"Parents - especially step-parents - are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years"
About this Quote
Powell slips a blade into the sentimental myth of parenting: that adulthood arrives as a grand reveal of competence, steadiness, and moral clarity. Instead he offers the quieter, more corrosive truth children learn late - that parents are ordinary people who age, improvise, and fail, and that the child’s earliest memories function like advertising: glossy, simplified, impossible to live up to.
The dash and the aside, "especially step-parents", carry the social context Powell knew well: English domestic life where remarriage can feel less like a new chapter than a recasting. A step-parent doesn’t just inherit a household; they inherit a narrative already underway, with roles preassigned by grief, loyalty, and comparison. The disappointment isn’t only about behavior. It’s structural. Step-parents start with a deficit because the child’s "promise of their early years" often belongs to someone else - or to a fantasy built when the child had no adult scale for contradiction.
The real sting is in "promise". Powell implies parenting is read like a contract, but it’s a contract drafted by children: unconditional protection, inexhaustible patience, perpetual stature. Time voids it. Adults can’t compete with the parent-as-giant a child once needed, and the step-parent is asked to deliver intimacy without the history that makes it believable.
Powell’s intent is less to indict parents than to expose how memory manufactures authority - and how growing up can mean recognizing that the first people you trusted were never designed to be perfect, only present.
The dash and the aside, "especially step-parents", carry the social context Powell knew well: English domestic life where remarriage can feel less like a new chapter than a recasting. A step-parent doesn’t just inherit a household; they inherit a narrative already underway, with roles preassigned by grief, loyalty, and comparison. The disappointment isn’t only about behavior. It’s structural. Step-parents start with a deficit because the child’s "promise of their early years" often belongs to someone else - or to a fantasy built when the child had no adult scale for contradiction.
The real sting is in "promise". Powell implies parenting is read like a contract, but it’s a contract drafted by children: unconditional protection, inexhaustible patience, perpetual stature. Time voids it. Adults can’t compete with the parent-as-giant a child once needed, and the step-parent is asked to deliver intimacy without the history that makes it believable.
Powell’s intent is less to indict parents than to expose how memory manufactures authority - and how growing up can mean recognizing that the first people you trusted were never designed to be perfect, only present.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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