Figuring out how life works is hard. It takes most of us all of our lives to make sense of it. But there are some who are luckier than others. There are some who are fortunate to start with a foundation of enough love, enough trust, enough of the basics that make life comfortable. And that makes all the difference.
This foundation "layer" starts with parents who see children as people, right from the beginning--people with their own needs, their own desires, their own ways of being. Parents who get that, give their children most of what they need to build good lives, right there, in the earliest years of their lives.
I have been thinking about the layering of my own life. And I realize that those of us who were born to "The Greatest Generation" were also born to face some of the greatest challenges. 
Many of our parents are second generation citizens. Their mothers and fathers immigrated for reasons that were not-so-happy. They left their homes in other countries because their families of origin had been broken apart by the first world war, by famine, by poverty. Some, like my mother's parents, never saw their own parents again. And if our parents were not second generation citizens, they were third -- and there was a depression that ripped more families apart and sent more families migrating away from what they had known as home.
Families who are struggling with loneliness, homesickness, hard circumstance, loss, and just a basic need to survive, have a hard time giving their children a "first layer" that gives them security, comfort, and good support to build their own lives. Some are able to build empires out of extremity, but cannot give their own children the foundation to build happy, contented lives. Fortune is not always fortunate.
My parents married in 1940, and then there was Pearl Harbor in 1941, and I was born in January of 1942. My dad and mom lived pretty comfortably in rented housing with genial neighbors, and only one block away from their parents. So I had a pretty good beginning, so far as it went. Then my dad was going to be drafted in 1944, so he enlisted in the Navy, where, he said, they had "clean white sheets to sleep on." And off he went to serve a year of duty in Oklahoma (I know, I know, but he was in aircraft). He did say to me once, after a few too many scotches, that he also had left home because his life had become pretty complicated. My mother, ultimately, in 1960-something, was diagnosed as manic-depressive. So yes, his life would have been pretty complicated. She was 20 when they were married, he was 22. I think the first two years were pretty much okay -- he had a good job, she was happy to have a new baby, and they had lots of friends.
When he left for the Navy, things got even more complicated, at least for me. I can't remember much of it, but we did finally manage to move into a new tract house in West Los Angeles, because my dad qualified for a GI loan. And that was a very good thing. We were a bit removed from my mother's mother -- who, in her own way, was certainly and certifiably a depressive in the most Ingmar Bergmanesk terms -- here from Sweden at 18 and still speaking broken, but usually understandable, English at 54.
But my mother was a difficult and complicated person. She couldn't make much sense of the world when her interior world was often so murky. That meant that communication was hard for her -- the messages she sent and received were so emotionally "gilded" that I had to learn early on how to sort what was real and what was imaginary. And that is a great skill for a kid to learn -- but a kid should not have to make those interpretations for a parent.
When my dad came home, life returned to a more even-tempered rhythmn. But it was still pretty complicated. My mother was always at "odds" with somebody -- if it wasn't my dad or me, it was her mother or my dad's mother, or her sister. It seemed to be the way she connected to the world. She could be charming and sparkling with friends and strangers, and dark and brooding at home. I never could figure out what it was she wanted, and I so desperately wanted to know. I wanted to fix her life. I was helpless. And I do believe she wanted to fix it too, but just did not have a way.
Hard for a kid. I'm still trying to find scaffolding so I can look safely at the layers of my life that seem to have pockets of despair, uncertainty, anxiety (that's a big one), and helplessness. But in spite of it all I did figure out ways to survive -- as most kids do. One way or another.
I'm grateful for all those who have helped me out of those scary pockets. And I take comfort every single day in the fact that I have children and grandchildren who are building good lives for themselves.
War is hell, as we all know. And in so many ways, on so many levels, the war against poverty and emotional deprivation, leaves us all gasping like victims of mustard gas or radiation. We have to figure out a better world, for ourselves and our families. Let's choose to build what lasts, and what cannot be blown apart or shattered.
Parents. love your children. Give them security and comfort, recognize their unique abilities and support their growing--lots of light, lots of air -- and then they will build whatever they can dream.
