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I'm back....

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Hopalong:
I remember when I first saw Phil Donahue, and Oprah, and then began
reading Psychology Today (and got into therapy) it was an earthshaking
worldchanging REVELATION -- that there were explanations for emotions,
and neuroses, and personalities, and people who actually knew how to educate
and help me get from emotional stuckness to a better space.

Even more importantly to me, for decades, was discovering there was a
world of INSIGHT and INFORMATION about how people's minds and
relationships worked.

To my mother (born in 1910) -- none of that was ever something she
trusted or accessed or learned to explore. It was just off her radar. And
it wouldn't have worked to try to force her into it.

I was born into a time when self-examination (not driven solely by
religion, even!) was the most liberating and empowering thing...

But it wasn't there for her. So I think that's why a whole lot of my
frustration cycled for years (decades). It took me just forever to accept that
I had tools that she didn't. And my longings were fed by new knowledge
I was lucky to be exposed to. Because I'd been born in that time.

I wanted her even MORE to change because I had begun learning that
to some remarkable degrees (if one absorbed, trusted and applied the
new knowledge of psychology) -- one COULD.

I wish now I had envisioned her as born in an alternate universe that
overlapped with mine in some realms but in others, just not...and that
wishing it weren't so would be like wishing I myself grew up on a different
continent. (In a way, I did. But she did not so there was a whole lot of culture
and language that I felt at home with that she never would.)

xo
Hops

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