Kavitha

“Do not be afraid of complexity, Be afraid of people who promise and easy shortcut to simplicity.”
― Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

“Ambivalence exists in all human relationships, including parent-child. Anna Freud maintained that a mother could never satisfy her infant's needs because those are infinite, but that eventually child and mother outgrow that dependence...In Torn in Tow, the British psycho analyst Rozsika Parker complains that in our open, modern society, the extent of maternal ambivalence is a dark secret. Most mothers treat their occasional wish to be rid of their children as if it were the equivalent of murder itself. Parker proposes that mothering requires two impulses - the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away. To be a successful mother you must nurture and love your child, but cannot smother and cling to your child. Mothering involves sailing between what Parker calls 'the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.' She proposes that the sentimental idea of perfect synchrony between mother and child 'can cast a sort of sadness over motherhood - a constant state of mild regret that a delightful oneness seems always out of reach.' Perfection is a horizon virtue, and our very approach to it reveals its immutable distance. The dark portion of maternal ambivalence toward typical children is posited as crucial to the child's individuation. But severely disabled children who will never become independent will not benefit from their parents' negative feelings, and so their situation demands an impossible state of emotional purity. Asking the parents of severely disabled children to feel less negative emotion than parents of healthy children is ludicrous. My experience of these parents was that they all felt both love and despair. You cannot decide whether to be ambivalent/ All you can decide is what to do with your ambivalence. Most of these parents have chosen to act on one side of the ambivalence they feel, and Julia Hollander chose to act on another side, but I am not persuaded that the ambivalence itself was so different from one of these families to the next. I am enough of a creature of my times to admire most the parents who kept their children and made brave sacrifices for them. I nonetheless esteem Julia Hollander for being honest with herself, and for making what all those other families did look like a choice.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: How Children and Their Parents Learn to Accept One Another . . . Our Differences Unite Us

“Well", she said a little hesitantly, "you write about this field of psychology." I nodded. She took a deep breath. "Can you tell me how to love my daughter more? I want to love her so much, and I try my best, but when I look at her, I see what happened to me and it interferes." A tear rolled down her cheek, but her tone was almost fiercely challenging when she repeated, "Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?". Only afterward, too late to tell Christine, did I marvel that she did not know how much love was in that question itself. It is what anyone asks herself who lives with a child ignominiously conceived, who wishes to disentangle her own ambivalence. It calls starkly into question how much of any woman's love is inherent in mammalian DNA, how much it is a matter of social convention, and how much it is the result of personal determination.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: How Children and Their Parents Learn to Accept One Another . . . Our Differences Unite Us

“Fifteen miles south of Seattle and halfway across Puget Sound to the west is Maury Island. Shaped like an arrowhead aimed at the mainland, green as the inner fold of a grass blade, it can be seen from the air cradled in the crook of an elbow of water. Tourists ride over on ferries to watch for whales and UFOs. Jets turn around overhead on their final approach to the airport. Even on days when there is no rain, mist filters through the evergreens until it pulls apart like threadbare cloth and burns off.”
― Vanessa Veselka, The Great Offshore Grounds