http://movieclips.com/watch/embed/to-kill-a-mockingbird-1962/scout-meets-boo-radley/0/94.636
Last night my sister Carol and her partner Michelle and my guide dog Nira gathered on the sofa to watch the classic film “To Kill a Mockingbird”. I was on that sofa too. It’s amazing how many people and creatures you can squeeze on an old couch at the summer house. But I digress.
It’s been many years since I last saw TKAMB or last read the novel by Harper Lee. I’ll bet the last time I read the novel was when I was in high school, or perhaps even earlier. So it’s been since 1968. I think that’s a pretty good guess. I was 13 in ’68. That was also the year I read “Animal Farm” and “1984” and the stories of Franz Kafka. I had to hold the books about an inch and a half from my left eye. Nowadays I can hold them three inches from my left eye. But I digress.
1968 was the worst year in American history if you discount 1861-65 or 1929-39 or 2010’s “Depression” which is still leaving some 30 million of our citizens unemployed, perhaps permanently, but I digress. I digress.
My sister (who is a physician) and I grew up in a disturbingly dysfunctional family. Our mother was outright scary though brilliant. Our dad was a highly successful college president but he was largely an absentee persona, leaving us to fend for ourselves with his terrifying wife. Although I owe much of my irreverence and nerve to my mother I also inherited from her a furtive and uncomfortable depression that segues with my vision impairment. Like tens of millions of Americans I work hard every day to navigate this depression with grace and candor and steadfastness. Who knows how far back our collective depressions go? Perhaps in ancient times depression kept you in the cave on days when going outside was statistically unsafe. Cheerful Ogg went out and was devoured by the saber toothed tiger but depressed Oog stayed inside on that day, probably licking the stalagmites for natural lithium. So Oog went out the next morning when the tiger was asleep.
Last night watching TKAMB I saw for the first time how the movie is about the capacity of children to stake a claim to a soulful and nurturing inner life against the backdrop of sinister adults. At 13 I understood it only as a story of racial intolerance and injustice. But watching it again with Carol and MIchelle and Nira I saw the remarkable individuated intelligence of Harper Lee who crafted a narrative of magic stones, sub-conscious empathy, childhood curiosities, and deep love and compassion. We are living in a time now when the these human qualities need as much narrative dispensation as they did in the 60’s. Post-modernity and political factionalism cannot take the place of brotherly and sisterly love. Of course. And yet, and yet, watching the film you feel it–a marrowed sense of loving’s urgencies and that Harper Lee’s summer long ago can get you right.
Planet of the Blind 
Not to mention needing to attend PTA meetings, soccer games, and endless car shuttling to play dates and such! How do people do this, work a fulltime job to economically support the family, and eke out some sort of life for themselves, too? I couldn’t see it working from my perspective.
However, you are quite right about this, WJ, kids can be very accepting and unprejudiced. I was out this weekend at Griffith Park Observatory with a friend and her daughter. The daughter is an engaging 17-yr-old who is A-OK with having two moms now. While I, even when we’re all in the Ladies restroom together, still manage to inadvertantly refer to my friend as “Your dad”. (And could immediately kick myself in the butt for doing so, but *kersplat* out it pops from gosh-knows-where!) Kids can have a great plasticity about change that is quite admirable.
And I also remember my husband telling me about the time when he was a small child, that he brought a little, dead mouse to sleep on his pillow with him. His mother was horrified when she discovered them peacefully asleep side-by-side.
Do you remember the audio recording of “Peter and the Wolf”? Do you remember The Grandfather’s words, “…but what if the wolf had come out of the forest? What then?” I am not Peter. I am The Grandfather, a fellow encrusted, implacable, worst-case-scenario specialist. So again, yes, it’s helpful for people to have a variety of perspectives to choose from.
LikeLike
Leslie B It seems to me you focus principally on the negative aspects of child rearing. I recall sleepless nights, shitty diapers, and being woken in the middle of the night. I also recall my son’s first smile and countless other warm memories. Children are human beings and like adults have strengths and weaknesses. What separates kids from adults in my estimation is that they are not inherently prejudiced–bigotry is learned behavior. Never has a a young child seen my wheelchair and had a negative response. Adults on the other feel free to say all sorts of rude and nasty things. Hence my general preference for the company of children over adults.
