My mother had no tolerance for my crying.
“If anyone looks at Anjuelle, she cries,” was how she described me.
She wanted to instill in me a mental toughness–what she had.
I was not going for it.
And so I cried.
I took
Mental Toughness, Girl Scout Badges, and Du’as … Read More »
In that a memoir, and the structure of any narrative, consists of scenes, I must write various scenes of my life, those that most depict my suffering for which I offer forgiveness and hold compassion for my mother.
This is hard. Not simply because I am writing of my mother, and about myself. The challenge lies in my lack of certainty, the ambiguity of my mother’s actions, and thus my ambivalence.
Perhaps what
Of Narrative, Scenes of a Life, and Brimming With Fear … Read More »
Despite all that I endured with my mother under her care, or lack of it, I was never ambivalent about my ability to love.
Even in the worst of times during my childhood, and while undergoing the nightmare of relationship with my mother, it has always seemed the easiest thing to love, the hardest to mistreat and push away, speak harshly to.
I cannot imagine being to my children as my
Of Ambivalence, Epiphanies, and Sonnets of Compassion … Read More »
It is said that an autobiography comprise the story of a life and that memoir consists of a story from a life. A life can hold, and a person can write, many memoirs. But we have only one telling of the factual events constituting our life.
As a story from a life, a memoir consists of scenes from that life, or more importantly, moments from the aspect, area, or slice of our life that one is focusing upon.
The dimension of life
Of Memoir, Ambivalence, and Love … Read More »
The weekend following the accident my daughter would tell me of how on his arrival, the woman’s husband offered to and helped my daughter move the boxes of books, copies of my novels, from the back of my SUV, its back window blown out by the impact of the crash, into the trunk of my daughter’s car.
The woman, by then had
Of A Jeep Wranger, Corporal Punishment and Compassion … Read More »
Knowing more about my mother and understanding her are two different things.
I wish to have known more about my mother. But that will not happen.
She died of gall bladder cancer nearly two decades ago.
Yet as a mother of three daughters I feel that I have come to understand her.
It is difficult
Of The Inner Child, Mothers and Compassion … Read More »
It requires skill to craft tantalizing titles, bylines, etc. that coaxes readers, even those who receive your blogs as I do those written by The Mommy Psychologist
to actually stop what we are doing and take in the blogger’s words.
That what we read leaves us thinking, and pondering the subject of their website and blogs, which for The Mommy Psychologist is the whole gambit of parenting in the 21st century, evidences grasp of an art.
Readers can be grateful when the very topic of a blogger’s discussion plunges
Of Jonathon Franzen, Loneliness, and The Still Point of Attention … Read More »