Posts of the Week
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The Fear of Becoming My Mother Arlene Green - 12:06am Sep 3, 1997 PST(#1 of 9)
...believe it or not, most people don't really bother to understand where their parents went wrong if they were not good parents. They make statements such as "I will never be like my parents" without figuring out exactly what it is they do not want to emulate. These people are doomed to repeat the past. You are not. You know exactly what qualities you wish to avoid. As a general rule obstacles are much easier to avoid if you can see them. Your fear will make you hyper conscious of how you interact with your children. When you have children you will be the mommy who buys the educational toys, all the child safety gadgets known to man, and makes sure you set aside quality time every day for your child. The first year of your child's life you will be a nervous wreck but you will not be your mother. Even later when the school years come around and you have mellowed and don't feel guilty about a night out once in awhile you will still not be your mother. Yes, you may catch glimpses of her in yourself and worry briefly, but those little mannerisms and turns of speech are not tidings of doom. They are simply the things that all parents say or do at one time or another. Even when your child is a teenager and so much of their life is hidden from you as they pull away to swim in the sea of adulthood and you feel the pangs of separation anxiety, you will not be you mother. You will be sad but your focus will be on them and their future and with the sadness will come pride. Not criticism and angry self pity. You will never be your mother because your mother never would have feared what you are fearing now. She boiled squirrel nutkin, he diddled girls -- does it spoil the
message? Paul Clark - 08:36am Sep 5, 1997 PST (#21 of 27)
I've shifted my thoughts about writers that I've enjoyed after finding out more about their lives. Lewis Carroll, Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, all exhibited character traits, human weaknesses, or socially (or legally) unacceptable behaviors. If I knew more about an author's life before I read him or her, I would likely be presupposed not to read them, if I disagreed or disliked with things they had done in their life. In late-20th Century America, I think that authors become pigeon-holed or dismissed more for their political leanings or social stands than for any personal idiosyncracies. What I can't escape from, however, is the impact that a well-told story has upon me. Lewis Carroll liked little girls and liked to take pictures of them naked. Reprehensible! But, the power of his stories is inescapable; they are marked in my brain; they creep into my writing. That's one of the powers of art. I'm not academically trained to soapbox about art or aethestics, but a good tale, well told, will implant itself into the readers or listeners psyches, regardless of the writer's personal life. The writer's life may color our later perception of his or her work, but that initial impression is hard to shake. Princess Diana Seriously Injured, Dodi Fayed Dead!!!! Paul Deegan - 07:17am Sep 2, 1997 PST (#234 of 241)
if you are a human being, don't you really have a "personal" relationship with every other human? Your level of relationship will differ according to your awareness of the "details" of the other person - the more you know about them, the deeper the relationship. We know more about Princess Diana, John Lennon, and other "famous" people, so their deaths affect us more. But even though we may not personally know all the people who died on the highways today, as human beings, we can be saddened by their deaths. If we learn more about one of the now-anonymous (to us) victims, our feelings will become deeper and more complex because of that knowledge. I had no face-to-face relationship with Diana but I knew more about her than I do about some of my neighbors. I know next to nothing about any individual victim of the Holocaust. As a result, I'm saddened and horrified by their deaths but I'm more personally affected by Anne Frank because I know about her as a person. I guess what I'm trying to say is that knowing another human being and knowing "about" another human being both create personal relationships. When death ends these relationships, we feel loss and sadness, different in degree and depth but real and "personal". Isn't that what John Donne was saying? |
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