You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Interpretation
It's important to maintain boundaries with parents regarding personal struggles and vulnerabilities.
In this quote, Alice Munro suggests that sharing our most humiliating experiences with our parents can lead to discomfort and potential misunderstanding. Parents may not fully grasp the nuances of their children's adult lives, and involving them in these personal struggles can complicate familial relationships, making it essential to protect certain emotional vulnerabilities.
In practice
During a therapy session discussing family dynamics.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.
Harass someone on Bumble, and you're banned for life. Harsh? Maybe. But I feel strongly that we won't end misogyny until we start holding each other to higher standards, and that starts with setting clear boundaries and enforcing them.
If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.
Krystal flung herself violently off the chair, away from her mother. She was surprised to feel warm liquid flowing down her cheeks, and thought confusedly of blood, but it was tears, only tears, clear and shining on her fingertips when she wiped them away.
The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.
There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.