Relative irony

There is so much irony in relationships. Take parents, for instance. I read somewhere that you spend half your life ingesting your parents and the other half digesting them. Take marriage. Each partner works so hard to realign the other’s programming to match one’s own. And then, if and when the other becomes more like one…why, they obviously become boring! How ironic: a romance that was born in resonance fizzles out as an echo. Then take children. We want them to be like us, see them as an extension of our own egos. We preen when they look the way we do; we gloat when they like what we like and when they do what we do the way we do it. Then comes payback time. With horror we realize they picked up not only what we considered the best in us but also what we hated most about ourselves. And guess what, they are around all the time to remind us of it. (Of course the tangy irony in this is: having ingested us, the poor darlings are trying so hard to digest us!)