I finished The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls yesterday and I have been sort of haunted by it. (I’m obsessed with memoir lately…I think they make me grateful for my childhood and conscious of the one i’m creating for my own kids.)
I have decided that this particular memoir stands out to me because the author actually transported me in way that I had to struggle with loving/hating her parents. I feel like they are people in my life and I’m saying one minute, “this act was just absolutely unforgivable…i cannot forgive him/her” and then “wait a minute, what about this beautiful moment. does this redeem them for me?”
Also, the reading of this and other memoirs has confirmed my notion that currently the trend is to overindulge our children to the extreme and it is a daily fight to hold back the tide of materialism that threatens to undo our family-ness. (just us and Jesus is enough)
I want my children to bond with each other the way that these children did, but somehow without the trauma that caused them to hold so tightly to each other. is that impossible? Surely, the owning of so much junk gets in the way of their ability to improvise and share with one another. I want them to work with each other to dig a huge hole, to save a large amount of money for one common cause, to protect their youngest sibling or to discover a wonderful place to live. These are all things that the older three children in The Glass Castle did, but they were in response to or in spite of constant turmoil in their home. Ii want mine to do it even in the midst of a happy childhood.