I found this in Marianne Williamson, Everyday Grace: “A human being is a part of the whole called the ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of… consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, […]
I have been thinking about my maternal grandmother. Arada Lusk (1895-1983) was a tiny woman with a huge presence in my childhood. I grew up in the house my mother was born in, and my grandparents lived next door, in a house built by their sons and sons-in-laws. The winter after my grandfather died, when […]
I recently reread Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years. I hope I’m not revealing too much (about myself) by telling you that in this novel mother and wife Delia Grinstead acts on an impulse to walk away from her family. Eventually, she returns, and Tyler does an excellent job imagining both the humor and the tragedy of the […]
When I first became a mom, my friend Karen gave me Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Good Enough Parent. The concept originated, I believe, with D. W. Winnicott. The heart of the theory is that trying too hard as a parent just mucks things up for the child. Better to be “good enough” and let the child take […]