People persist in telling me that they are moving to an isolated space so their child can have the freedom of the countryside. Others are homeschooling to liberate their child from institutions.
I am not at all convinced that isolation in a nuclear family is the best of ideas. I know for a fact that to sacrifice a life you love so that you can have a child and put it in a garden, and then to take that sacrifice out on the child, is a very poor idea.
Every time I see someone about to be sequestered off like that I turn my head in tears. I would like to at least hug them good by and say how sorry I am. For May Day I would like children to be brought back into view. This is not generalized, of course -- I know of whom I am thinking.
*
1. Being told how expensive it was to have children and how my parents had given up their lives to have them and weren't happy -- and weren't always happy with who we were. I felt so responsible and so helpless, where could I go? How could I pay them back? I still carry this and its embellishments.
2. All the violence, physical and emotional, in and around my first assistant professor job -- and my parents' violent reaction about it -- and mostly the way I internalized it.
3. Reeducation was supposed to be about #1 but it was its own entity, as we know -- Reeducation.
I have to deal with items 1 and 2 now, especially item 1. Reeducation made this more difficult. Item 2 I have somehow dealt with, it seems -- I no longer feel the pain or feel responsible for it.
But I feel the pain of item 1 like a knife and it drives a great deal of what I do -- especially since it was reinflicted during item 2, and then widened and deepened significantly during item 3. I would like to restructure myself out of it entirely. I can do this, I believe, if I continue to channel the person I was before item 3, and then before item 2.
Axé.