The Writing Mamas Daily Blog
Each day on the Writing Mamas Daily Blog, a different member will write about mothering.If you're a mom then you've said these words, you've made these observations and you've lived these situations - 24/7.
And for that, you are a goddess.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
The Man in the Mirror
First there was shock, then came the thought, "Who will take care of his children?"
That was what went through my head when I heard that Michael Jackson had died.
I immediately thought of the woman who bore his first two children and hoped it would not be her. She was paid to be a surrogate, gave up her rights and from what I've read about her would rather raise horses than those kids.
According to several news reports she said something that she certainly did not have to share. Not now during such a painful time for his children. She said that Michael was not their biological parent.
He was their father. They knew him as Dad. Fortunately, the children are with his mother and his family. Hopefully their nanny, who has helped raise them for most of their lives, will continue in that role.
There is something else about the death of Michael Jackson that has bothered me. My own guilt and judgement about him in life and the almost saintly quality I've given him now that he is gone.
Death does that. Bad memories often give away to good, and they are what remain.
His skin was widely believed to be bleached. Now journalists are saying he really did have vitiligo, which splotched his skin and turned it pale. He also suffered from lupus, a harsh anti-immune disease. Perhaps that is why he wore surgical masks and allegedly took a number of drugs. That and years of strenuous performing left him in pain.
One thing I never believed was the molestation charges. The dentist who said Jackson abused his son, actually used a truth serum on his own child during a root canal. Can you imagine? Why did Jackson pay up? He said it just wasn't worth it. Haven't we all felt like that about one thing or another? OK, maybe not to the out-of-tune scale of $25 million. But understandable.
And then like a modern Jean Valjean in Les Miserable there was the district attorney who was going to bring Michael down regardless of the facts. The infamous molestation trial. Michael in his pajamas. So many, including myself, thought he was faking it. But I have spoken to people who have been on trial or have had family members who have been and all said they were on medication for much of their ordeals. So, apparently, quite understandably now, was Michael. A weak case. One that should never have been brought, Michael won, but he lost so very much. The financial and emotional strain cost him his career, his credibility and he became the equivalent of a cartoon character. A freak. Someone not of this world.
He was none of those things. He was a devoted father. A loving son. A caring brother. A man who, literally, thrilled millions and helped create the music video genre of MTV.
Michael Jackson is an object lesson in glass houses and to look at our own reflections before casting stones. Only then might we put down those rocks, and cast aside our harsh words and too easy judgements.
Michael Jackson is now in the same category as Elvis. His father said he would be bigger in death than he was in life. He left a legacy far larger than that. He had three children, just twelve, eleven and seven. Far too young to be orphaned. They are what is most important about Michael Jackson. He was their parent. He was their father. He was his children's dad.
By Dawn Yun
Labels: devoted father, glass houses, guilt, Jean Valjean, judgement, Les Miserable, lupus, Man in the Mirror, Michael Jackson, MTV, vitiligo
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
How Movies Put EVERYTHING into Perspective
I stagger out of the movie theater with the newfound certainty that my life is pointless.
Why write blogs about my kids’ aggravating but endearing traits when African children are being snatched from their mothers’ arms and forced to commit unimaginable atrocities just to stay alive?
It seems indecent to obsess about SAT scores or worry about underage drinking in light of such horrors.
Yet, I and everyone else I know persist in the delusion of how stressful our pampered lives are.
We have no idea what goes on in the rest of the world.
Nor do we want to.
I wish I could channel my shock and grief into the righteous indignation of action. Petitions, rallies, boycotts, bake sales -- anything to stave off paralysis and guilt.
In my tireless fight for justice, I could inspire my daughters to trade People magazine for a life dedicated to helping real people.
I could instill in them fervor to save the world rather than regret being born into it.
Instead, I just want to retreat.
I want the bubble to descend over the soft green hills of Marin, over our soft neuroses about trivial injuries, over the soft lives of my precious girls.
Maybe then I’ll feel safe from the wolf at the door.
By Lorrie Goldin
Labels: African children, atrociites, bake sales, Blood Diamond, boycotts, guilt, kidnappings, Lorrie Goldin, pampered lives, paralysis, People magazine, SAT scores
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Four
My daughter had a bruising day yesterday. From the moment she woke up, her emotions were overheated, misread, and dragged her behind them like a freight train.
Nothing sounded good to wear, to eat, to play. No one seemed to hear her anguished plea for the world to be the way she desperately needed it to be.
