Parents doing their best.

My daughter Sophia is presently in Athens with her father. It’s her birthday treat, but I suspect it was also a good excuse for her dad to revisit the part of his genetic inheritance that he values more the older he gets. We take so much for granted when we are young. Recently he has been collating family histories (much more exciting than my own family) and it has caused him to reminisce about the years of his childhood spent, until he was eight or nine, in the bright sunshine and freedom of Athens. He remembers running around without shoes. I find that hard to imagine. He became a man who would never be seen without his shoes. The bright sunlight and warmth were taken away from him, ‘as if a dark curtain fell,’ (his own words), when he was sent to a prep school in England. There he learned to get dressed in bed to avoid the biting cold of the dormitory, to focus on learning and chess in an attempt to block out the pangs of homesickness and loss.   

The things our parents do to us whilst giving us what they think is best.