i really did a horrible of job of expressing my opinion in class the other day. i was trying to figure out what is was i said wrong, and what i really meant, while driving home from school today. (i am turning into such a nerd!) anyway, i figured it out. see, we read this book called the awakening. i will not go into the details, i don't have enough time before crew. however, it reminded me almost painfully of this one book i read last year, called the liar's club, by mary karr. you should read it. it's fantastic. i want to find it, own it, and memorize every syllable in it. anyway, the mother in that book was a lot like the one in the awakening, only in a more modern sense. the question i botched: "was edna a good mother?" in the typical motherly sense, no, she was horrible. she didn't smother her kids with love and affection and tell them everything they did was wonderful and dedicate all her energy into making her kids feel like the center of the universe. rather, she was self-absorbed. she showered affection on her kids sporadically, sometimes loving them dearly and marveling at their existence, while at other times she would forget them completely. this isn't the classic middle-class soccer mom mother type. but it's one of the best forms of raising a kid to produce someone independent, free-thinking, and apart from the usual society. in the liar's club, the mother's preoccupation with literature and the arts (over her kids) forms an appreciation of literature in her children's minds. their make-believe worlds are chock-full of the stories of tolstoy and billie holiday's music. they form unique personalities, apart from the rest of their town's kids. they aren't preoccupied with clothes and material possessions because their mother never instilled that basic behavior of our society into their minds. the boys in the awakening are the same way. they're the leaders of the other kids their age - what they do, the other mothered kids imitate. it's through learning to fend for yourself that people become great people. if all your life you're told that everything you do and everything everyone else does is just wonderful and pretty and perfect, why would you ever want to change anything? but if you haven't been sheltered, if you're aware of the contrasts in the world around you, then you develope a sense of self and the mindset necessary to overcome life's problems.
i mean, even look at anne rice's books. lestat, the "god-child" of the vampires, the person that no one can predict or explain and everyone loves and looks up to, even if they hate him. his mother ignored him practically all his life, except for a few times when she felt sorry for him. she was constantly reading and writing and trying to live a life outside the one with a husband and kids. and look how her kid turned out.
granted two out of three of my examples are fiction. but fiction is based on real life. mothers who aren't the mother-type are the best kind of mothers to produce original and unique kids.
i have to pack up my stuff for crew and leave now. hopefully i made my point a little clearer this time. but hey, if you want some cool conservative gear (which i really wish i had enough money to buy) then check out this site! http://www.shopmetrospy.com i told brent i want to get them because in all their anti-liberal viewpoints, a liberal wearing them would be making an ironic statement about how most right-wing conservatives back up their positions through hate and intolerance.
