"Love you Forever" Tearing down the Culture

Oedipal themes, the glorification of disorder, and the romantic imagination

One of the most disturbing children’s stories ever published is Love you Forever by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sheila McGraw.

I hit a nerve for some with my critique of Where the Wild Things Are, a book that I hesitated to examine too closely since I, too, had warm childhood memories of reading it. But rebuilding the culture means taking a careful look at what is producing this culture and not taking lightly these artifacts that laugh off the pillars of civilization.

Once you see what they’re teaching your children with these books, you’ll be quick to cast them into the fire. I’m going to make the case for doing just that with Love you Forever.

Aside from the strange Oedipal message that runs throughout this book (notice the conspicuous absence of the mother’s husband and then of the son’s wife, to say nothing of the bizarre adult rocking-habit), there is a persistent message throughout that children are just born wild and free and there’s nothing we hapless adults can do about it.

The first page, which serves as the cover image, sets the tone. The little boy “pulled all the books off the shelves. He pulled all the food out of the refrigerator and he took his mother’s watch and flushed it down the toilet. Sometimes his mother would say, ‘This kid is driving me CRAZY!’”

We’re supposed to laugh at how naughty the child is and how exasperated his mother is. Perhaps if this book represented an aberration from the culture and were telling an unusual but redemptive tale, it might be interesting. But this is the sad state of modern parenting. Undisciplined children and frustrated parents. Although we all have experienced these episodes in child-rearing, it should not be celebrated and made to seem as if it were just the inevitable but hilarious norm. That is disordered, and in essence, normalizing disorder seems to be one of the main themes of this book.

The adolescent years are perfectly in keeping with the conduct of the toddler. What else could be expected of the child whose naughty antics are not corrected but met simply with exasperation and sarcasm?

An anarchic freedom seems to characterize the boy’s adolescent years:

Notice that he has not matured out of the toddler grip, as that bottle of soda spills as he struts across the kitchen with muddy shoes. This is the behavior you’d expect from your three year-old, not your thirteen year-old. His development has been arrested.

“The little boy grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was nine years old. And he never wanted to come in for dinner, he never wanted to take a bath, and when grandma visited he always said bad words. Sometimes his mother wanted to sell him to the zoo!”

So far, we have been told how naughty and disrespectful the child is and has been since toddlerhood. We have been told that he drives his mother crazy and she would rather be rid of him. Hahaha! How funny! Or…is it? Are we supposed to laugh at this sorry state of disorder and unhappiness? That is certainly what the author believes, and is one of the resounding messages of the 1980s and 1990s. I don’t think it is reading too much into this book to say that there is a connection between the parenting style that is represented in this book and the epidemic of anxiety and depression in young people that we see today.

Also, notice the absence of a father figure.

In between the pages of chaos and frustration in the home is the romantic refrain:

“But at night time, when he was asleep, the mother quietly opened the door to his room, crawled across the floor and looked up over the side of the bed. If he was really asleep, she picked up that nine-year-old boy and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And while she rocked him, she sang:

I’ll love you forever,

I’ll like you for always,

As long as I’m living

my baby you’ll be.”

And herein we see the typical bipolar dynamic that is the hallmark of the romantic imagination. On the one hand, we have the ideal: the serene nightly rocking of the sleeping child, where the mother pours out her love for him. On the other hand, we have the reality of a day-to-day existence in which the child is a terror and the mother appears to have abdicated responsibility for the difficult work of forming the child. But at night, when the boy sleeps, she can do the easy, sentimental “work” of rocking and singing.

This is, at the very least, sentimental romanticism, and at worst, diabolical. I go so far because it is this type of book that represents the destruction of a generation. Love you Forever depicts at the same time as it encourages ruin.

As we get deeper into the teenage years, things don’t improve. Pizza is spilling onto the floor as the boy sings into a broken lamp. His friend hangs upside down on the phone (with whom?).

This child appears to have been abandoned, despite the eternal recurrence of the mother-rocking theme. The very incongruence of his mother’s love and the absence of parental guidance makes this story very unbelievable and, at the risk of beating a dead horse, romantic.

This book is telling us that real love is merely sentiment. It is rocking a sleeping child. Even as it disdains this same child during his waking hours. At the same time, it is telling us what love is not. It is not correcting a child and forming him morally and spiritually into a good and decent human being. It is not stopping him from using foul language around his grandmother! It is not teaching him not only to clean up after himself but also to be a helpful member of the family.

Eventually, the boy grows up and moves out of the house. But his mother still rocks him. She drives across town, sneaks into his house, and goes up to his room. She holds him and sings to him her song.

I doubt that the intention here was an Oedipal theme, but nonetheless, that is what we got. Rather, I think the author is simply one of a million romantics. The theme is truly romantic more than it is Oedipal. The romantic imagination, as I often point out here at The Christian Imagination, is prone to daydreaming of ideals while actually living something of a nightmare. In Love you Forever, this dynamic holds. The author tries to show the devotion of the mother through her idyllic sentimentalism toward her son. But the reality is that she failed to form her child. In typical romantic fashion, there are no consequences for these actions. The son matures into a perfectly functional adult (aside from his rather strange relationship with his mother), sautéing mushrooms in an orderly kitchen and later rocking his own baby.

This neat and tidy conclusion, which is not at all the natural consequence of his disordered upbringing, is a part of the cultural lie that has been told since at least the 1980s when this book was published, if not since the 1960s. And that is that parents can neglect their children’s moral and spiritual life, substituting sentimentality for action, and everything will work out just fine. The rates of marriage among young people suggests otherwise. We are told that just over half of all Gen Z men and women will ever marry. This means that just under half will never marry! 33 percent of millennial men and 44 percent of millennial women will never marry.

Does the collapse of marriage have nothing to do with the culture that we see presented in Love you Forever? The imagination is very powerful. Clearly the book’s author found his interpretation of family life appealing, perhaps humorous, and if nothing else, harmless.

My contention here at The Christian Imagination is that such imaginative interpretations and representations are destructive of civilization. They glorify and celebrate that which should not be celebrated.

I’m not calling for a morality tale, either. Far from it. Love you Forever actually evinces a lack of imagination rather than an overabundance of it. It takes real imagination to produce beauty and truth in art, which necessarily resists didacticism. Examples of highly imaginative yet morally wholesome tales are to be found in the work of Elsa Beskow, for example. These stories depict happy family life and supply plenty of good examples for children through rich, interesting visions of life.

I had not looked at Love you Forever since my own childhood, but when I picked it up and read it as an adult, I was truly shocked. It really does tell us all we need to know about the culture and how we got here. We got here in part because the Boomer generation abdicated its moral responsibility in forming Christian children parents left it to “the culture” to raise their children. “Culture” like this book. But this book itself is a product of a pre-existing culture that goes back to the sexual revolution, which helped to decimate not only the family but also our imaginative understanding of what family life ought to be like.

Let us cast it into the fire.