Brian Goedde writes about his breakup with his girlfriend.  His psychotherapist (people still do psychotherapy? – I thought it was mostly drugs now…) tells him to interview people who knew the two of them to answer the question that is keeping him up at night: why did she leave?  The further along this path he goes, most significantly when it leads him to his mother, the more he realizes what he is looking for is not his erstwhile girlfriend, but himself.  He sums things up at the end of the piece:

…my research hadn’t led to the discovery of a Jenna I didn’t know but of a me I didn’t know how to approach.

     There is an obvious connection here to Mencius.  But, more interestingly, Goedde’s tale raises some questions about what happens when one’s emotional tie to one’s parents is broken.

    The point about Mencius goes all the way back to the first of these Sunday Modern Love blogging sessions I did in July.  There, I mentioned how Mencius tells us to look inside ourselves when we face personal questions.  He describes our internal moral compass like this:

…‘The ten thousand things
[everything] are all there in me.  And there’s no joy greater than
looking within and finding myself faithful to them.  Treat others as
you would be treated.  Devote yourself to that, for there’s no more
direct approach to Humanity." (236)

    Everything is inside us.  So when we lose something, like a girlfriend, the place to look is not outside ourselves with the other people in our lives; but within ourselves.  And that is just about where Goedde comes out.  Perhaps if he had read Mencius instead of going to a psychotherapist he would have saved a few bucks and some time.

      The more interesting issue here, though, has to do with what might be called our network of commitment.  By this I mean how we, as children, are embedded, or should be embedded, in a web of loving family relationships; and how these give us the foundation and orientation to create and extend loving relationships in our adult lives.  That, at least, is what a Confucian perspective would tell us. 

    In this case (and I suspect this is fairly common), Goedde’s mother had left him when he was only eight, leaving him "an emotional wreck."  When he turned to his mother to ask her why she thought his girlfriend had left him, he came to realize that his response to his girlfriend’s flight was the same as his childhood reaction his mother’s absence.  He had finally found a reason to ask his mother why she had left, way back when.  And she told him a story about having to "rebuild" her life.  His response to this is telling:

I was surprised to feel uninterested in these monologues. For so many
years I had wondered why she left, but now I realized I didn’t so much
care. The point, for me, was that she had. All I actually needed was to
tell her that her leaving had "really screwed me up for a really long
time."

     This is another reminder of just how much emotional damage gets done to when people divorce.  At the very least, married people should take this (the toll divorce takes on the children) very seriously when they are calculating the pros and cons of separating. 

    The question raised here (from a Confucian moralist point of view) is this: what happens when parents fail to live up to their duties to their children?  If a child’s primary ethical responsibility is to treat their parents well, what happens when the parents treat the children badly?

    I am most interested here with the practical side of the problem: what should badly treated children do?  Or, more precisely, how can they go about constructing, or reconstructing, a web of loving personal relationships in the absence of their parental tie?

     Even though Mencius would tell us that children must bear their parent’s maltreatment (see the story of Shun that I discuss here), I would not take this as an absolute rule.  Furthermore, it seems to me that, at some point of emotional distress, children should be free to sever their emotional links to their parents (as difficult as that might be) and find a way to construct a new network of social interactions on their own. 

     Now, that might seem searingly obvious to a modern American.  Of course, we should cut our ties to our parents.  That’s how we consolidate our independence and autonomy.  But, I think, emotionally, not many of us actually do this, even when it might be justifiable by bad parental behavior.  That says something about just how powerful the child-parent tie is (Confucius was certainly right about that!).

     This may sound odd, but I think there is a Confucian basis for turning away from what Confucius believed was the most important relationship of all.  If we remember that the ultimate goal of Confucian morality is living a Humane life, and if we can imagine that some parents might actually be hurting their children more than helping them emotionally and ethically, then we can envision some sets of circumstances where a child’s progress toward a humane life is best served by severing ties to parents.  For Confucius, the threshold for such severance would be rather high.  But the ethical possibility exists. 

     And I believe Goedde has done the right thing in this regard.  He obviously tried to maintain his emotional tie to his mother, even after she left him.  He was on fairly good terms with her, good enough to seek her out for counsel in the midst of his breakup.  And he has now discovered that her leaving has caused him deep and long-lasting hurt.  He is certainly right to now reorient the interactive channels of Humanity in his life in a way that reduces his mother’s role.  He has been a good son; he has been hurt in the process; and he can, from a Confucian perspective, now look elsewhere for that network of commitment that will sustain his movement toward a humane life. 

     There is, in the end, a limit to how much we should rely on our ties to our parents (our filiality) to create a foundation for our Humanity.  And I think that is consistent with a Confucian-inspired ethics.