I was cast as the brutal, unyielding bully mother at every juncture. I felt abusive, insisting she wear boots instead of sandals that she had to eat protein if she wanted dessert that she could not make her sister go away.
Being 4 is a vicious time. Children floating comfortably in fantasy fall perilously into reality. Death exists and is permanent, stories are suddenly understood as unreal, other people control many of the child’s choices and consequences for their actions exist and persist across time. Time itself opens to them, an expanse with a permanent record rather than a slide across a projector, there and gone at their will.
And I have to play her bad guy, emissary of limits, bedtimes, manners, and overall prohibition.
So, to this mess of tears and a tiara sobbing on the floor, watching her friend get to eat vanilla ice cream she cannot have until she eats some dinner, I can only offer to hold her and start again. It doesn’t work; she kicks me, and cries the most serious of rejections:
“I want my Daddy! I just want my Daddy” she wails, alone in her pile of misery.
When my husband arrives on the scene, she clings to him with both hands, looking back at me as though I am a marauding hyena. Her shoulders hunched, eyes wide, sniffling and begging Daddy to be alone with her in her room, she leaves.
I understand this terrain, the ill-fitting blustery rage that descends when we can’t have things be as they are. When it is too painful to maintain a connection with someone telling you that you may not have what you know you need to feel better.
To be powerless, and awkward. To endlessly love and need people so much who prevent your desires from finding satisfaction. To start to understand that you are indeed not the center of the universe.
Beginning to understand that everyone else is as big a planet, not chunks of stone orbiting you. What grief. I hear my daughter crying to my husband, “Mama didn’t understand. She was confused about what I needed. I needed her to only put everything the way I like it.”
Then just tears.
I can hear in her language her attempt to forgive me for not telepathically receiving and fulfilling her wish. She is starting to understand that we are separate, no matter how much I love her or how hard I try.
I go to bed and feel tearful at how painful this is, growing up, even in full confidence of being loved, having to become a person: only sometimes successful, affected by others, gripped by competing wants.
It’s not too far away, when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer, when a lawsuit takes a loved one down into hell, when babies aren’t born healthy. Four is my own bitten down grief at apparent injustice, feeling helpless to bigger forces.
By Avvy Mar Stumble This Post
Nothing sounded good to wear, to eat, to play. No one seemed to hear her anguished plea for the world to be the way she desperately needed it to be.
I was cast as the brutal, unyielding bully mother at every juncture. I felt abusive, insisting she wear boots instead of sandals that she had to eat protein if she wanted dessert that she could not make her sister go away.
Being 4 is a vicious time. Children floating comfortably in fantasy fall perilously into reality. Death exists and is permanent, stories are suddenly understood as unreal, other people control many of the child’s choices and consequences for their actions exist and persist across time. Time itself opens to them, an expanse with a permanent record rather than a slide across a projector, there and gone at their will.
And I have to play her bad guy, emissary of limits, bedtimes, manners, and overall prohibition.
So, to this mess of tears and a tiara sobbing on the floor, watching her friend get to eat vanilla ice cream she cannot have until she eats some dinner, I can only offer to hold her and start again. It doesn’t work; she kicks me, and cries the most serious of rejections:
“I want my Daddy! I just want my Daddy” she wails, alone in her pile of misery.
When my husband arrives on the scene, she clings to him with both hands, looking back at me as though I am a marauding hyena. Her shoulders hunched, eyes wide, sniffling and begging Daddy to be alone with her in her room, she leaves.
I understand this terrain, the ill-fitting blustery rage that descends when we can’t have things be as they are. When it is too painful to maintain a connection with someone telling you that you may not have what you know you need to feel better.
To be powerless, and awkward. To endlessly love and need people so much who prevent your desires from finding satisfaction. To start to understand that you are indeed not the center of the universe.
Beginning to understand that everyone else is as big a planet, not chunks of stone orbiting you. What grief. I hear my daughter crying to my husband, “Mama didn’t understand. She was confused about what I needed. I needed her to only put everything the way I like it.”
Then just tears.
I can hear in her language her attempt to forgive me for not telepathically receiving and fulfilling her wish. She is starting to understand that we are separate, no matter how much I love her or how hard I try.
I go to bed and feel tearful at how painful this is, growing up, even in full confidence of being loved, having to become a person: only sometimes successful, affected by others, gripped by competing wants.
It’s not too far away, when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer, when a lawsuit takes a loved one down into hell, when babies aren’t born healthy. Four is my own bitten down grief at apparent injustice, feeling helpless to bigger forces.
By Avvy Mar
Labels: daddy, four-years old, guilt, mommy, tantrums, tears
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