Zoo Pictures! Check 'em out.

Reading: Tarzan. I'm only up to the third chapter, but I'm very impressed at the way Tarzan's father, an English lord, manages to construct first a tree house and later a solid log house for his pregnant wife after they are marooned in the jungle. Who knew the nineteenth-century English nobility were so handy?

The Child is Father of the Man

I picked up some bagels this morning at Kramer's and brought them over to Nana's house this morning for Dad and Bunny. Dad and his brother, Jim, were in the kitchen working on Dad's notebook computer. Bunny was sitting by the hospital bed, helping Nana with her breakfast.

I wonder how much time Dad has actually spent with Nana. This is their first trip down from Maine in more than a year, and it may be the last time Dad gets to visit with his mother.

But then my father's relationship with Nana has always been a strange one. To the rest of her five children, to all of her grandchildren, and to practically everyone who knows her, Nana is a virtual saint. I can't imagine a warmer, more loving mother or grandmother. My father, on the other hand, has always been distant toward her and once characterized her as "manipulative," a description that couldn't be more incongruous.

I find it hard to believe that my father alone is right about her and the rest of us are wrong.

When I heard Dad disparaging Nana several years ago, I asked him to elaborate. All he could dredge up in defense of his statement was a mild misunderstanding from thirty-five years in the past. Sorry, I don't buy it.

The funny thing is, the only completely selfish, manipulative person I've ever known is my father himself. He was the spoiled oldest son--in fact, the only child for nearly the first four years of his life. He was the miracle baby born a few years after my grandmother lost her first baby at birth and was told she would never have another one; the sun rose and set on him and his whims. If my grandmother failed at all as a parent it is because she loved and indulged him too much. And she was hardly alone in this: her husband and her in-laws colluded in spoiling my father.

After I called him on it that time, Dad ceased complaining about Nana to me. It's a good thing he stopped because if he really wanted to mine the past for incidents of parental transgressions, my sisters and I could readily confront him with his own emotional and physical abuse of us.

Parents can screw their kids up in so many ways. Almost everything I've learned about being a nurturing parent has come from my mother and my grandmother.

previous       index       e-mail me       next