LikeLike
But also, SK, it seems that it must be acknowledged that kids, just being kids, while I wouldn’t call them CAPs, engender adult behaviors that would not necessarily be chosen behaviors by adults if the kids weren’t around. Long games of peek-a-boo, changing shitty diapers, early morning sleep disruptions, etc. I remember a really sweet, little kid who woke me out of a dead sleep at about 1:30 a.m. Honestly, when I first awoke, I wasn’t even quite sure where I was or who he was. He’s standing over me, next to the sofa, brandishing a large, plastic baseball bat. He has this look on his face that makes my hair stand on end. He says, “Kill the monsters.” I’m dazed. I say, “What?!” He hands me the bat, and says, “My father does it.” OK, so I follow him to his bedroom. As I’m leaving him tucked in again, he says very appreciatively, “Thanks, you know where all the monsters hide.” I guess his father used to ask him for the locations of the monsters, whereas I just methodically pummeled all darkened and closeted areas where my childhood monsters formerly resided. Is that anyway for an adult to live?
LikeLike
Now it seems to me that there are two kinds of “pains in the asses” being discussed here: Adult Pains in the Asses (APIAs) are essentially broken children. They are usually broken in spiritual ways by junior high school principals, truancy officers, television, and, of course their own parents who were also broken, etc. Then there are your Child Ass Pains (no acronymn necessary) who, sensing how ungenerous and polluted the adult world really is, seek to stay wilfully inside the vainglory of their liminal egos as long as they can. These people often remain trapped in their childishness long into adulthood–see Jungian pschotherapst Marie-Louise Von Franz’s great book “Puer Aeternus” for a good description of this phenomenon. Now the APIAs and the Children Asses are both crippled inside as John Lennon pointed out, but alas, they speak entirely different languages–like muskrats trying to talk to bald eagles. All they can do is flutter and squeak at one another while the castle is covered with vnes and thorns. All of which is to say that this is why old folk tales remain the best pop psychology you will ever read. Here comes the Baba Yaga in her terrible house that walkds through the forest on chicken legs. You get the picture.
LikeLike
Anonymous,
Point well-taken. I will change my statements to:
“Living with children can be [rather than ‘is’] stressful” (But I still must say that I have noticed a high enough prevalence of unpleasant stresses in average families that I personally was unwilling to commit to raising children myself, although, again, this was one reason of many. If other factors had been different, I might have ventured to have children despite the inherent stresses that I perceive. After all, “stress” is not in and of itself negative unless there is an overwhelming amount of it. In our apartment building, only one family currently has two children — One other has a child who visits intermittently. The husband left about a year after the second child was born. Our neighbor, a writer, complains bitterly of being woken up far too early in the morning by the kids, of enduring their sweet, yet remarkably piercing, high-pitched screams of delight, and their penchant for constantly running up and down the length of the apartment. I remind him that he only shares a wall, what about the mother who endures it all without the wall in-between? Oh, it’s no doubt a fabulous pleasure for her; she’s their mother after all.)
I’ll change “The average family puts on a pretty good front at looking happy” to “Many average families tend to try to look happier than they actually are.” (I say this because some people when they have kids come to realize that their concept of what it would be like to have a family can be very different from the actual reality of having a family — it can be more exhausting than people realize. One reason for this is that people often look at families from the outside or from the perspective of children rather than adults, and don’t have a true idea of what parenting will actually be like until they’ve already commited to it.)
OK, and last but not least, “Clinical depression can be [rather than “is”] the over-achiever’s (or the over-stressed person’s) reward.” Forgive me for this, I must admit that my babysitting and general life experiences occurred in an upper-middle class neighborhood, and, wow, depression, anxiety, OCD (before I even had a name for it!), alcoholism, and worse…we just seemed to have a lot happening on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I attributed it to the relentless strain of over-acheivement, but it could have been other factors — not enough smog perhaps?
Now, Anonymous, what about all adults being “TOTAL pains in the ass”? OK, I may be, but not EVERYONE! Do you consider yourself to be a total pain in the ass? (OK, maybe I’m talking to a kid, in which case I think that you’d just better wait until you have to put up with hairy underarms and such before you pass judgement — I use this example because I always remember a quiet, reserved girl named Nancy in 5th grade who had a meltdown when the school nurse informed our class that we would get hairy underarms when we reached puberty. She seemed fine with the other changes, but she hadn’t reckoned on those hairy underarms.)
