A Blasphemous Litany for the Day and Season.

[bellatrys]

It is not adequate, to spend your hours making ornate stuffed toys or hand-sewn clothes or knitted sweaters for your children, and never talk to them or still more, listen; it is not an adequate substitute, to fill your hours baking cookies and roasting dinners so that you can have everything homemade and thus healthier (but also far cheaper, if

Comments

yeah...sigh...in her case, a combination of Kate Greenaway

[bellatrys]

Currier & Ives, St Nicholas Magazine and Victorian romances, the Idea that if only the trappings of a Big Old-fashioned Happy Family were all shoved into place, Happiness would ensue. Kind of Sympathetic Magic, really. Which is why I tend to get twitchy around any Martha-Stewartesque or excessively-homey "traditional" mothering and homemaking - a suspicion of protesting to much," trying too hard, and what is not there under it. Add to that the problem of what happens when Vor disillusioned Cold War milbrats try to rebel without ever breaking the mold of the Authoritarian Personality Type that's been cast about them, and a whole heaping slather of the Patient Griselda model of Sacrificial Womanhood, which promises that if only you suffer and suffer and suffer and give and give and give, eventually you will Be Appreciated by your Prince Charming and everything will be Wonderful, and it's a really toxic web of maya all right.

--Coraline bothered me a hell of a lot more than I liked to admit at the time. As with Wee Free Men, there is

well, we didn't have *that*

[bellatrys]

not really possible with 7 children all packed into a tiny house! - but I know what you mean! There are houses (and neighborhoods!) where I expect to see the holographic projectors if I look round the corner; vastly I prefer the chewed-up antique linoleum and cobwebs to Gattaca perfection. Tim Burton got it, the scariness of it and the in humanity of it, q.v. Edward scissorhands...

[fidelioscabinet]

Poor soul. If only she tried hard enough, closed her eyes tight enough, and so on, and so on, and so on. Doesn't work. At least you managed to avoid the mistake of marrying a man just like your father, so you could redo their relationship for them and get it right, which would make up for anything she failed to achieve.

You'll never have a happy and secure existence until you purge all this from yourself, but all those thorns are in pretty deep, and I think I see some pus down in there with 'em. Yes, that metaphor is mixed. Report me to the Rhetoric Cops. Or not.

Want some hydrogen peroxide to clean that up as you get them pulled out?

27 years of a lie affirmed is long enough

[bellatrys]

The clincher was a revelation in the course of some intragenerational discussion this summer which cast a light on our past like to that of an exploding nuclear warhead, if - and I am *fairly* certain it is, weighing all things against each other - it is true. Combined with the ongoing feminist blogosphere discourse about moral innocence and lack of culpability versus full personhood and accountability no matter how affected by circumstances, and I have been working on dealing with the fact that the only way I've been able to deal with her memory is to consider her a poor, helpless, total victim of circumstances and my father's crazy, but that this is not just to either of them. It was a mutual codependence/dysfunctionality/crazy, and pretending she didn't choose any of it, when in fact she was the driving force behind much of what went on in our family, right down to and including her rejection of feminism in the 70s and embrace of Traditional Catholicism to provide a doctrinaire structure and Authority System that she could use as a

Re: 27 years of a lie affirmed is long enough

[fidelioscabinet]

You know, it's obvious that the old strategy just didn't work. You can't put any of it behind you until you can forgive her, and you can't do that until you are able to admit she fucked up. Until you can say "When you chose to do this, you ended up doing this to me," all you're doing it helping to bury it in the catbox and hoping it gets tossed out by someone else.

You (rhetorical) have to own your rage before you can do anything useful with it, and until you look at where it comes from and why, you can't do that. The rage, however, will own you, which means it will keep you a helpless prisoner, which isn't nearly as romantic an image as people might think--ask the shades of Constance of Brittany and Isobel Buchan sometime. People without number make that mistake when they try, or when the tell other people, to put it behind them. You have to examine it and figure it out first.
After you own it, you can put it to good use--but until then it uses you, and you can barely call your soul your own.

Oh, I know that

[bellatrys]

which is why there are multiple failed attempts at a future post on the subject scattered on a couple different USB drives and SD disks right now, and all of them having ended in a combination of "HULK SMASH - got to take a walk RIGHT BLOODY NOW" and "There's no plot to this! There's no structure! It's a goddamn postmodern novel, chicklit as written by Frank K., and what's the fucking point of excavating Chernobyl now?" and then I encounter yet another bit of antifeminist academic blathering and I know damn well a) that I have to and b) why I have to, rinse and repeat. And little by little I chip away at it.

But moving back into that particular bit of timespace when I dealt with the constant and unnameable fears of my daily existence by (among other things) imagining a Hellworld of mud and trenches a hundred feet high through which giant grey tanks the size of city blocks ripped each other apart in a war that had no possible "win" - is not particularly enjoyable, either. And there's not any way to back but through, either.

[randwolf]

My sympathies.

Thank you.

[bellatrys]

but I'm winning so far - I haven't killed myself, nor anybody else, nor trapped anyone in a nightmare with me. So that's ahead of the game...

[ksej]

There's a muted echo of this in my life: the whole "I've given you what I wanted to give; how dare you be so ungrateful as to complain it's not what you wanted to get?" dynamic is all too familiar. I got into a tiring circular argument the other night because she wanted to condemn me for "not accepting the help other people give" when that isn't the help I need, and when I explained that she told me several times in increasing exasperation that if she promised to help me with something she would drop everything (the phrase she used was "tell [depressed and needy son] to suck his own cock") to help me with it, and I tried to explain that I didn't need a babysitter on some specific, planned-in-advance day anything like as much as I needed someone to come round and just spend some time with me...

One of my fervent wishes from my teenage years still holds as true today: I hope I never behave that way to my child(ren).

"when that isn't the help I need,"

[bellatrys]

BINGO! and in fact is often quite counterproductive and harmful "help" when it isn't merely useless - I'm thinking of Advice specifically, but also of decrepit cars and furniture personally; mileage varies of course. And then they can say "I gave you X" or, "Well, I offered" if you refuse it, and feel all benevolent and ill-used.

"tell [depressed and needy son] to suck his own cock") to help me with it,There is something going on like this in my family - has been since around 1980, in fact, when my oldest brother was diagnosed with asthma, and that is how my father especially plays all our illnesses (physical and mental) off against each other, leaving all of us feeling simultaneously guilty for taking parental attention and money away from "all your poor little brothers and sisters" and resentful "you don't care about Poor Sibling X's Dire Ailment!" by turns as you go into and out of categories. Then they can't figure out why we go away and don't come back and never mention what dire straights we're in later

[riverheart]

I will not celebrate her birthday with the customary mandatory burning of incense to the dead

Instead, go out and do something to celebrate your own survival and healing.

[riverheart]

Exactly. "Living well is the best revenge.''

--Architeuthis