Enders In Exile

creating me, and for raising me
those first six years?
    I thought: You were so
in awe of my great achievement that you felt unworthy to insist on a
relationship, and as with royalty, you waited for me to invite you.
Here, though, the fact that you are not too much in awe of Peter to be
with him, though his achievements are arguably greater—peace
on Earth, after all!—tells me that awe is not a powerful
motive in your lives.
    Then I thought: They
have divided the family. Valentine is their co-parent, and she has been
assigned to me, while they assigned themselves to Peter. Other people
had taken care of training me to save the world; but who would train
Peter, who would watch out for him, who would pull him up short if he
overreached or became a tyrant? That was where you were needed; that
was your life's work. Valentine would give her life to me, and you
would give yours to Peter.
    But if that was your
thinking, then I think you made a poor choice. Valentine is as good as
I remembered her to be, and as smart. But she cannot understand me or
what I need, she does not know me well enough to trust me, and it
drives her crazy. She is not my mother or father, she is only my
sister, and yet she has been assigned—or assigned
herself—to take on a motherly role. She does her best. I hope
she is not too unhappy with the bargain she made, to come along on this
voyage. The sacrifice she made in order to come with me was far too
great. I fear she thinks the results in me have amounted to little of
worth.
    I do not know you, a
man and a woman in their eighties. I knew a young man and woman in
their early thirties, busy with their own extraordinary careers,
raising extraordinary children who, for a time, each wore the monitor
of the I.F. at the base of their skulls. There was always someone else
watching over me. I always belonged to someone else. You never felt
that I was fully your son.
    Yet I am your son.
There is in me, in the abilities I have, in the choices that I make
without realizing that I've chosen, in my deep feelings about the
religions that you believed in secretly, which I have studied when I
could, there is in all these things a trace of you. You are the
explanation of much that is un-explainable.
    And my ability to shut
certain things completely from my mind—to set them aside so I
can work on other projects—that also comes from you, for I
think that is what you have done with me. You have set me aside, and
only by directly asking for it can I win your attention once again.
    I have watched painful
relationships between parents and children. I have seen parents who
control and parents who neglect, parents who make terrible mistakes
that hurt their children deeply, and parents who forgive children who
have done awful things. I have seen nobility and courage; I have seen
dreadful selfishness and utter blindness; and I have seen all these
things in the SAME parents, raising the same children.
    What I understand now
is this: There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human
relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful
destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one
has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or
even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply
cannot be done right.
    For reasons truly out
of your control, I became a stranger to you; for reasons I do not
understand, you made no effort to come to my defense and bring me home,
or to explain to me why you did not or could not or should not. But you
let my sister come to me, giving her up from your own lives. That was a
great gift, jointly offered by her and you. Even if she now regrets it,
that does not reduce the nobility of the sacrifice.
    Here is why I am
writing. No matter how hard I try to be self-sufficient, I am not. I
have read enough psychology and sociology, and I have observed enough
families over the past two years, to realize that there is no
replacement for parents in a person's life, and no going on without
them. I have achieved, at the age of fifteen, more than any but a
handful of the greatest men in history. I can look at the records of
what I did and see, clearly, that it is so.
    But I do not believe
it. I look into myself and all I see is the destroyer of lives. Even as
I prevented a tyrant from usurping the control of this colony, even as
I helped a young girl liberate herself from a domineering mother, I
heard a voice in the back of my