Knowing the sorrows of family dysfunction, I don't want it to happen to anybody else. I first noticed that my family had dysfunction observing my little who always seemed very cool, seems deficient in friendliness. For sixty years, I've noticed that she seems to hate me. I attribute that to my parents leaving her with Grandpa, whom she didn't know, while for two weeks we took the train across the continent to New York, helped Grandma clean out the apartment there in Manhattan for the big move to L.A. The little 5 year old brat (me,) got to go to New York and my baby sister age three was left with a total stranger. My mother said that when we came back, the toddler was depressed, insane, silent, weepy, a mess and for the next two decades, my Mom had to deal with a troubled child. From that point on, she never did a kind thing for me. Only in the last months, with much overlooking rudeness on my part will she do a kind thing but she does it with a flat face. She just gave me one of her old coats on a cold winter night and she paid for my hot chinese dinner and made my half brother come pick me up way out in the valley. 40 Extra miles! I appreciate that. It is kindness. It is attention. And it's taken six decades to get to it.
My mother is always kind; At ninety five, she still loves books most of all so she saves the good paperbacks that fall into her hands for me. When I'm there, visiting, she's friendly, not exhuberant, but loving and very polite and gentle in her ways. Once about a decade ago I slipped and criticized her handling of her marriage, well the divorce.....actually. She had me, a kid of l8 and my sister, age 17 and my mom got pissed at my dad and just disappeared. She left the country to live in Mexico! Sylvia and I were like half baked cakes! She just turned off the oven. I told her so and said many tragedies were attributable to that move. Well, she didn't talk to me a whole lot for ten years after that, she talked but it was cooler than usual. Her reaction was so intense, I began to think back over my life with her and realized that there were subtler dysfunctions, earlier ones, hidden, but they paved the way for the big ones.
In the first years I knew her, MY MOM had a verrrrrrry light touch as a mother. LIKE NOT THERE AT ALL? A maid gave me breakfast, I got myself off to school. She was VERY engrossed in her own social/ art and studies life. I made huge life decisions, and not always the right ones, and my mother and I had no talking-it-over GOING. None. Aware that the light-touch parent could happen, and the results be dramatic and nuts, I TRIED so hard to be involved w. my kids every step of the way....but LIFE IS SOOOOOOO seductive. One gets so 'into romance, career, work, that you get BUSY with stuff'.
I SEE NOW with full clarity why nature makes a man DOMINATE THAT WOMAN and will, if he can, TIE HER TO THE upbringing of the KID and the welfare of the household and if she strays one centimeter from that path, he beats the (#%*) out of her (at least in about fifty countries!) But not here in America.
Here, we have career girls. I wouldn't say they're happier than the mother wearing a Burkha (veil), at home with her children and mother-in-law breathing down her neck. The unhappy career girl --- juggling desk work all day, picking up kids at sitters, only spending an hour at best with babies ---is a mess. If she has to work all day, pick up the infant at a daycare, she's stressed, depressed. If she runs an office in the home, maybe there's no income from a daddy, she's sulking around the house about her sad 'fate' and being irritated at the child when he or she yells for Mom. Every petition by the child seems like HORRIFIC demands! That parent will unwittingly without meaning to, TOTALLY CURE that infant of sharing her feelings, her needs. A single acrid retort from parent will totally STOP the child from asking. You'll teach her to CHOOSE friends who don't give ---as she will never ask, never ever.
Without meaning to, this 'busy' efficient parent could PROGRAM the baby to think she's a loser, that she cannot be put on a pedestal, ever. That daughter will NOT be USED to diva behavior. Not used to princess behavior. More like used to MAID behavior. She'll learn that she'd just better get used to living as a lowborn shitkicker as 'that's all there is.' This is 'how it is.' The parent's eternal busy-ness and 'self involvement and self pity' will teach her that she'd better shut up and put up. She may become agreeable and slavish and seek to please. And become a GIVER.
That is the worst thing for a woman. GIVERS are slaves. A GOOD WOMAN IS A TAKER An asker, a demander. A GOOD MAN is a GIVER I know this and I fear for my granddaughter. I watch my son juggle a career, a cottage industry out of the house where he is the caretaker of a new born infant. This condition has, til today, lasted a year and a month. He is peevish, impatient with the child. I warned him, "You will strip her of her inborn feminine gentle goddesshood, a kind of royalty, bleach out of her all feeling of entitlement....it'll be abraded with the emery board of DAD's sulking, FILED down to a woeful little stump. She'll become a fearful girl who will not KNOW or have a clue that a woman can be ADORED, respected, treated like a queen. As happens to a lot of ladies. They don't know how great they are. They sell themselves short.
I write to my four kids, "Did you ever see grandpa ALBERT with his younger kids? The two from the fourth wife? It wasn't much but it was way more attention than Syl and I got. He was l00 times kinder to Jenny than he was to me and syl. He treated us like wallpaper. Well, that's how he treated CHRIS, also. Terribly. Awful. George Bassman his friend once warned me, Al is destroying that boy. In Sylvia and my case, not a rude word ever except "TURN OFF TV at 9pm!" Yelled. But aside from that, we didn't exist. He was caught up in his life. In my entire life I never talked with Grandma or Grandpa Szendrei as they were the same way! They were caught up in their own minds, and lives. If we went to LAUREL AVE where they lived, which we did often, there was not a word spoken to Syl or Anita. The adults spoke quietly.
I nag my eldest son who's Mr. Mom, (his wife is an accountant,) to pay gentle but continual attention to his new daughter "Can you see how...If a little girl is nothing, or if YOU are a nothing to the opposite sex parent, you will never have 'standing' with either the people you pick as sweethearts or with your mates? GIVE your new daughter STANDING, primary standing. Next and way far behind....is focusing on your fabulous artistic photo work, the career he runs out of the home while his daughter calls for Daddy's sole attention to be focused on her. Last is the blues about 'how it is.' That doesn't belong in the quotient. Cuz it bums you so bad you can't do the first two!
You need to forget your problems and just play with the kid when she's awake. Creative play. Goonie-play with your daughter. Watching movies and explaining between scenes what's going on. And above all BOOMPAH! And Ring around the maypole. And you be a barking dog scaring her as a cat, And then let her be the dog and bark and scare you!
Then cards, Checkers, monopoly, shooting marbles. You need to be a celebration on wheels. A FUN GUY reading her funny books, doing all the voices. Making up fairy tales at nap and bedtime. Cuz lemme tell you. The SECOND you stop all that fun and games, you both grow apart and all the OTHER things parents do, the goal oriented career activity, all the art classes and events you go to for your cultural life, all the handling the logistics of feeding, dressing, schlepping to school and raising a kid haven't got the bonding material in them. No glue. There's just MOM and Baby together.
Or the lack of it.
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I am interested in babies and child raising, so here are sites you
might like, a list assembled by a writer, Jan Levinson who apparently has
a LIST online, I googled her, couldn't find her anywhere, but this article
in my daily newspaper today says that she runs a unique blog on babies/parents,
etc. and she lists her favorite PARENTING SITES as:
http://www.geocitykids.com/?area=195
http://www.citymommy.com/
http://www.thedailystroll.com/
http://www.dailycandy.com/
http://www.losangeles.urbanbaby.com/front.php
http://www.hungry-girl.com/
http://www.epinions.com/
http://www.losangeles.parenthood.com/
http://www.mommystylenews.com/
http://www.momready.com/
Research and read, then maybe write about baby and child raising issues, and maybe even get published THERE!
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence
without civilization in between."
OSCAR WILDE
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