My daughter is sixteen, and she hates me. People tell me it’s just her age and she’ll get over it and come around, but it’s hard to believe at the moment. Everything I do is wrong. I actually expect her to pick up after herself, do something useful and productive once in a while, get out of bed before noon, don’t pick on her brother, who is five years younger and has so many more problems than she ever did, and actually earn her own money (gasp!) rather than bitch about all the things she doesn’t have, but it’s all a waste of time. I don’t know why I even bother breathing in air and formulating words and moving my mouth–what a waste of energy.
Lately I must admit my entire family is driving me nuts. I know living alone can be hard, but sometimes when everyone’s around, I must fight the desire to close my eyes and imagine myself far, far away.
I am listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes. How beautiful, how full of love and longing and tears. They seem like the songs of middle age, when you realize life is just getting through the days, surviving the disappointment, trying to grasp any bit of beauty you can because Death is hovering by your side, not taking you yet, but the time is drawing nearer.
I’ve also been reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” What a marvelous piece of writing. People are capable of great but also terrible things when they band together.
It reminds me of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics, all those dancers moving as one organism. Interesting piece on the subject in the New York Times, about the difference between individualistic and collective societies.In China, a little girl is told she should be proud that her singing was used even though another little girl lip-synced to her voice because she was supposedly cuter and therefore more worthy of representing the motherland. Is this the direction of the future–the end of Western cultural dominance in favor of something else? It’s all very Borglike (i.e. Star Trek).
Perhaps we can feel less alone when we are part of collective, self-sacrificing whole.
