Book related memories….
“Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, being in charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse…..” Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not
“What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society.” Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, Hold on to Your Children
“There is still plenty to go around— plenty of flowers, plenty of seeds, plenty of bugs— but the creatures in my yard are not interested in sharing. For them, scarcity is no different from fear of scarcity. A real threat and an imagined threat provoke the same response. I stand at the window and watch them, cataloging all the human conflicts their ferocity calls to mind.” Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss
Walking in a spring rain Sarah Ruhl, Love Poems in Quarantine
Sometimes bullies feel / like the weather – but they / are not the weather.
These last few weeks I’ve been busier and running more errands than usual, but in between I have managed to do some reading and listening to things that interest me. I will begin with a quote by Maria Shriver Kennedy from her newsletter, which is related to Easter [here in Greece tomorrow is Palm Sunday]. She writes: “So on this Palm Sunday, as we approach Holy Week, may we all regardless of our religious identity or lack thereof—think of our lives and the lives of others as holy indeed. Do you know how you would treat your life if you really viewed it as holy? Do you know how you would treat others if you saw their lives first and foremost as holy? I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week, and I believe that I would be gentler….. So this week, my hope is that we each attempt to treat each other and ourselves in a manner that is holy, that is kind, that is gentle, and that is compassionate.”This is also my wish for this Easter period and beyond.
As I wrote in a previous post I am trying to finish reading books I left halfway. One that I’ve completed is the book that Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate have co-authored, Hold on to Your Children, which discusses the negative impact of peer orientation on children’s development and their relationship with their family, the flat lining of culture and how parents and teachers can reassume their nature-appointed roles as the mentors and nurturers of the young, as the models and leaders to whom they look for guidance. They write that we need to give our children the freedom to be themselves in the context of loving acceptance— an acceptance that immature peers are unable to offer, but one that we adults can and must provide.
Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate discuss many valuable themes, but I will very briefly focus on competing attachments, which is less discussed. The authors stress the importance of children’s relationships to their adult caregivers / parents and the devastating impact in today’s society of competing attachments with peers. The book restores parents to their natural intuition and offers alternatives to today’s contrived methods of behaviour control and strategies for restoring or preserving the child-to-parent relationship. A lot of vignettes are included of cases where things have gone awry between peer oriented children and parents and teachers, and the consequences on children’s safety, development and maturation. The book explores many aspects of the main theme in detail. Additionally, two important related topics worth reading are the increase of bullying and the making of bullies and the challenges with raising children in a digital age.
The writers ask the question: If parenting skills or even loving the child are not enough, what then is needed? They go on to discuss in detail the indispensable special kind of relationship without which parenting lacks a firm foundation, which developmental psychologists or other scientists who study human development call attachment relationship.
They write: “Only the attachment relationship can provide the proper context for child-rearing. The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child. When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach. For a child well attached to us, we are her home base from which to venture into the world, her retreat to fall back to, her fountainhead of inspiration. All the parenting skills in the world cannot compensate for a lack of attachment relationship. All the love in the world cannot get through without the psychological umbilical cord created by the child’s attachment. The attachment relationship of child to parent needs to last at least as long as a child needs to be parented. That is what is becoming more difficult in today’s world. Parents haven’t changed— they haven’t become less competent or less devoted. The fundamental nature of children has also not changed— they haven’t become less dependent or more resistant. What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society. Even parent-child relationships that at the beginning are powerful and fully nurturing can become undermined as our children move out into a world that no longer appreciates or reinforces the attachment bond. Children are increasingly forming attachments that compete with their parents, with the result that the proper context for parenting is less and less available to us. It is not a lack of love or of parenting know-how but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective.”
They add: “In adult-oriented cultures, where the guiding principles and values are those of the more mature generations, kids attach to each other without losing their bearings or rejecting the guidance of their parents. In our society that is no longer the case. Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children’s primary sources of orientation. What is unnatural is not peer contact, but that children should have become the dominant influence on one another’s development…… Culture, until recently, was always handed down vertically, from generation to generation. For millennia, wrote Joseph Campbell, “the youth have been educated and the aged rendered wise” through the study, experience, and understanding of traditional cultural forms. Adults played a critical role in the transmission of culture, taking what they received from their own parents and passing it down to their children. However, the culture our children are being introduced to is much more likely to be the culture of their peers than that of their parents. Children are generating their own culture, very distinct from that of their parents and, in some ways, also very alien. Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation….”
Another book I’ve recently completed is Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, a memoir by Margaret Renkl.
It contains short chapters with introductory illustrations by her brother. Renkl’s narrative left a sense of familiarity. Her descriptions of the natural world, mostly the world of her back yard and street, and her awe and empathic connection to the creatures and plants in it resonated with my own thoughts and feelings in relation to nature and creatures that cross my path; however, unlike her I don’t know the names of all the different species of birds, insects and plants. This experience of awe and empathic connection that has in my case resulted in my feeding and taking care of almost a dozen cats in my garden, something I had never planned on doing, but happened gradually after the passing away of our dogs, as the garden became a free zone for stray cats.
This is a photo of the ladder from which my husband fell off as he was trying to screw the new polycarbonate glass sheet on the pergola, which is too heavy for me to move and has now become a playground for our female cats.
Below are some excerpts from Renkl’s book:
“….. there is another game I play in church with Mother Ollie’s hand. I take it in my own and pat it smooth, running my finger across its impossible softness, marveling at the way it ripples under my finger, as yielding as water. My great-grandmother’s skin is an echo of her old Bible, the pages tissue-thin, the corners worn to soft felt. I gently pinch the skin above her middle knuckle, and then I let it go. I count to myself, checking to see how many seconds it can stand upright, like a mountain ridge made by a glacier in an age long before mine. Slowly, slowly it disappears. Slowly, slowly it throws itself into the sea.”
“Safe, Trapped: Inside the nest box, the baby birds are safe from hawks, sheltered from the wind, protected from the sharp eye of the crow and the terrible tongue of the red-bellied woodpecker. Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow’s beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.”
“Flowers that bloom in the garden are called flowers, and flowers that bloom in the vacant lot are called weeds.”
“I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”
Finally, poems from Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl, playwright, essayist and poet.
On homesickness, back when I travelled
….. And I thought: / at home in the world / The endless desire to be / at home in the world……
Differences between me and my dog
…. She eats from a bowl on the floor; / I eat from a bowl on the table.
She always bears small irritations with grace; / I sometimes bear small irritations with grace……
Crossing
The water rushes / and it doesn’t stop rushing. / We help each other cross.
Shelter
To love a house not / because it’s perfect, but / because / it shelters you
To love a body / not because it’s perfect but / because it shelters you
Books as food
Change the body by / what you fill it with; and so / too the mind – with books.
Freedom
I will interrupt / my own mind. Instead of others / interrupting me.