Adam Gopnik reflects on it:
What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon – if we live long enough – of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigour that once was ours.
His theory? Parental love is infinite:
Though our story is ending, their story, we choose to think – we can’t think otherwise – will go on forever. When we have children, we introduce infinities into all of our emotional equations. Nothing ever adds up quite the same again.
The Dish 