The Responsibility of Parenting

Recently, I talked about the autobiography of Sayo Masuda, a former bath-house geisha who suffered a very difficult upbringing. Because she was born out of wedlock by a mother who rotated through one man after another, Sayo’s mother had too many kids and no financial support for them. Sayo was thus sold off as a child to indentured labor where she suffered greatly.

Reflecting back on this, she says in her autobiography:

Even now it fills me with anger: I want to rage against the miserable lives we lead, those of us who are born into this world as blots of sin because of a parent’s irresponsibility; I want to cry out that a life like mine must never be repeated. No matter how deep in disgrace, a human being is human, after all. The human spirit wanders ceaselessly in search of light; and if it finds a light of some sort, it strives somehow to get near it, struggling, writhing in anguish. Yet even as it writhes in anguish, it is drowned before it reaches the light. If you have the heart of a human being and you become the parent of a human being, then even if it exhausts every bit of your energy, until that child can walk alone I want you to do your duty as a parent.

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Speaking as a parent, I feel this too. Kids are born into your care (through your actions, obviously), so you owe it to them to provide the best possible life you can.

Namu Shakamuni Butsu