Prodigal Daughter

At https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2022/10/dear-lurkers.html , a philosophical sort of blog, people discussed Aoife O'Donovan's song, "Prodigal Daughter." 

For those who aren't listening to the YouTube link, the song is about "prodigal daughter" Rosie who comes home "like a lamb to the slaughter," with a child, and wants her mother, who "wore black for days" when she left, to take her and her child back for more money and mothering. Rosie expresses some regret that "forgiveness won't come easy, not for me" but "I'll try to shut the past behind us" if given "one more chance to make you see." She does not ask her mother to "try to shut the past behind us," or give her one more chance to see. 

Isn't that how it usually goes with twenty-something "boomerang kids"?

Well, no. I came home single and chaste, with mononucleosis. I did feel more sorry for myself, having such a tiddly, tedious, draining disease, than sorry that I'd wasted the'rents' hopes and the taxpayers' money. Twenty-one is still an age at which it's hard to see very far beyond the end of one's own cute little nose. But I did come home with some feeling for my parents--a little bit, mixed in with self-pity because I couldn't go straight to work and take care of them financially. I did look for work, and do jobs for up to three weeks at a time before collapsing and having to be brought home in a taxi. I did make payments on my student loans. I did write, when I wasn't working, and help homeschool my natural sister. It wasn't altogether a matter of "Yo, Mom and Dad, I wasted all the effort you spent trying to bring me up to be a competent adult for seventeen years, now please try again for another five or ten years." Some twenty-one-year-olds are beginning to see a short distance past the ends of their noses.

Whatever else they've done, at least one of my sisters never came back to any of her various parental units seeking to return to financial dependency. 

The other one didn't even try to present a boyfriend to Dad or me, but she did show him to Mother. Mother said, of course, "You're far too young to marry a boy your own age who's already been divorced." Sister smoldered around quarrelling with everyone about everything for a week or two, making herself easy not to miss, then ran off with the said nineteen-year-old divorcee. He'd joined the Navy. We next heard from her at a Navy base. The'rents seemed relieved that at least they had a civil marriage, if they didn't qualify for the church kind, before the baby came along. Mainly their reaction seemed to be "We are grandparents at last! We thought we'd never live to see this day!" Only after the baby was born did Sister yelp for help. I was a happy bride. Mother was happily employed as a private nurse, but the patient was a grandmother, too, and understood. Mother gave one day's notice and took the next plane to Norfolk.

My experience has been that most people in their early twenties, including my phenomenal self, do sort of "suck at life," in both the polite and the impolite senses of the phrase. Slurp up experience, make a lot of mistakes, spend a lot of time falling on their faces and kicking and screaming. If picked up with love and support they'll need to be picked up again, later. If forced to pick themselves up there's the danger that they may Be Strong. In my family "the pretty one" was at least spared from becoming Strong. "The tough one" and "the prodigy" did have to Be Strong and, consequently, have very little empathy to spare for people wallowing in the mistakes we were able to avoid making.

Got drunk and pregnant? Could've happened to anybody, now let's see how well you do as a single mother for the next 25 years.

Got divorced? Sad. No "stones" of blame or contempt will be cast--just be celibate unless, or until, you can be reconciled or widowed.

Need money? Who doesn't? If I have a five-dollar bill to spare, I'll try to find a five-dollar job for someone who needs one. Then person should move quickly along to the next place where person can get a five-dollar job, until steady employment can be found. 

Women who have had a chance to Be Strong form hard edges and can be downright mean, as when their sons could afford to marry women who are not rich and they snarl, "No rich man came along and rescued me! You, my son, should marry someone who has no use for your money!" 

So what happened to the mother of Rosie the Prodigal Daughter, in the song? I'm inclined to picture bad things having happened to her, because she's not rushing out to forget the past and revel in grandmotherly bliss at the first sight of the blue-eyed grandchild. Did they live in an old-school Catholic community where the mother was shamed for the daughter's elopement, marriage outside the church, or worse yet single motherhood? Was Rosie's entry-level job what was keeping the mother off welfare, did she have to give up her home when Rosie left? It had to have been awfully traumatic to stifle the joy of grandparenthood. All the grandmothers and most of the aunts I know feel ready to pardon everything at the sight or thought of the baby. 

Could guilt be part of the trauma?

Is it hard for her to rush out and squeal and rave over the baby because she's trying so hard not to think conscious thoughts like "I shouldn't have hit Rosie, that night, at least not with the mop," or "I should have known that school would do more harm than good," or "I should have listened when she said it was that new, young priest; now everyone knows she was the first of half a dozen children he molested"? 

Based on what I remember of myself as a teenager and young adult, I'm inclined to believe that young people simply haven't grown some of the feelings of empathy and repentance that adults think they ought to have. This is not necessarily the case. Seven years after eloping, or even running off to be a homeless waif, a girl might have developed the capacity to feel those things in other situations and be suppressing it when she approaches her mother, because her mother never modelled it toward her. Rosie's mother might have taught Rosie, indirectly of course, that "we" defend our egos at all costs and don't let ourselves notice that we've hurt others.

The song doesn't really tell us enough of this kind of thing to justify giving advice to prodigal Rosie or her mother, so far. 

