"She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them"
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Marquez slips a quiet provocation into a sentence that sounds, at first, like comfort. The shock is in the reversal: motherhood isn’t presented as a sacred instinct that automatically blooms on contact. Love isn’t owed; it’s made. By framing the discovery as “great delight,” he turns what could be read as guilt into liberation. The mother isn’t defective for needing time. She’s human for finding love in the daily labor of becoming someone’s world.
The key word is “friendship,” a concept that yanks parenting out of the realm of pure duty and into chosen intimacy. Friendship is earned through proximity, jokes, grievances, routines, the private language that accumulates when two lives repeatedly bump into each other. Raising a child is often sold as a one-way act of giving. Marquez suggests it’s also a relationship that grows reciprocally: the parent is shaped by the child’s emerging personhood, and affection deepens not because the child is “mine” but because the child becomes known.
There’s subtext here about what blood can’t guarantee. Family, in Marquez’s world, is rarely a stable institution; it’s a volatile weather system of loyalties and resentments. This line nudges against sentimental family mythology and replaces it with something sturdier and more modern: care as a practice, not a claim. It also smuggles in a democratic idea of love. If parental love is partly built like friendship, it can be repaired, renegotiated, even re-earned - and that’s a more realistic, and arguably more radical, view of kinship than any automatic “unconditional” promise.
The key word is “friendship,” a concept that yanks parenting out of the realm of pure duty and into chosen intimacy. Friendship is earned through proximity, jokes, grievances, routines, the private language that accumulates when two lives repeatedly bump into each other. Raising a child is often sold as a one-way act of giving. Marquez suggests it’s also a relationship that grows reciprocally: the parent is shaped by the child’s emerging personhood, and affection deepens not because the child is “mine” but because the child becomes known.
There’s subtext here about what blood can’t guarantee. Family, in Marquez’s world, is rarely a stable institution; it’s a volatile weather system of loyalties and resentments. This line nudges against sentimental family mythology and replaces it with something sturdier and more modern: care as a practice, not a claim. It also smuggles in a democratic idea of love. If parental love is partly built like friendship, it can be repaired, renegotiated, even re-earned - and that’s a more realistic, and arguably more radical, view of kinship than any automatic “unconditional” promise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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