“If You Want War, You’ll Have War”

The meaning of love between people represents an emotional investment outside oneself. As infants in developing stages we are dependent on the love of parents whom biology has tasked with the imperative to raise their young, to invest their energies and their emotional well-being in the assurance that they are nurturing their offspring to the best of their capabilities.

It is a maturing process for the parents, and for their children. Parents have already presumably made an investment in extending a caring emotionalism and deep empathy for the individual whom they have chosen to partner them in bringing children into the world. That deep emotional investment that we call love is then further extended to encompass the investment in nurturing and raising the children that result from their union.

This is what we assume happens. That two mature adults raising children in a tandem of domestic traditions common to the animal kingdom and refined over the ages by human ingenuity, compassion, and the primitive inheritance of the survival imperative, devote themselves unreservedly to the well-being of their children.

Children are often regarded as possessions, and remain so until they become autonomous through their own emergence into a state of self-dependence and responsibility. When they are infants their parents’ lives revolve around the well-being and social adjustment and intellectual advancement of their children.

But when parents, mothers and fathers destroy their children in an act of parental rage because one of the partners has deviated from the premise that their union is meant to outlast the infancy of their children, surely it can be held as a manifestation of the parents having been left themselves in a state of infantile dependency.

Is it possible to love a child and to contemplate despite that love, destroying that child’s life? Perhaps it can only occur when the parent loves him/herself more than he/she does the child. Infanticide motivated by a sense of personal outrage at having been wronged, as a kind of revenge taken against the partner who has dared to take the relationship in vain by destroying trust through infidelity betrays a conditional love.

Which is no love at all.

It hardly seems to matter whether the parent is an ignorant, unlettered lout or a well-educated health professional whom society trusts implicitly with their own well-being through the practise of the medical profession, the urge to kill one’s own as a last desperate act to hold on to a possession and deny it to the betrayer, reflects an arrested emotional development.

Those who destroy the very human attachments that should mean the most to them, and which they should be expected to defend and protect from harm at the cost of their own lives have succumbed to the reality that their bruised and torn ego is more important than the life and well-being of their child.

Those, like the cardiologist Dr. Guy Turcotte, on trial for the first degree murder of his two young children, are mired in their own juvenile, self-absorbed needs. They excuse themselves. They manage somehow, despite destroying their own flesh and blood, to portray themselves as pitiable creatures momentarily in a state of confusion and psychotic momentum, helpless to halt the violence that their anger and despair has unleashed.

They temporarily lost contact with rationality and became emotionally deranged.

“I freaked out”, he testified, because “It tore me apart. I was going to lose all that remained … she wanted to exclude me from family life.” Reasons for his temporary descent into madness. Loss of reason representing a tolerable reason for being held not guilty as a result of temporary loss of sanity.

The back-and-forth of anger between estranged and hostile husband and wife victimizes their children. A woman who, as a mother of two very young children, knowing full well how devoted her husband appears to be to her as his wife, succumbs to the allure of a sexual attraction to another man.

Devastating her husband, who lashes out at her and whom she accuses of “controlling her life”. Does this failed relationship reflect a mature and reasonable commitment? Do defenceless children deserve better?