The prodigal daughter

Helena has never been a difficult baby.  Rita and I hear stories from other parents that make us wince, of sleepless months and temper tantrums and endless crying, and we can only thank whatever combination of genetics and health care and parenting that has kept us free of such challenges.  But no baby is easy: they all make us suffer in countless small -- and several large -- ways.

I'm not quite sure why I have been thinking of New Testament parables recently, but the Prodigal Son has been on my mind.  Most of us know the story from church, Sunday school, or pop culture: the vagabond son disobeys his father, leaves home, spends all his money on worthless things, and then, finally, comes home.  The father is so happy that he slays the fatted calf and throws a huge party to celebrate; the older son, who has always stayed with his father, obeyed the old man, and helped him, arrives bitter to the party, wondering why the father would do so much for the vagabond, and nothing for the good son.

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ (Luke 15:31-2)

Most people read the parable through that last phrase: we should forgive and ben happy when we get back something we have lost.  It's not exactly a trite lesson, but I don't think it does much more than express something about how humans deal with loss.

I wonder, though, if there isn't something else going on, a reason that that father loves the prodigal son more than the perfect one.  As anyone who has ever been in love knows, we like people because of their virtues, but we love them because of their faults, their tics, their strange neuroses.  I'm not sure that it's different for children.  Do I love Helena because she's smart and funny and cute?  Sure, that helps.  But I think I really love her because I've had to rock her to sleep when she has a terrible colic at 3AM, because she constantly disobeys and wants to climb the stairs we tell her are dangerous, because if there are olives on the table, she won't eat anything else...  It's the glitches and the errors that make love dawn on us.

Slavoj Zizek makes a whole theological structure out of this idea, suggesting that if we love people for their lacks and sins, it means that God must be lacking, essentially broken.  God is love, after all.  And in fact, I think that the process by which I child comes to love his or her parents is a very strange one, in which she begins loving them because of their omnipotence and the protection they offer her, but (sometime in the teenage years, or later) she has to learn that loving them means understanding and loving their faults.

I don't want Helena to disobey, climb the stairs -- let alone leave home, spend all the money, and do everything else the prodigal son did -- but I know I'll love her even if she does.