Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 and Why I Would Have Been a Terrible Parent
Content warning: child abuse, child murder, and spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2.
I spent most of my twenties trying my best to create another human being. Maybe you spent your twenties in similar pursuits. Maybe you succeeded. If so, good god, I hope you’re handling it okay and nobody’s gotten seriously hurt. That can get really intense really fast. So I’ve heard.
I wanted to do the thing properly, you know. I had to put a team together, and a base of operations. It was a years-long process, and I had to start over several times. It was frustrating. Eventually I gave up, and started pursuing my own happiness instead. A side effect of my transition is the medical suppression of my fertility, so by now I’m pretty committed to having given up. And much like giving up alcohol has opened my eyes to how badly I used to abuse it, giving up on trying to have children has helped me realize how amazingly lucky those children are not to have been born. I would have been a terrible parent.
I probably would have gotten away with it, too. I’d have looked good on the outside. I had done my research; I knew about age-appropriate activities and developmental milestones and basic hygiene and nutrition. I knew how to change a diaper. Several kinds of diapers. I knew about several different parenting philosophies and the pros and cons of each. I knew how to look at a kid really seriously for a few seconds and then cross my eyes to make them laugh without anyone else in the room knowing why. I probably would have been very good at avoiding the most obvious forms of abuse and neglect, and for that, society would have praised me on the daily, sympathized with my struggles, and revered me for my sacred duty. Especially if I got married first.
But I’d have been a terrible parent. I know because I have had a terrible parent, and I’m not really any better myself. I can try to improve on them, but that would just make me feel more self-righteous about it when I do inevitably fail. “At least I’m not doing as bad as they did,” I’d have said, while doing bad. Because I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. I thought having a kid would help me feel love. I thought it would help me feel like I had a family for once. I thought it would help me feel like my life had a purpose. Meaningful. Justified. I wanted to have a kid mostly so that I would have to be loved, by at least one creature in this world, because it’s genetically and hormonally programmed to love me. That, I thought, would make me happy. And that’s no reason to create a human being.
Maybe this is just the sour-grapes tale I tell myself to cope with the loss of my fertility. But if that’s so, it’s still true enough to be a useful coping mechanism and not harming anyone. Let me have it.
And that’s what it really boils down to: I would have chosen whatever beliefs about myself make me feel best. It’s my nature as a human being. I want to be able to like myself, because I’m the only person I can’t get away from. So naturally, if in my natural ignorance and mortality I were to hurt my own child, or even destroy her, I would be forced to deny it. I have seen the torture on the face of a parent who has realized this, and chosen to deny it. It hurts to look at that face, but I looked at it anyway, and that’s when I knew that a parent’s love is not as certain as we have all been led to count on. Parents can and do hurt their children, and even destroy them, all while believing they are doing what is best, out of love. Because they need to believe that they are right in order to live with themselves. As long as I believe this is possible, I cannot in good conscience try so actively to create a child who might one day have to see that look on my face.
The last thing any parent will ever admit to is narcissism, because the more narcissistic a parent is, the less capable they will ever be to admitting it. A parent would sooner drown her own child in the bath than admit that she would rather do it than admit to it. Or, if she ever did admit it, it would be in the interest of turning attention to herself and her own terribleness. Because the narcissistic mindset is black and white: you can only ever be an angel or the devil himself. A perfect parent, or a pitiful excuse for one. A mother’s love is supposedly either pure and flawless or entirely nonexistent.
I just watched Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2. I know it came out over a year ago. I’m slow on the uptake with these things. I think I only saw the original last fall. And while I’m slow to catch up to pop culture, once I get around to looking at something, I tend to pick up its themes and personal significance pretty quickly. But even I was a bit shocked at how transparent this movie was. A movie for adult audiences (and yes, funny animals and plants aside, this was an adult movie, with sexual jokes and swearing and terrible violence) usually has to veil its moralistic meanings a lot more carefully to avoid sounding preachy. For instance, ever since I first saw it I knew Iron Man has a lot to say about the corrupting influence of power without vulnerability. The further Tony Stark gets from the blast, the less control he has over the damage it does to others and the more it can be exploited for evil ends. As a builder of weapons, he could only create destruction until he put himself inside the missile, and therefore into harm’s way. That’s some heavyhanded moral commentary against making any decision that can potentially affect others more than it could affect yourself, and the illusion of thinking that power and control can ever be completely synonymous. But it’s very carefully hidden in symbolism and metaphor, and that’s why the movie can be so popular with powerful people who continue to believe they are in control of their power, even when they don’t see what it’s doing.
Or else maybe I just came up with that interpretation myself. But I think it’s a rather good one.
Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 isn’t nearly so subtle. It whams you over the head with a sledgehammer and says “This is about how your shitty dad is shitty because his own shitty dad didn’t teach him how to express love properly, and you’re a shitty kid but you can still love your shitty dad anyway.” It’s about terrible parents, and confronting the myth that a parent can ever not be terrible. You don’t have to doubt your parent’s love to admit that they’ve been terrible to you. What do you expect from someone who could never have been prepared for the task of parenthood, but was entrusted with it anyway and made do with what they could? All parents are terrible in the way that all fifth-grade orchestra students are. Your childhood was the screeching of an under-rosined bow drifting up from a mildewy basement and making the neighbors question their life decisions. Your childhood wasn’t even sure if it sounded okay from a distance.
In Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, an adult child comes face to face with his hopes for a lost father’s love. And that father turns out to be a selfish narcissist who only cares about his child insofar as he could be used to further the father’s self-aggrandizement. This was a father who created a child, and caused that child to suffer abandonment and grief alone, out of the most selfish motives possible. To increase his own power. That’s abundantly clear even if you didn’t catch the hint when you found out the father’s name is Ego, literally EGO. The man is conceitedness incarnate, and based on his own description of his origin, that isn’t even far off from being literally true as well as metaphorically. It’s really hard to miss this stuff. For me, anyway.
“I know this isn’t what you want. What kind of father would I be to let you make this choice?”
If you watched this movie, I bet you felt some uncomfortable recognition when you heard Ego verbally abusing his son toward the end. I sure as hell did. But why would we? Typical parents aren’t like Ego. They don’t create children just to destroy them for not being exactly what they wanted. Normal parents sacrifice themselves for their children; they don’t sacrifice their children for themselves. That’s so fundamentally against the nature of a parent that it should be wholly strange to the human experience. Nobody should recognize that. Nobody should feel resonance with that. But we do, and it feels like the worst kind of blasphemy.
And it’s not new either. It’s a tale as old as time, and way older than Beauty and the Beast. Abraham was prepared to kill his only son, the miracle boy born to a barren wife, rather than lose the approval of his god and the glory promised him. Chronos ate his children, one by one, as soon as they were born, to preserve his own sovereignty as the Chief Big Guy of the Universe. In fact, none of the legendary parents who heard prophesies of being opposed by their own offspring responded with self-effacing martyrdom. They responded with infanticide.
I know these are old stories. And they’re about fathers, not mothers. But we’re still telling stories about it, and it’s still happening, with mothers as well as fathers.
Maternal infanticide happens.
Yes, it’s usually due to a mental illness, but mental illness has been around for as long as we’ve had minds. Since back when we called our minds our souls, and thought that was our connection to the divine. Back when god was both a loving parent and a murderous egomaniac, and we all knew it.
And nobody could have blamed postpartum depression when a mother in my hometown murdered her twenty-six-year-old daughter, leaving her child orphaned. “She was a good mother,” a neighbor said of the woman who killed her own daughter, as if murdering one’s child is something a good mother could ever do.
Because it’s true that parents have a strong drive to protect their children. It’s as human a drive as any other, and very real. But every parent is also a human, who has a much more deeply-rooted and primal drive to self-preservation. Abuse sometimes leads children to associate image and reputation with survival. You have to be liked in order to avoid being hurt. You would become whatever kind of person your abuser tolerates best, and hide any evidence that the mask is not genuine. As if your life depended on it. All parents were once children, and many of them were abused. And there are many parents who would do anything to save their children — unless doing so would violate the mask they have built to protect themselves. Maybe Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his child because he quite rightfully feared the wrath of a god who has not always been merciful, or a father who has not always been loving.
When I was trying to become a parent, I wanted a child so that my life would have meaning. I wanted to have a purpose, and purpose is hard to find in a complicated, morally ambiguous world. The need for meaning burns bright in an empty life. A child would fill that emptiness, for a while. But eventually, every child must discover his own life’s meaning. A child’s life purpose is usually not to enrich his parent’s life, or to glorify his parent by following the path chosen by them.
“I told you… I don’t want to do this alone. You cannot deny the purpose the universe has bestowed upon you.”
The most fundamental bias we all fall for, more times than not, is to assume that we see the world around us accurately. We don’t. Everything we know about the science of perception and cognition disproves it. So if you look at another adult human being and insist that they must see what you see in them and in their life, you are making the most egocentric assumption ever: that you know better than anyone else who they are and what their life means. Even if that person is your child. You may have created them, but you do not define them any more than your parents get to define you. I know that’s hard, because maybe you sacrificed a lot for the privilege of being someone’s parent. You feel like they owe you a certain amount of respect, and maybe you want that respect showed in a certain way, like in the form of a life lived in keeping with your values and beliefs. When your grown child makes choices you disagree with, it might hurt you, because it feels like a rejection. Maybe it is a rejection. Maybe your child thinks you’re wrong, and is trying their best not to be like you. You are wrong sometimes, so it makes a lot of sense.
I have a lot of friends who are parents, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as their ally it’s that there are few things more insulting than getting parenting advice from someone who has no children. I want to make it clear that I’m not interested in giving advice to parents. If anything, I want to give advice to anyone who was once the child of a parent who made a mistake, especially a mistake they’d never admit to. Forgive, but never forget. You are the owner of your life. You are the expert of your own experience. Reject anything that threatens that, even if it makes you feel like an ungrateful child. And if you have kids of your own, expect nothing less from them.
