My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the complex and conflicting emotions a parent experiences regarding their children, encompassing both love and struggle.
Adrienne Rich reflects on the intense and often contradictory feelings that come with motherhood. The quote illustrates the dual nature of parental love, revealing how it can be accompanied by struggles with ambivalence, where moments of deep joy and gratitude coexist with feelings of frustration and resentment. This emotional complexity emphasizes the challenges inherent in nurturing children, highlighting how a parent's passionate feelings can oscillate between pride and distress, ultimately showcasing the depth of love intertwined with the burdens of responsibility.
In practice
During a heartfelt conversation about parenting at a family gathering.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.
If you have a family mission statement that clarifies what your purpose is, then you use that as the criterion by which you make the decisions.
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