Nina

“beginnings are like seeds that contain within them everything that will ever happen.”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

“My mind was spinning a little. I’d never really thought of life in this context before. Most of my decisions had been made in response to things like family advice, cultural pressures, people’s opinions and other things. This was very different.”
― John P. Strelecky, The Cafe on the Edge of the World: A Story About the Meaning of Life

“With a break in the mother-child bond among siblings, each child might express his or her disconnection with the mother differently. One child might become a people pleaser, fearing that if he’s not good, or he makes waves, he’ll lose connection with people. Another child, believing that connection is never hers to have in the first place, might become argumentative and create conflict to push away the people close to her. Another child might isolate and have little contact with people at all. I’ve noticed that if several siblings have breaks in the mother-child bond, they’ll often express anger or jealousy, or feel disconnected from one another. For example, an older child might resent the child born later, perceiving that the younger child received the love that he or she did not get. Because the hippocampus—that part of the brain involved in creating memories—isn’t fully operational until after the age of two, the older child may not consciously remember being held, fed, or cuddled by the mother, but remembers the younger child receiving their mother’s love. In response, the older child, feeling slighted, can unconsciously blame the younger child for getting what he or she did not. And then, of course, there are some children who don’t seem to carry any family trauma at all. For these children, it’s quite possible that a successful bond was established with the mother and/or father, and this connection helped to immunize the child from carrying entanglements from the past. Perhaps a window of time opened in which the mother was able to give more to one particular child and not the others. Perhaps the parents’ relationship improved. Perhaps the mother experienced a special connection with one child, but couldn’t connect deeply with the others. Younger children often, though not always, seem to do a bit better than first children, or only children, who seem to carry a bigger portion of unfinished business from the family history. When it comes to siblings and inherited family trauma, there are no hard and fast rules governing how each child is affected. Many variables, in addition to birth order and gender, can influence the choices siblings make and the lives they lead. Even though it may appear from the outside that one sibling is unscathed by trauma, while another is encumbered, my clinical experience gives me a different perspective: Most of us carry at least some residue from our family history. However, many intangibles also enter into the equation and can influence how deeply entrenched family traumas remain. These intangibles include self-awareness, the ability to self-soothe, and having a powerful internal healing experience.”
― Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

“In English, the term memoir comes directly from the French for memory, mémoire,” David Shields offers in Reality Hunger. “And yet more deeply rooted in the word memoir…is the ancient Greek, mermeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian memara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mermer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’ In this darker light of human language, the term suggests a literary form that is much less confident than today’s novelistic memoir, with its effortlessly relayed experiences.”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage