Hush

If I ever deem myself fit enough to have children, I know for a fact that I won't treat them as if they were pawns in a battle, so ready and willing for sacrifice.

It is a simple enough lesson, but one few parents, including my own, ever knew or will learn.

Children, of any age, should not be expected to save marriages, or justify them. Children should not be utilized as scapegoats to the sins and injustices committed within a marriage. Children should not be allowed to hear the vicious words screamed, even whispered between their parents in hatred, in emptiness, in a despicable cycle of pain and violence. Children should not feel that because of a lack in them, because of some missplaced strength of their own, have two lives combusted. Children should never feel as if their lives were meant to support the beings that brought them into the world. They are burdens, they are not insurance for which to think a marriage can last, or even scapegoats upon whom the failure of one can be thrust. Children should never see one parent shove another, strike out, even with words, for though thought to be less destructive, they haunt just as violent memories.

Most of all, they should never think themselves incomplete for the failures of the generation before them.