It is, in the end, a question of perspective, and the more perspectives that people have, the better they will be able to reach their own conclusions of what fits for them. Yes?
LikeLike
“Living with children is stressful.”
“The average family puts on a pretty, good front at looking happy”
“Clinical depression is the over-achiever’s (or the over-stressed person’s) reward.”
A list of generalizations.
LikeLike
When one generalizes, e.g. 1) people with average abilities can work; people with reduced abilities cannot or 2) adults are pains in the ass; children are fabulous pleasures, one loses sight of people as unique individuals. If someone asks me whether I want to spend time in the company of an adult or child, I am much more likely to then inquire, which adult; which child? And will base my decision on the qualities of each.
LikeLike
Leslie B: Pissers of the world unite! I feel a kinship as I have been characterized as such. I am glad you are proud to be in the clan of pissers.
Anonymous: Amen to adults being a pain in the ass. Kids make much better company.
LikeLike
Anonymous & WJPeace, thanks for your thoughts — sharing them is what SK’s blog is all about. Yes, WJ, I can, indeed, be quite a pisser! And am quite proud of that.
LikeLike
Leslie B you sure are a pisser to read. I may not always agree with your comments but you make me think.
This post highlights one good aspect of getting old–being able to reread classics in literature and think about how differently they affect you as an adult. As a result of being the parent I have been prompted to reread many books I had not thought about since high-school (my son just graduated and is off too college in two weeks). What an amazingly different experience it is to read a book at 18 as opposed to 50.
LikeLike
“One of the reasons (I have many) that I never had kids is that I babysat extensively from age 13 through my early 20s… Living with children is stressful.”
Leslie B…living with children is a fabulous pleasure…adults, on the other hand, are a total pain in the ass. If the children you worked with stressed you out, blame the adults they were forced to live with, not the kids.
LikeLike
Beautiful — there is always something to be learned, to see and hear from that movie. I recently watched it with my two young sons (aged nine and twelve) and found it fascinating how strange and curious the world depicted in the movie was to them. They were incredulous when I explained the history, the racism, etc. — I found that encouraging and hope that it lasts —
LikeLike
One of the reasons (I have many) that I never had kids is that I babysat extensively from age 13 through my early 20s. The average family puts on a pretty, good front at looking happy. But if one babysits for them, one usually finds that outside appearances seldom reflect internal realities. Living with children is stressful. Families, almost by definition are dysfunctional if happiness is the measuring stick. The only difference from family-to-family is the degree of dysfunction. It’s one of the reasons that we like movies like TKAMB; they’re fantasy — complete fabrications of the reality of living with kids (in the case of TKAMB, very cleverly disguised as gritty, true reality which makes it all the more satisfying, as it’s embarrasing to be duped by patently over-the-top feel-good fantasy like Mary Poppins and such things.)
Clinical depression is the over-achiever’s (or the over-stressed person’s) reward. Although lots of creative ways exist to medicate, and effectively stifle the urge to be depressed, the better a person is at stifling depression, the bigger the depression whammy will be when it finally manages to overcome our medications. OK, perhaps your physician sister will take issue with this assessment, but it is what I have come to believe. For this reason, I work to achieve, but am careful not to over-achieve (relative to my own personal capacity) if I can avoid it. I pay attention to how I feel, rest when the need presents itself, and don’t cover up those feelings with various “medications”. Because I know that if I don’t, eventually I will have to face Depression — and I’d like to avoid that whenever possible! However, the person who is absolutely committed to a challenging profession, a family, a long daily commute, etc., etc., etc, God (or whatever) help them!
Also, from my observation as a rehab specialist (and research actually supports this view), the person who has a vision impairment or other significant impairment, and is attempting to “do-the-same-things-that-an-average-person-does” is typically working a hell of a lot harder to achieve the same level of accomplishment. That, too, could increase a person’s risk for depression. Consider your lakeside vacation (minus the trips to Loew’s and that related drek) your “rest cure”. A little depression, tolerantly indulged and nurtured, will help to send you back to w-w-work in September ready to fight the good fight once again.
Obviously, I will never be a successful motivational speaker. And, really, in this “you-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be” society (if you consume enough sugar-coated cereal and Coca-cola), it probably would be much safer if I kept my opinions to myself. But this is what I believe, and I am doomed to express my beliefs for better or for worse.
LikeLike