What this web site does need to say is to The Nephews--nieces, nephews, cousins, by birth or adoption: Some of you are in your early twenties. Some of you are getting through this difficult life stage very well. It's unlikely that all of you will reach age 25 without a major mistake.

So, if you find that you've made a major mistake...you can count on my auntly instincts, but you need to know that when I made choices that led through times of destitution and desperation, I was allowed to Be Strong. You can expect a place to spread out your sleeping bag at night, and that's about all. I'm not in the business of making people feel better about their mistakes. The way I reviewed Worthless is the way I'd be likely to talk to you about a divorce or unplanned pregnancy, about any involvement with drugs legal or illegal, any violation of the law that you can't honestly say amount to "obeying God rather than men." If, e.g., Muslim extremists aggravate the fascist elements in our country to the point where Muslims have to be smuggled out across the border, with that I'd probably help. If it's just a matter of your not wanting to pay taxes or obey traffic laws, I'd say pay your fine or serve your time. I found ways to be functional-equivalent-of-homeless without depending on begging or prostitution or even sleeping in unsanitary crowded shelters; I expect you to be able to do that, too, if you need to.

There's a very harmful influence in our society today, leading us to confuse compassion and forgiveness with a failure to make sound moral judgments. Christians are told not to presume to judge other people's souls, or those of their differences that don't involve morality. We are also told to use our God-given facility to make moral judgments, because we "shall judge angels." This has usually been understood to mean that we remain willing to forgive people who repent of their misdeeds--but we must judge the misdeeds, themselves. Lying, cheating, and stealing are bad things. We have to give people who have done those things the chance to make restitution and move forward in life. We must never be so eager for peace and reconciliation that we start trying to believe that lying, cheating, and stealing are morally "okay." In order for people who have done bad things to be accepted and forgiven by others, they need to agree with everyone else that the bad things they did were "not-okay" and they need to make restitution to strengthen their resolve not to do those bad things again.

And, in order to be forgiven, the repentant person needs to give up the urge to reduce everyone to the same moral level. Honest wives and widows are not the ones to whom women divorced on biblical grounds owe restitution, usually, and not the ones called to judge such women; but a woman divorced on biblical grounds is not on the same moral level as an honest wife or widow, or even the victim of an unethical divorce, and should not try to pretend to be. 

Because Christianity tended to accompany some degree of literacy in spreading around the world, and the pre-Christian religions of most human cultures left no written record if they had any formal doctrine that everyone believed, people sometimes imagine that pre-Christian religions were or would be "less judgmental" than Christianity is. This is a mistake. Pre-Christian religions, with the exceptions of Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, lacked official written versions of their moral laws. What writing and oral teaching they left behind, however, mentions strict moral laws. Often, because these people had little scientific understanding of what really violated a natural law and what merely coincided with a fatal accident, they had terrifying systems of taboos: don't kiss your spouse on Tuesdays, don't eat that pineapple, don't stand on your head, because someone did that in the past on the day before he died. And people regarded those "unlucky" behaviors as sins against arbitrary, perhaps not really pro-human, spirits, and sacrificed their food and their wealth to those spirits. Pagan deities punished sins. Sacrifices and sweat lodges and Sun Dances and so on were seen as ways to show penitence for sins. Christianity was a liberating reform that emancipated people from the silly taboos and asked them only to obey the real moral law. 

In fact, ancient Pagan traditions were harsher than Christianity about some things. Their moral laws were inflexible, with no room for forgiveness. When Oedipus realized that he had inadvertently killed his father and married his mother, he didn't need to be told that he'd done bad things--he wouldn't have done them if he'd known his own real identity--or shamed into feeling sorry for them, and he certainly never would have done those things again. Still, in the Greek system, although he could try to leave the city with his young children and lead a life of penitence as a homeless working father, there could be no forgiveness for him in this world or the next. In the Christian system even Oedipus could have hoped for forgiveness.

Christians should always be willing to forgive one another but, in order to forgive, both the offender and the offended must judge the offense, condemn it, detest it. In long-term relationships, like Rosie's with her mother, the offenses that push people apart tend to be long strings of petty and reciprocal "debts" and "trespasses" rather than any big bad sin. The debts and trespasses may be expressions of the Seven Deadlies but they hardly ever deserve the attention of a court of law. Rosie's mother, perhaps, stifled her ambition and undermined her self-esteem, which was why Rosie eloped, believing she had no talents and no reason to wait for a better marriage. Rosie, perhaps, disrespected her mother by talking back and breaking house rules. Sometimes people want to forgive family members' sins against them, think they're forgiving those sins, say they are, and then find themselves going back to their habitual resentment when they want to sin against those family members the next day. Sometimes they need counselling in order to be reconciled. It would be better to get counselling, and spend a few years rehashing the moral and emotional weight of every eye-roll, rather than to try to blunt our awareness that disrespect for mothers and house rules is a bad thing.

Reconciliation, which is always at least the goal of forgiveness, can be said to take place when people agree in condemning their past sins against each other. The sooner that happens, the better. They can stop trying to judge each other and start enjoying each other's company. This is not achieved by trying to be "non-judgmental" but by reaching agreement about their obligations to each other, and meeting those obligations.