An Unready Life

I am a throughput of our preparatory system:
toilet training, superficial manners, lots of schools,
veneered morals, punitive ethics, conditioned fears.
Yet remained unprepared for everything important
that I incurred or which came upon me.
Wife (only one), children, new professions,
belief, disbelief, resumption of belief,
anxiety, combativeness, mellowness,
and the courting of intimacy with mortality.