To be a parent (or caregiver or teacher or therapist or….) is to ceaselessly exert yourself towards the goal of your own obsolescence.
That’s a weird spot to be in, like trying to enjoy mushroom coffee: you know it’s good for you, and the planet, or whatever, but it kind of busts up your circuitry on the way down. The results might even be great, but you’re not going to dodge the bitter grittiness no matter how much mylk you dump into the brew. You have to be prepared to work hard to keep the whole show moving in a non-disastrously-grief-inducing direction, to slowly transform your scrunched wince of a face into the composed unfurling of faux-objective sommelier insight:
“…it’s… got notes of…rosehip and… ash twig… with just a soupçon of… raw sewage.”
Always working to eventually remove yourself from the equation, and have the rest of the pieces keep working upon your exit, sets up a duality so fierce that it creates a wormhole (this is also, incidentally, the one where single socks and all hair bands go).
Inside this wormhole, the scrubbing action between near-holy tenderness and tired-and-pissed-off-beyond-belief-in-dirty-sweatpants-with-a-busted-back creates a froth of humanity that could probably only really be admired by actual pond scum.
And so: you’ve dumped your soul (or had it removed like brains for mummification through the nose) down the gullet(s) of this/these creature(s) and your ultimate reward will be… they won’t need you anymore! Winner winner shit-wich dinner!
Here’s the thing, though, a millisecond of grace I stumbled on with the help of a friend in what I estimate to be nearly as constant a state of despair and dissolution as I am: there are two options for “reading” this whole pond-scum sitch: