When A Mother Loses A Child Quotes

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. She cannot even experience them secretly, “just for herself”; she will fail to experience them at all. But they will nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.

I’m always saying a mother never loses her peach pit instinct. Even with a grown son, you have to stop yourself from sticking out your hand when your child finishes a piece of fruit.

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody’s parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described.

I have lost people, though. It's strange when it happens. I don't actually lose them. Not in the way one loses one's parents, either as a small child, when you think you are holding your mother's hand in a crowd and then you look up, and it's not your mother... or later. When you have to find the words to describe them at a funeral service or a memorial, or when you are scattering ashes on a garden of flowers or into the sea.

And, increasingly, I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death. [“Complaints bureau!” I remember Boris grousing as a child, one afternoon at his house when we had got off on the vaguely metaphysical subject of our mothers: why they—angels, goddesses—had to die? while our awful fathers thrived, and boozed, and sprawled, and muddled on, and continued to stumble about and wreak havoc, in seemingly indefatigable health? “They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?”] And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?

The changes that happen in the mommy brain are the most profound and permanent of a woman’s life. For as long as her child is living under her roof, her GPS system of brain circuits will be dedicated to tracking that beloved child. Long after the grown baby leaves the nest, the tracking device continues to work. Perhaps this is why so many mothers experience intense grief and panic when they lose day-to-day contact with the person their brain tells them is an extension of their own reality.

They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.

We can speak of trauma when that system fails: when you beg for your life, but the assailant ignores your pleas; when you are a terrified child lying in bed, hearing your mother scream as her boyfriend beats her up; when you see your buddy trapped under a piece of metal that you’re not strong enough to lift; when you want to push away the priest who is abusing you, but you’re afraid you’ll be punished. Immobilization is at the root of most traumas. When that occurs the DVC is likely to take over: Your heart slows down, your breathing becomes shallow, and, zombielike, you lose touch with yourself and your surroundings. You dissociate, faint and collapse.

People won’t see you as just another woman any more, but as a white woman who hangs with brownies, and you’ll lose a bit of your privilege, you should still check it, though, have you heard the expression, check your privilege, babe? Courtney replied that seeing as Yazz is the daughter of a professor and a very well-known theatre director, she’s hardly underprivileged herself, whereas she, Courtney, comes from a really poor community where it’s normal to be working in a factory at sixteen and have your first child as a single mother at seventeen, and that her father’s farm is effectively owned by the bank Yes but I’m black, Courts, which makes me more oppressed than anyone who isn’t, except Waris who is the most oppressed of all of them (although don’t tell her that) In five categories, black, Muslim, female, poor, hijab bed She’s the only one Yazz can’t tell to check her privilege Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? Is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? Is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality Yazz doesn’t know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay - who’s amaaaazing? Was this a student outwitting the master moment? #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl

Oh, and another time he gave me a sex concussion. I can’t really go into the details, because my mother will probably read this, but basically he had a bunk bed in his dorm room (because he’s an only child and only children are obsessed with bunk beds for some reason), so we were on the bottom bunk and I tossed back my hair in what I envisioned would be a total porn-star move, except the wooden beam of the bunk bed above us was too low, and so I violently head-butted the wood plank and totally knocked myself out, which is pretty much the least sexy thing you could ever possibly do. Like, if I also lost control of my bowels that would be worse, but not by much. Then when I’d recovered, Victor was all, “Sex concussion, motherfucker!” like it was something to be proud of. Basically it was like autoerotic asphyxiation, except instead of being choked you get whacked in the head with a two-by-four. And instead of having an orgasm you lose all muscle control and pee on yourself. Which I totally did not do because that would be disgusting. I hardly ever pee on myself.

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions.

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I’m told. Not doing it the second time I’m told. Running, jumping, yelling, laughing, falling down, skipping stairs, lying in the snow, rolling in the grass, playing in the dirt, walking in mud, not wiping my feet, not taking my shoes off. Sliding down the banister, acting like a wild Indian in the hallway. Making a mess and leaving it. Pissing my pants, just a little. Peeing the bed, hardly at all. Sleeping with a butter knife under my pillow. Shitting the bed because I was sick and it just ran out of me, but still my fault because I’m old enough to know better. Saying shit instead of crap or poop or number two. Not knowing better. Knowing something and doing it wrong anyway. Lying. Not confessing the truth even when I don’t know it. Telling white lies, even little ones, because fibbing isn’t fooling and not the least bit funny. Laughing at anything that’s not funny, especially cripples and retards. Covering up my white lies with more lies, black lies. Not coming the exact second I’m called. Getting out of bed too early, sometimes before the birds, and turning on the TV, which is one reason the picture tube died. Wearing out the cheap plastic hole on the channel selector by turning it so fast it sounds like a machine gun. Playing flip-and-catch with the TV’s volume button then losing it down the hole next to the radiator pipe. Vomiting. Gagging like I’m going to vomit. Saying puke instead of vomit. Throwing up anyplace but in the toilet or in a designated throw-up bucket. Using scissors on my hair. Cutting Kelly’s doll’s hair really short. Pinching Kelly. Punching Kelly even though she kicked me first. Tickling her too hard. Taking food without asking. Eating sugar from the sugar bowl. Not sharing. Not remembering to say please and thank you. Mumbling like an idiot. Using the emergency flashlight to read a comic book in bed because batteries don’t grow on trees. Splashing in puddles, even the puddles I don’t see until it’s too late. Giving my mother’s good rhinestone earrings to the teacher for Valentine’s Day. Splashing in the bathtub and getting the floor wet. Using the good towels. Leaving the good towels on the floor, though sometimes they fall all by themselves. Eating crackers in bed. Staining my shirt, tearing the knee in my pants, ruining my good clothes. Not changing into old clothes that don’t fit the minute I get home. Wasting food. Not eating everything on my plate. Hiding lumpy mashed potatoes and butternut squash and rubbery string beans or any food I don’t like under the vinyl seat cushions Mom bought for the wooden kitchen chairs. Leaving the butter dish out in summer and ruining the tablecloth. Making bubbles in my milk. Using a straw like a pee shooter. Throwing tooth picks at my sister. Wasting toothpicks and glue making junky little things that no one wants. School papers. Notes from the teacher. Report cards. Whispering in church. Sleeping in church. Notes from the assistant principal. Being late for anything. Walking out of Woolworth’s eating a candy bar I didn’t pay for. Riding my bike in the street. Leaving my bike out in the rain. Getting my bike stolen while visiting Grandpa Rudy at the hospital because I didn’t put a lock on it. Not washing my feet. Spitting. Getting a nosebleed in church. Embarrassing my mother in any way, anywhere, anytime, especially in public. Being a jerk. Acting shy. Being impolite. Forgetting what good manners are for. Being alive in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times.

But then, I deserve to lose you. For years you took care of me like a mother takes care of her child. You sacrificed for me. You loved me when I was unlovable and helped me when I scorned you. Saying thank you a thousand times wouldn’t be enough. Saying I’m sorry a million times might be a start.

When I was a child, my mother would try to convince me of a woman's need for a secret stash. "It can be anything: land, property, even a couple hundred dollars. You know, in case anything goes wrong and you have to get the hell out of there." Her mother had told her this, as her mother before had told her.

Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death. [“Complaints bureau!” I remember Boris grousing as a child, one afternoon at his house when we had got off on the vaguely metaphysical subject of our mothers: why they—angels, goddesses—had to die? while our awful fathers thrived, and boozed, and sprawled, and muddled on, and continued to stumble about and wreak havoc, in seemingly indefatigable health? “They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?”] And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?

On our particular mission, senior marines met with local school officials while the rest of us provided security or hung out with the schoolkids, playing soccer and passing out candy and school supplies. One very shy boy approached me and held out his hand. When I gave him a small eraser, his face briefly lit up with joy before he ran away to his family, holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph. I have never seen such excitement on a child’s face. I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is. But that moment, with that boy, was pretty close for me. For my entire life, I’d harbored resentment at the world. I was mad at my mother and father, mad that I rode the bus to school while other kids caught rides with friends, mad that my clothes didn’t come from Abercrombie, mad that my grandfather died, mad that we lived in a small house. That resentment didn’t vanish in an instant, but as I stood and surveyed the mass of children of a war-torn nation, their school without running water, and the overjoyed boy, I began to appreciate how lucky I was: born in the greatest country on earth, every modern convenience at my fingertips, supported by two loving hillbillies, and part of a family that, for all its quirks, loved me unconditionally. At that moment, I resolved to be the type of man who would smile when someone gave him an eraser. I haven’t quite made it there, but without that day in Iraq, I wouldn’t be trying. The

When parents are shame-based and needy, they are unable to take over the mirroring narcissistic function for the child. Furthermore, the fact that the parents are shame-based is a clear signal that they never got their own narcissistic supplies. Such parents are adult children who are still in search of a parent or an object who will be totally available to them. For such parents, the most appropriate objects of narcissistic gratification are their own children. Again Alice Miller writes: A newborn baby is completely dependent on his parents and since their caring is essential for his existence, he does all he can to avoid losing them. From the very first day onward, he will muster all his resources to this end, like a small plant that turns toward the sun in order to survive. What the shame-based mother was unable to find in her own mother she finds in her own children. The child is always at her disposal. A child cannot run away as her own mother did. A child can be used as an echo, is completely centered on her, will never desert her, can be totally controlled, and offers full admiration and absorbed attention.

Understand, then, that it would have healed her: but not to your joy or hers. The day he would have come when both you and she would have looked back and said it would have been better to die in that illness. And Digory could say nothing, for tears choked him and he gave up all hopes of saving his mother’s life: but at the same time he knew that the Lion knew what would have happened, and that there might be things more terrible even then losing someone you love by death. But now Aslan was speaking again, almost in a whisper: “That is what would have happened, child, with a stolen Apple. It is not what will happen now. What I give you now will bring joy. It will not, in your world, give endless life, but it will heal. Go. Pluck her an apple from the tree.

Consider again the mated pair with which we began the chapter. Both partners, as selfish machines, ‘want’ sons and daughters in equal numbers. To this extent they agree. Where they disagree is in who is going to bear the brunt of the cost of rearing each one of those children. Each individual wants as many surviving children as possible. The less he or she is obliged to invest in any one of those children, the more children he or she can have. The obvious way to achieve this desirable state of affairs is to induce your sexual partner to invest more than his or her fair share of resources in each child, leaving you free to have other children with other partners. This would be a desirable strategy for either sex, but it is more difficult for the female to achieve. Since she starts by investing more than the male, in the form of her large, food-rich egg, a mother is already at the moment of conception ‘committed’ to each child more deeply than the father is. She stands to lose more if the child dies than the father does. More to the point, she would have to invest more than the father in the future in order to bring a new substitute child up to the same level of development. If she tried the tactic of leaving the father holding the baby, while she went off with another male, the father might, at relatively small cost to himself, retaliate by abandoning the baby too. Therefore, at least in the early stages of child development, if any abandoning is going to be done, it is likely to be the father who abandons the mother rather than the other way around. Similarly, females can be expected to invest more in children than males, not only at the outset, but throughout development. So, in mammals for example, it is the female who incubates the foetus in her own body, the female who makes the milk to suckle it when it is born, the female who bears the brunt of the load of bringing it up and protecting it. The female sex is exploited, and the fundamental evolutionary basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperms.

Close your eyes and stare into the dark. My father's advice when I couldn't sleep as a little girl. He wouldn't want me to do that now but I've set my mind to the task regardless. I'm staring beyond my closed eyelids. Though I lie still on the ground, I feel perched at the highest point I could possibly be; clutching at a star in the night sky with my legs dangling above cold black nothingness. I take one last look at my fingers wrapped around the light and let go. Down I go, falling, then floating, and, falling again, I wait for the land of my life. I know now, as I knew as that little girl fighting sleep, that behind her gauzed screen of shut-eye, lies colour. It taunts me, dares me to open my eyes and lose sleep. Flashes of red and amber, yellow and white speckle my darkness. I refuse to open them. I rebel and I squeeze my eyelids together tighter to block out the grains of light, mere distractions that keep us awake but a sign that there's life beyond. But there's no life in me. None that I can feel, from where I lie at the bottom of the staircase. My heart beats quicker now, the lone fighter left standing in the ring, a red boxing glove pumping victoriously into the air, refusing to give up. It's the only part of me that cares, the only part that ever cared. It fights to pump the blood around to heal, to replace what I'm losing. But it's all leaving my body as quickly as it's sent; forming a deep black ocean of its own around me where I've fallen. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Never have enough time here, always trying to make our way there. Need to have left here five minutes ago, need to be there now. The phone rings again and I acknowledge the irony. I could have taken my time and answered it now. Now, not then. I could have taken all the time in the world on each of those steps. But we're always rushing. All, but my heart. That slows now. I don't mind so much. I place my hand on my belly. If my child is gone, and I suspect this is so, I'll join it there. There.....where? Wherever. It; a heartless word. He or she so young; who it was to become, still a question. But there, I will mother it. There, not here. I'll tell it; I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm sorry I ruined your chances - our chances of a life together.But close your eyes and stare into the darkness now, like Mummy is doing, and we'll find our way together. There's a noise in the room and I feel a presence. 'Oh God, Joyce, oh God. Can you hear me, love? Oh God. Oh God, please no, Hold on love, I'm here. Dad is here.' I don't want to hold on and I feel like telling him so. I hear myself groan, an animal-like whimper and it shocks me, scares me. I have a plan, I want to tell him. I want to go, only then can I be with my baby. Then, not now. He's stopped me from falling but I haven't landed yet. Instead he helps me balance on nothing, hover while I'm forced to make the decision. I want to keep falling but he's calling the ambulance and he's gripping my hand with such ferocity it's as though I'm all he has. He's brushing the hair from my forehead and weeping loudly. I've never heard him weep. Not even when Mum died. He clings to my hand with all of his strength I never knew his old body had and I remember that I am all he has and that he, once again just like before, is my whole world. The blood continues to rush through me. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Maybe I'm rushing again. Maybe it's not my time to go. I feel the rough skin of old hands squeezing mine, and their intensity and their familiarity force me to open my eyes. Lights fills them and I glimpse his face, a look I never want to see again. He clings to his baby. I know I lost mind; I can't let him lose his. In making my decision I already begin to grieve. I've landed now, the land of my life. And still my heart pumps on. Even when broken it still works.

mothers of small children must maintain a body of rules and, more to the point, an ongoing mother-self to guide them in negotiating the days spent alone with a child. When her husband is here, she can manage it. She can see him seeing her, and she knows almost instinctively how to treat the boy firmly and kindly, with an affectionate maternal offhandedness that seems effortless. Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can’t always remember how a mother would act.

The people cast themselves down by the fuming boards while servants cut the roast, mixed jars of wine and water, and all the gods flew past like the night-breaths of spring. The chattering female flocks sat down by farther tables, their fresh prismatic garments gleaming in the moon as though a crowd of haughty peacocks played in moonlight. The queen’s throne softly spread with white furs of fox gaped desolate and bare, for Penelope felt ashamed to come before her guests after so much murder. Though all the guests were ravenous, they still refrained, turning their eyes upon their silent watchful lord till he should spill wine in libation for the Immortals. The king then filled a brimming cup, stood up and raised it high till in the moon the embossed adornments gleamed: Athena, dwarfed and slender, wrought in purest gold, pursued around the cup with double-pointed spear dark lowering herds of angry gods and hairy demons; she smiled and the sad tenderness of her lean face, and her embittered fearless glance, seemed almost human. Star-eyed Odysseus raised Athena’s goblet high and greeted all, but spoke in a beclouded mood: “In all my wandering voyages and torturous strife, the earth, the seas, the winds fought me with frenzied rage; I was in danger often, both through joy and grief, of losing priceless goodness, man’s most worthy face. I raised my arms to the high heavens and cried for help, but on my head gods hurled their lightning bolts, and laughed. I then clasped Mother Earth, but she changed many shapes, and whether as earthquake, beast, or woman, rushed to eat me; then like a child I gave my hopes to the sea in trust, piled on my ship my stubbornness, my cares, my virtues, the poor remaining plunder of god-fighting man, and then set sail; but suddenly a wild storm burst, and when I raised my eyes, the sea was strewn with wreckage. As I swam on, alone between sea and sky, with but my crooked heart for dog and company, I heard my mind, upon the crumpling battlements about my head, yelling with flailing crimson spear. Earth, sea, and sky rushed backward; I remained alone with a horned bow slung down my shoulder, shorn of gods and hopes, a free man standing in the wilderness. Old comrades, O young men, my island’s newest sprouts, I drink not to the gods but to man’s dauntless mind.” All shuddered, for the daring toast seemed sacrilege, and suddenly the hungry people shrank in spirit; They did not fully understand the impious words but saw flames lick like red curls about his savage head. The smell of roast was overpowering, choice meats steamed, and his bold speech was soon forgotten in hunger’s pangs; all fell to eating ravenously till their brains reeled. Under his lowering eyebrows Odysseus watched them sharply: "This is my people, a mess of bellies and stinking breath! These are my own minds, hands, and thighs, my loins and necks!" He muttered in his thorny beard, held back his hunger far from the feast and licked none of the steaming food.

Your mother did things her way when you were a child and it caused you to lose faith in yourself, become depressed or emotionally repressed, or become involved in an unhealthy relationship. If you have come to realize this and come to accept it, you might feel as if everything you do is her fault. In reality, you can no longer rightfully put the blame for your current actions on your mother. You have the power to take charge today. Claim that power and live the way you want to live. Only then will you be truly healed.

It’s hard to accept. One minute you’re a parent to a small child. You have all the power. You say what’s for dinner. You say when bedtime is, when the homework gets done, whether or not so-and-so can sleep over. And then, suddenly that power is gone. Motherly advice is now an insult. Fatherly wisdom is offensive. Opinions are hurtful. Everything is a judgment. So, what do you do? You take a step back. You hold your tongue. You say to yourself, It’s their life. You say it so many times it loses its meaning. You try to diffuse the bomb.

Well, if it’s helped, that’s great, but I wouldn’t advise you to use every snippet I said to you as a child in your adult life. Half the time, I was throwing stuff at the wall in the hopes it would keep you balanced and well-grounded in that school full of toxic assholes.” “What?” “I hate to admit this, but I don’t know everything.” Sonya drained her glass of whiskey in one shot and made a face. “Do you have any idea what it’s like, to be the mother of a prodigy? To know your child is brilliant and destined for greatness but will still have to work four times as hard as people with a fraction of her intelligence? I was furious when your classmates were rough on you, but I figured my job was to keep you calm and focused and not let you lose this opportunity. I couldn’t let you be angry, or at the very least, I couldn’t let you show that anger. Because then you would be that angry Black girl, and everyone would dismiss your intelligence or worse, suppress everything that makes you you. So I—” She stopped, and inhaled sharply. “I guess I suppressed you. My God. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.

You can have that life,” he told her. “It’s right there for you to take.” “I love you,” Eve quickly countered. “Loving me hurts you, doesn’t it?” Beckett asked, looking down. “No, you don’t have to tell me. I know. I can smell it. I can smell the pain coming off of you,” he said, looking at the floor. “You had love before and a future. What does loving me get you, Eve? What does it get you?” He stood, angry with himself. “I don’t need to get anything from you. It’s the way it is. There’s no changing that.” She gripped the porch railing. Beckett stepped close to Eve and tenderly tucked a lock of hair that had escaped her ponytail behind her ear. “You’re saying goodbye,” she said, her eyes full of questions. “Do you know there are other little girls out there like that one? I lived with a few of them. They would sell their souls for a mother like you.” At the word mother Eve’s chin crumpled. She tried to hold back the tears, but they wouldn’t obey. “See that? It’s what you need. You need that—a little kid calling you Mom.” Beckett put his arms around her as she shattered. The pain she kept hidden surfaced from where it had been smoldering. When he felt her knees weaken, he hugged her harder. “That’s right. It’s okay. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, baby. You want normal.” He guided her to the chair he’d vacated. “There’s a guy out there who’ll hold your hand. There’s a little girl out there. She’s waiting for you. It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” He knelt in front of her and rubbed her arms. She slapped at his hands, letting outrage carry her words. “I don’t want another man. I want you. I’ve killed for you. I’ve protected you. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Do you honestly think these hands that kill can hold a child?” She held her fingers in front of her face. “Yes. Absolutely. Don’t you know, gorgeous? Mothers are some of the most vicious killers out there, if their kids are threatened. You just have more practice.” He took her hands and kissed them. “I’ve lost too much. I can’t lose you. Don’t make me. Please. I’ll beg you if I have to.” She watched his lips on her palms. He shook his head and used her own words against her. “The hardest part of loving someone is not being with them when you want to be.” He stood, and she mirrored his motion,already shaking her head. “Don’t say it.” Beckett ignored her; he knew what he had to do. He had to set beautiful Eve free to find that soft, touchable woman he’d seen her become with the little girl.

I figure, we used to be part of our mother’s body. I mean, we did. I don’t just figure we did. That part is a given, but this next part is what I figure. She breathed for us, and pumped blood through us. And there’s only one person in the entire world we can say that about. So we’re less separate from our mothers than anybody else on the planet. We’re not literally one body with them anymore, but I think we carry this really instinctive subconscious memory of the time when we were. Until we could breathe on our own there was no surviving without her. And even when we came out into the world we would have died without her care. Actually somebody else could have cared for us at that point, but we didn’t know it. We just knew she did. So when we lose our mother, it’s different. It’s just different from any other loss. And it isn’t all about what a great relationship it was. It isn’t necessarily a loss of all these wonderful things you shared. It’s not only with the best mother-child bonds. It’s all of them. If it was great, you miss that. If it was troublesome, you suddenly realize the door has been slammed on it ever being any better way. So no matter what it was, it’s really hard to lose. Anyway, that’s my observation from watching both my parents lose their mothers.

we stared at each other, and I knew we were both thinking about the same exact thing: the night before. Not the long talk we’d had about our families—and that raw honesty we’d given each other—but about what happened after that. The movie. The damn movie. I didn’t know what the hell I’d been thinking, fully fucking aware I was already mopey, when I asked if he wanted to watch my favorite movie as a kid. I’d watched it hundreds of times. Hundreds of times. It felt like love and hope. And I was an idiot. And Aiden, being a nice person who apparently let me get away with most of the things I wanted, said, “Sure. I might fall asleep during it.” He hadn’t fallen asleep. If there was one thing I learned that night was that no one was impervious to Little Foot losing his mom. Nobody. He’d only slightly rolled his eyes when the cartoon started, but when I glanced over at him, he’d been watching faithfully. When that awful, terrible, why-would-you-do-that-to-children-and-to-humanity-in-general part came on The Land Before Time, my heart still hadn’t learned how to cope and I was feeling so low, the hiccups coming out were worse than usual. My vision got cloudy. I got choked up. Tears were coming out of my eyes like the powerful Mississippi. Time and dozens of viewings hadn’t toughened me up at all. And as I’d wiped at my face and tried to remind myself it was just a movie and a young dinosaur hadn’t lost his beloved mom, I heard a sniffle. A sniffle that wasn’t my own. I turned not-so-discreetly and saw him. I saw the starry eyes and the way his throat bobbed with a gulp. Then I saw the sideways look he shot me as I sat there dealing with my own emotions, and we stared at each other. In silence. The big guy wasn’t handling it, and if there were ever a time in any universe, watching any movie, this would be the cause of it. All I could do was nod at him, get up to my knees, and lean over so I could wrap my arms around his neck and tell him in as soothing of a voice as I could get together, “I know, big guy. I know,” even as another round of tears came out of my eyes and possibly some snot out of my nose. The miraculous part was that he let me. Aiden sat there and let me hug him, let me put my cheek over the top of his head and let him know it was okay. Maybe it happened because we’d just been talking about the faulty relationships we had with our families or maybe it was because a child losing its mother was just about the saddest thing in the world, especially when it was an innocent animal, I don’t know. But it was sad as shit. He sniffed—on any other person smaller than him it would have been considered a sniffle—and I squeezed my arms around him a little tighter before going back to my side of the bed where we finished watching the movie

The Dying Man" in memoriam W.B. Yeats 1. His words I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, “My soul’s hung out to dry, Like a fresh salted skin; I doubt I’ll use it again. “What’s done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose I know, as the dying know Eternity is Now. “A man sees, as he dies, Death’s possibilities; My heart sways with the world. I am that final thing, A man learning to sing. 2. What Now? Caught in the dying light, I thought myself reborn. My hand turn into hooves. I wear the leaden weight Of what I did not do. Places great with their dead, The mire, the sodden wood, Remind me to stay alive. I am the clumsy man The instant ages on. I burned the flesh away, In love, in lively May. I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs. In the worst night of my will, I dared to question all, And would the same again. What’s beating at the gate? Who’s come can wait. 3. The Wall A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn! The figure at my back is not my friend; The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn. I found my father when I did my work, Only to lose myself in this small dark. Though it reject dry borders of the seen, What sensual eye can keep and image pure, Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn? A slow growth is a hard thing to endure. When figures our of obscure shadow rave, All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave. The wall has entered: I must love the wall, A madman staring at perpetual night, A spirit raging at the visible. I breathe alone until my dark is bright. Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun. 4. The Exulting Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child– I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after image of the inner eye. Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone; I die into this life, alone yet not alone. Was it a god his suffering renewed?– I saw my father shrinking in his skin; He turned his face: there was another man, Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid. He quivered like a bird in birdless air, Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere. Fish feed on fish, according to their need: My enemies renew me, and my blood Beats slower in my careless solitude. I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed. I think a bird, and it begins to fly. By dying daily, I have come to be. All exultation is a dangerous thing. I see you, love, I see you in a dream; I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum, And that slow humming rises into song. A breath is but a breath: I have the earth; I shall undo all dying with my death. 5. They Sing, They Sing All women loved dance in a dying light– The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon! Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one, Then settles back to shade and the long night. A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn, And that cry takes me back where I was born. Who thought love but a motion in the mind? Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing? I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing; Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend. I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds, They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds. I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone: What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!– Eternity defined, and strewn with straw, The fury of the slug beneath the stone. The vision moves, and yet remains the same. In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am. The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When

This is the work of a lifetime, here on earth: To invent the astral body, to create it. giving it our consciousness. Thus one will survive death. One could also die when one chooses… And on dying, not lose the awareness 'from here.' What has happened to you is a detachment of your astral body while your physical body sleeps. This occurs to vîras; it's an automatic unconscious process. Sometimes, by simple chance, a glimmer of consciousness reaches this fine body and then, on suddenly awakening or the next day, one gets the impression of experiencing something much more real than physical reality. The deja-vu of psychologists has its explanation in this phenomena of detachment. Have you seen those children who elevate a kite and send messages with little rolls of paper that go slowly up to the kite? So it is, more or less, with that other. The astral body breaks away, still attached to the physical body by a string which has been called a 'silver cord' that is only cut at death. Thanks to this cord we can go immeasurable distances without losing the connection with our physical bodies. It always returns. So it reaches consciousness, like those messages of children with their kite. Yes, we must become like children to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven… with our astral bodies. Pay attention to this other analogy: As a child finds itself joined to its mother by the umbilical cord, so the astral body is joined to its father, the physical body, by a silver cord. The child cries and despairs at birth, when the cord connecting him to his mother is cut. He thinks this is death, but it is a new life. The same befalls the vîra when he dies; when the silver cord is cut he enters into another life. Death is a new life. All this is archetypal. Only those events expressing archetypes have ontological reality.

Over the course of the 1970s conservatives made the endangered child into a kind of political and rhetorical abstraction, a way of thinking about the country and its citizens that could help advance a wide range of policy initiatives. They opposed the counterculture on the grounds that rock and roll caused adolescents to lose respect for family life. They promoted the War on Drugs with racially tinged morality tales about addicted inner-city mothers and, crucially, the “superpredator” “crack babies” to whom those mothers supposedly gave birth. (That particular epidemic was later shown to be a myth.)40 And when Anita Bryant led a campaign to allow Dade County to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring teachers for public schools, she named the effort “Save Our Children.” The fear that tied all of these campaigns together was of the ease with which children could be victimized or else corrupted and turned against the society that was supposed to nurture them.

Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death. [“Complaints bureau!” I remember Boris grousing as a child, one afternoon at his house when we had got off on the vaguely metaphysical subject of our mothers: why they—angels, goddesses—had to die? while our awful fathers thrived, and boozed, and sprawled, and muddled on, and continued to stumble about and wreak havoc, in seemingly indefatigable health? “They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?”] And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant.3 This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. “At present,” one wrote, “I am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby….Everywhere I go the landlords don’t want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy….I can’t keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?…I can’t go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate.” Another mother wrote, “My children are now sick and losing weight….I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it’s] always ‘too late’ or ‘sorry, no children.’ ” Another wrote, “The lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don’t want me to let them come back….If I could get a garage I would take it.”4 When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them. Some placed costly restrictions on large families, charging “children-damage deposits” in addition to standard rental fees. One Washington, DC, development required tenants with no children to put down a $150 security deposit but charged families with children a $450 deposit plus a monthly surcharge of $50 per child.5 In 1980, HUD commissioned a nationwide study to assess the magnitude of the problem and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions.6 Eight years later, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread.7 Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.8

There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too soon about sex and death. Well, like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocence the old-time-religion way, by reading the nursery rhyme of fornication that is the Old Testament and the fairy tale bloodbath that is the New. Job taught me Hey! Life's not fair! Lot's wife taught me that I'm probably going to come across a few weird sleazy things I won't be able to resist looking into. And the book of Revelation taught me to live in the moment, if only because the future's so grim. Being a fundamentalist means going straight to the source. I was asked to not only read the Bible, but to memorize Bible verses. If it wasn't for the easy access to the sordid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god who, from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time. God wasn't exactly a children's rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you're supposed to honor your mother and father but they're not necessarily required to reciprocate. This was a god who told Abraham to knife his boy Isaac and then at the last minute, when the dagger's poised above Isaac's heart, God tells Abraham that He's just kidding. This was a god who let a child lose his birthright because of some screwball mix-up involving fake fur hands and a bowl of soup. This was a god who saw to it that his own son had his hands and feet nailed onto pieces of wood. God, for me, was not in the details. I still set store by the big Judeo-Christian messages. Who can argue with the Ten Commandments? Don't kill anybody: don't mess around with other people's spouses: be nice to your mom and dad. Fine advice. It was the minutiae that nagged me.

There once was a female snake that roamed around a small village in the countryside of Egypt. She was commonly seen by villagers with her small baby as they grazed around the trees. One day, several men noticed the mother snake was searching back and forth throughout the village in a frenzy — without her young. Apparently, her baby had slithered off on its own to play while she was out looking for food. Yet the mother snake went on looking for her baby for days because it still hadn't returned back to her. So one day, one of the elder women in the village caught sight of the big snake climbing on top of their water supply — an open clay jug harvesting all the village's water. The snake latched its teeth on the big jug's opening and sprayed its venom into it. The woman who witnessed the event was mentally handicapped, so when she went to warn the other villagers, nobody really understood what she was saying. And when she approached the jug to try to knock it over, she was reprimanded by her two brothers and they locked her away in her room. Then early the next day, the mother snake returned to the village after a long evening searching for her baby. The children villagers quickly surrounded her while clapping and singing because she had finally found her baby. And as the mother snake watched the children rejoice in the reunion with her child, she suddenly took off straight for the water supply — leaving behind her baby with the villagers' children. Before an old man could gather some water to make some tea, she hissed in his direction, forcing him to step back as she immediately wrapped herself around the jug and squeezed it super hard. When the jug broke burst into a hundred fragments, she slithered away to gather her child and return to the safety of her hole. Many people reading this true story may not understand that the same feelings we are capable of having, snakes have too. Thinking the villagers killed her baby, the mother snake sought out revenge by poisoning the water to destroy those she thought had hurt her child. But when she found her baby and saw the villagers' children, her guilt and protective instincts urged her to save them before other mothers would be forced to experience the pain and grief of losing a child. Animals have hearts and minds too. They are capable of love, hatred, jealousy, revenge, hunger, fear, joy, and caring for their own and others. We look at animals as if they are inferior because they are savage and not civilized, but in truth, we are the ones who are not being civil by drawing a thick line between us and them — us and nature. A wild animal's life is very straightforward. They spend their time searching and gathering food, mating, building homes, and meditating and playing with their loved ones. They enjoy the simplicity of life without any of our technological gadgetry, materialism, mass consumption, wastefulness, superficiality, mindless wars, excessive greed and hatred. While we get excited by the vibrations coming from our TV sets, headphones and car stereos, they get stimulated by the vibrations of nature. So, just because animals may lack the sophisticated minds to create the technology we do or make brick homes and highways like us, does not mean their connections to the etheric world isn't more sophisticated than anything we could ever imagine. That means they are more spiritual, reflective, cosmic, and tuned into alternate universes beyond what our eyes can see. So in other words, animals are more advanced than us. They have the simple beauty we lack and the spiritual contentment we may never achieve.

When we are needy Christ does His best work, but be warned. Someone, maybe even some well-meaning soul, is going to tell you, “Don’t worry. God will never give you more than you can handle.” I double-dog-dare you to find that in the scriptures. The closest you can come is found in 1 Corinthians 10:13: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” This talks about an escape from temptation; it does not say that you will not be faced with more than you can handle. The mother whose baby is born and dies, the father who loses his eyesight in a construction accident and can no longer provide for his family, the child who hurries home from school every day hoping that his mother hasn’t yet succumbed to the cancer that he sees ravish her body day by day . . . all of these souls have more than they can handle—on their own. But with Christ as their companion on the journey through life—and only with Christ—all things are possible. Without Him, we fail no matter how far we manage on our own. We can never cross over without Christ and His all-access Atonement.

Then I came back to Christine. She was waiting for me..." Erik here rose solemnly. Then he continued, but, as he spoke, he was overcome by all his former emotion and began to tremble like a leaf: "Yes, she was waiting for me... waiting for me erect and alive, a real, living bride... as she hoped to be saved... And, when I... came forward, more timid than... a little child, she did not run away... no, no... she stayed... she waited for me... I even believe... daroga... that she put out her forehead... a little... oh, not too much... just a little... like a living bride... And... and... I... kissed her!... I!... I!... I!... And she did not die!... Oh, how good it is, daroga, to kiss somebody on the forehead!... You can't tell!... But I! I!... My mother, daroga, my poor, unhappy mother would never... let me kiss her... She used to run away... and throw me my mask!... Nor any other woman... ever, ever!... Ah, you can understand, my happiness was so great, I cried. And I fell at her feet, crying... and I kissed her feet... her little feet... crying. You're crying, too, daroga... and she cried also... the angel cried!..." Erik sobbed aloud and the Persian himself could not retain his tears in the presence of that masked man, who, with his shoulders shaking and his hands clutched at his chest, was moaning with pain and love by turns. "Yes, daroga... I felt her tears flow on my forehead... on mine, mine!... They were soft... they were sweet!... They trickled under my mask... they mingled with my tears in my eyes... they flowed between my lips... Listen, daroga, listen to what I did... I tore off my mask so as not to lose one of her tears... and she did not run away!... And she did not die!... She remained alive, weeping over me, with me. We cried together! I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer!" And Erik fell into a chair, choking for breath: "Ah, I am not going to die yet... presently I shall... but let me cry!... Listen, daroga... listen to this... While I was at her feet... I heard her say, 'Poor, unhappy Erik!'... And she took my hand!... I had become, no more, you know, than a poor dog ready to die for her... I mean it, daroga!... I held in my hand a ring, a plain gold ring which I had given her... which she had lost... and which I had found again... a wedding-ring, you know... I slipped it into her little hand and said, 'There!... Take it!... Take it for you... and him!... It shall be my wedding-present from your poor, unhappy Erik... I know you love the boy... don't cry any more!'.... She asked me, in a very soft voice, what I meant... Then I made her understand that, where she was concerned, I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her... but that she could marry the young man when she pleased, because she had cried with me and mingled her tears with mine!..." Erik's emotion was so great that he had to tell the Persian not to look at him, for he was choking and must take off his mask.

This fear of life is not just an imaginary bogy, but a very real panic, which seems disproportionate only because its real source is unconscious and therefore projected: the young, growing part of the personality, if prevented from living or kept in check, generates fear and changes into fear. The fear seems to come from the mother, but actually it is the deadly fear of the instinctive, unconscious, inner man who is cut off from life by the continual shrinking back from reality. If the mother is felt as the obstacle, she then becomes the vengeful pursuer. Naturally it is not the real mother, although she too may seriously injure her child by the morbid tenderness with which she pursues it into adult life, thus prolonging the infantile attitude beyond the proper time. It is rather the mother-imago that has turned into a lamia.63 (Cf. pls. XXXVIIIa, XLVIII.) The mother-imago, however, represents the unconscious, and it is as much a vital necessity for the unconscious to be joined to the conscious as it is for the latter not to lose contact with the unconscious. Nothing endangers this connection more in a man than a successful life; it makes him forget his dependence on the unconscious. The case of Gilgamesh is instructive in this respect: he was so successful that the gods, the representatives of the unconscious, saw themselves compelled to deliberate how they could best bring about his downfall. Their efforts were unavailing at first, but when the hero had won the herb of immortality (cf. pl. XIX) and was almost at his goal, a serpent stole the elixir of life from him while he slept.

Bronwyn is very much like myself, in both looks and temperament." "Then she likes to command and manipulate those around he," Ranulf interjected to prove he was listening. Laon sent him a slicing glance before answering. "Aye,and if you think me stubborn and relentless, you will rediscover the meaning if you and my eldest daughter ever disagree upon something.And prepare to lose,for even if you are right,she will wear you down until you find yourself acquiescing on the one point you swore never to concede," Laon cackled,obviously recalling one or two times in which she had bested him.Then his voice changed. "But I thank the Lord for her steadfastness and prudence. With my absence,I suspect all have been looking to her for guidance,and they were right to do so," he breathed softly. "Though no man would want her,she is strong in spirit and in mind and the only person I would trust to ensure her sisters are safe and well." "Which one is Eydthe?" "My middle child.She is small, but don't let that deceive you when you meet her.She inherited her Scottish grandmother's temper as well as her dark red hair.Of all of my daughters, her mind is the sharpest,but so is her tongue.It is my youngest,Lily,that I worry about the most when it comes to your men," Laon sighed. "She is the spitting image of her mother.Tall and slender with long dark raven hair and gray eyes,she snatches the soul of every man who looks upon her." And as if he could read Ranulf's mind,he added, "And her disposition is just as sweet.She sees only the good things in life and,as a consequence, brings joy wherever she goes." Ranulf conscientiously fought to refrain from showing his true reaction-nausea.

She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm. So much for the natural relation between the sexes. But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life. They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. Have they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

So let’s review all the ways the Dorito Effect appears to be turning us into nutritional idiots: • Dilution. As real food becomes bland and loses its capacity to please us, we are less inclined to eat it and very often enhance it in ways that further blunt its nutrition. • Nutritional decapitation. When we take flavors from nature, we capture the experience of food but leave the nutrition—the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals, the antioxidants, the plant secondary compounds—behind. In nature, flavor compounds always appear in a nutritional context. • False variety. We naturally crave variety in food—it’s one of nature’s ways of making sure we get a diverse diet. Fake flavors make foods that are nutritionally very similar seem more different than they actually are. • Cognitive deception. Fake flavors fool the conscious mind. A mother enticed by a Dannon Strawberry Blitz Smoothie as an after-school snack for her eight-year-old child will taste it and reasonably believe the product contains strawberries, even though it contains none. • Emotional deception. Flavor technology manipulates the part of the mind that experiences feelings. Fake flavors take a previously established liking for a real food and apply it, like a sticker, to something else—usually large doses of calories—creating a heightened and nutritionally undeserved level of pleasure. • Flavor-nutrient confusion. By hijacking flavor-nutrient relationships, fake flavors, by their very nature, set a false expectation. A major aspect of obesity is an outsized desire for food, one that very often cannot be extinguished by food itself. By imposing flavors on foods without the corresponding nutrients, are we creating foods that are incapable of satiating the people who eat them? So many of the foods we overconsume—refined carbs, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar, added fat—would not be palatable without synthetic flavor. We gorge on them because they taste like something they are not.

