Do you love your parents? Let's have a moment of brutal honesty and question our emotional and why not, moral, integrity. Are our mothers infallible just because they gave us birth? Or because they fulfilled their emotional void through us? Do the blood-ties blind us? Should the shared DNA oblige us into experiencing parental love? What makes us love our parents?

We know what makes us fall in love with the opposite gender, the surge of hormones to the brain, the release of cuddle hormone, the appetite for sexual desire and the devilishly pleasant and irresistible tingle in our groins. The basic need to copulate and multiply. The insane desire to become immortal and conquer death by giving birth to our children. Or the mixture of intimacy, passion and commitment.

Why do we love our parents? Biologically speaking, once we exit their tutelage, and we seek no further support from them, our affection based on needs should cease. Yet, we keep on loving them. Or maybe it is not love. What is love? I know what love is not: not unconditional. Love is a tradeoff. Otherwise you feel outwitted. Like everything else in life, love and respect, even parental must be earned through hard work and diligence.

Parenthood doesn’t come with the territory and a parent must earn his/her respect like everybody else. Anyone can breed but not everyone is fit to be a parent, let alone a good one. Parental respect is not self-understood and you should never take your children’s for granted.

Why as parents love our children, it’s pretty much a no brainer.

If we were god, we loved our children roughly, exigently, demandingly, pushing them beyond their human limits, asking them to overcome them, thus initiating their perfection. But we are not. Cause there is no god. And the love for our children is passionate, irrational but moreover unconditional. We love our children possessively, simplistically, maternally, desperately, energetically, gloriously and sometimes to the point of alienation. At times we define ourselves through them.

Yet, as adults, we discontinue loving our parents. What is left is pity for their weaknesses (some call it compassion), gratitude for what they have done for us, duty and moral filial obligation, as no one abandons the weak, especially someone from the same tribe, sometimes respect as a remembrance as they led a righteous life.

Have our parents done no wrong? Actually, what have they done wrong?

For a while, we feel guilty for not being capable of loving them as much as you feel they love you, and you might wonder if there is anything wrong with your “love skill”. I haven’t seen an adult madly loving his/her parents, unless they are pathologically and freaudianly undeveloped. You are looking for possible excuses within yourself and them. Childhood sexual abuse? Nope. Domestic violence? Nope. Lack of affection? Nope. What is wrong then? Why can’t we love our parents back the same way they love us? Is it biology? Is it maybe because like rats, we push the elderly, the sick and the useless towards the edge of the cliff so we can make room for the young, voracious and vivacious? Is this what we are eventually? A pack of rats? A gathering of apes? Yes.

Shall we feel guilty and apologize? Apologize for what? For our faulty genes which determine us to shift our focus from our elderly towards our offspring? Both are equally helpless. Ironically, psychologists claim that insincere apologies are better than no apology. However, “the person who offered a coerced apology was judged even more harshly than the one who offered no apology at all”. Well, if this is the case, we are sorry for being who we are. After all, if biology is our destiny, this is what is waiting for us, too. A proverb says that you can define a society by the way it treats its dogs and elderly.

We should not trust a society that shoots stray dogs or shows no mercy begging senior citizens but claims to have family values. (2010)