I’m regretting more and more that I allowed The Human Condition to slide, if for no other reason than it offers a good framework to understand the value of work and for critiquing actions that are often uplifted as extraordinary political ones. Parenting, for example, is frequently trumpeted a crucial work, and while I don’t deny the crucialness of raising children, I do wonder how much of a work it is. When you have children, rearing them is something you do: how you do it varies and is built upon your and your community’s moral and ethical values, and you hope that something of those values are reflected in the children’s post-childhood lives. What many parents identify as a parenting failure, in other words, is often a question of whether or not the child embraced that parent’s values. What constitutes a parenting failure is a matter of interpretation and perspective, and I don’t know whether anyone—least of all children or parents—are can gain sufficient perspective to judge. Moreover, as often as not children become upstanding citizens or serial killers in spite of their parents. What it amounts to is that true failure in parenting is actually more a refusal to parent—to hand your child to Madonna to raise, perhaps—than it is a series of mistakes made while fulfilling the act. As I see it parenting, in other words, is a condition and not a work; but I might be more able to argue that positively if I had ever finished the book. For that reason, I’m returning to it, and I’ll be writing about it in the reading section as I do.

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