Children

LAST NIGHT, our meeting took a turn into a familiar subject: our kids, the monsters. I had gone to that meeting hoping to raise the topic of our children, but in quite another context. I was thinking about my daughter, prompted by a magazine article I had read concerning alcoholics' children who grow up looking good and acting perfect and then, later in their lives, begin to fall apart. What seemed at first to be their healthy self-reliance proves to be unhealthy loneliness brought on by a parent or parents who could never be trusted. I was hoping we could discuss this--see, perhaps, whether there were danger signs in our own children, ask ourselves what we might do to heal such an injury. The meeting never did get around to this; but for me, the topic was far from closed.