honor your parents, even if they're dishonest, even if they never honor you. let the ball stay on their side of the court, serve softly, ignore faults, let them win, if you're not married, shelve your plans, store your sketches, don't bother romancing better things or entertaining novel ideas. serve only them.
without mom and dad "society" has no shape or stability. without marriage love loses it's life creating force, it becomes rage. a child conceived in love or it's deformed sister, lust, that doesn't know by example that mom manages and dad provides, often bind that experience into the fabric of everything else, schooling becomes 20 years of defending the same thesis: all she had to do was love him back.
we can't change what our parents did in the past, their adultery that made us bastards, unsafe in our names, orphaned of identity and promise, dismissed and disfavored by second marriages. but nor can we intend to form societies, civility or nations from instruction manuals that cope with sin and ignore the first of the bible's social commandments, both judeo and christian.
we never leave the chaotic realm of our parental matrix until they die. it's while they're living that we forgive and feign forgetfulness. in that work, death brings peace, love brings surrender, acceptance truth. not because you should, but because you can, love them anyway.
