My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexities of parenting and the desire to protect one's children from hardship.
In this quote, Dorothy Allison expresses her experience as a parent raising her son, Wolf, in a middle-class environment despite her own challenging upbringing. She highlights the contrast between their lives, acknowledging her efforts to shield him from the struggles she faced in her childhood, which illustrates a common parental instinct to provide a better life for the next generation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the challenges and triumphs of parenting.
Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
I would have been a terrible mother because I'm basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people going off and having children.
This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.
I am convinced that if we as a society work diligently in every other area of life and neglect_x000D_ _x000D_ the family, it would be analogous to straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.
Parents and children seldom act in concert:_x000D_ each child endeavors to appropriate_x000D_ the esteem or fondness of the parents,_x000D_ and the parents, with yet less temptation,_x000D_ betray each other to their children.
In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
Our parents set the moral tone of the family. They expected more of some of us and less of others, but never less than they thought we were capable of.
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