My mother, Woman with Many Robes, asks if you want to eat?” Loretta gave an emphatic shake of her head, pressing closer to his chest. In a toss-up, she chose to stay with Hunter. He leaned forward so he could look into her eyes. “You will not be afraid. My mother will crack heads. Your good friend, eh? You will trust.” Loretta scanned the wall of leather-clad bodies and, for the first time, hugged her captor’s arm more closely around her. The dark depths of his eyes shifted, warming on hers. A ghost of a smile flitted across his harsh mouth, and his fingertips tightened their hold on her ribs. Looking up, he said something in Comanche. The woman nodded and turned to shoo the onlookers out of the way, her spoon tapping a hollow tattoo on slow-moving heads. Hunter chuckled, his chest vibrating against Loretta’s shoulder blades as he steered the mare along the path his mother cleared. The crowd formed walls on each side of them, hanging back only when Hunter drew up before a lodge. When he began to dismount, Loretta clutched his wrist, terrified he might abandon her. “Yo-oh-hobt pa-pi! Yo-oh-hobt pa-pi!” a small girl cried, dancing around the mare’s legs, her button eyes gleaming, her plump brown bottom jiggling so hard that she was about to lose her breechcloth. “Ein mah-heepicut?” Hunter pried Loretta’s frantic fingers from his arm and slid off the horse. Smiling at the child, he leaned over and retied her breechcloth thong. “Huh, yes.” Glancing up at Loretta, he said, “She is a yellow-hair, and she is mine.

About 41 percent of mothers are primary breadwinners and earn the majority of their family’s income. Another 23 percent of mothers are co-breadwinners, contributing at least a quarter of the family’s earnings.30 The number of women supporting families on their own is increasing quickly; between 1973 and 2006, the proportion of families headed by a single mother grew from one in ten to one in five.31 These numbers are dramatically higher in Hispanic and African-American families. Twenty-seven percent of Latino children and 51 percent of African-American children are being raised by a single mother.32 Our country lags considerably behind others in efforts to help parents take care of their children and stay in the workforce. Of all the industrialized nations in the world, the United States is the only one without a paid maternity leave policy.33 As Ellen Bravo, director of the Family Values @ Work consortium, observed, most “women are not thinking about ‘having it all,’ they’re worried about losing it all—their jobs, their children’s health, their families’ financial stability—because of the regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and a responsible parent.”34 For many men, the fundamental assumption is that they can have both a successful professional life and a fulfilling personal life. For many women, the assumption is that trying to do both is difficult at best and impossible at worst. Women are surrounded by headlines and stories warning them that they cannot be committed to both their families and careers. They are told over and over again that they have to choose, because if they try to do too much, they’ll be harried and unhappy. Framing the issue as “work-life balance”—as if the two were diametrically opposed—practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life? The good news is that not only can women have both families and careers, they can thrive while doing so. In 2009, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober published Getting to 50/50, a comprehensive review of governmental, social science, and original research that led them to conclude that children, parents, and marriages can all flourish when both parents have full careers. The data plainly reveal that sharing financial and child-care responsibilities leads to less guilty moms, more involved dads, and thriving children.35 Professor Rosalind Chait Barnett of Brandeis University did a comprehensive review of studies on work-life balance and found that women who participate in multiple roles actually have lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of mental well-being.36 Employed women reap rewards including greater financial security, more stable marriages, better health, and, in general, increased life satisfaction.37 It may not be as dramatic or funny to make a movie about a woman who loves both her job and her family, but that would be a better reflection of reality. We need more portrayals of women as competent professionals and happy mothers—or even happy professionals and competent mothers. The current negative images may make us laugh, but they also make women unnecessarily fearful by presenting life’s challenges as insurmountable. Our culture remains baffled: I don’t know how she does it. Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.

My mother was taken by the Gestapo. My brother managed to escape, but my mother was taken away. They tortured her there, questioned her about her daughter’s whereabouts. For two years she was held there. For two years, along with our other women, the fascists made her lead the way during their operations: they feared the partisan mines and always drove local people ahead of them—if there were mines, those people would be blown up, and the German soldiers would remain unharmed. A living shield. For two years they used my mother that way. More than once, while waiting in ambush, we suddenly saw women followed by fascists. Once they came closer, you could see that your mother was there among them. And most frightful of all was waiting for your commander to give the order to fire. Everyone waited in fear for that order, because one would whisper, “There’s my mother,” another “And there’s my sister,” or someone would see their own child…My mama always went around in a white kerchief. She was tall, she was always the first to be noticed. Before I had time to notice her, someone would already report, “There goes your mother “ When they give the order to shoot, you shoot. And I myself didn’t know where I was shooting; there was one thing in my head: “Don’t lose sight of that white kerchief—is she alive, has she fallen?” A white kerchief…They all run away, fall down, and you don’t know whether your mother has been killed or not. For the next two days or more, I walk around, beside myself, until the liaisons come back from the village to tell me she’s alive. I can live again. Until the next time. I don’t think I could stand it now. I hated them…My hatred helped me…To this day the scream of a child who is thrown down a well still rings in my ears. Have you ever heard that scream? The child is falling and screaming, screaming as if from somewhere under the ground, from the other world. It’s not a child’s scream, and not a man’s either. And to see a young fellow cut up with a saw…Our partisan…After that, when you go on a mission, your heart seeks only one thing: to kill them, kill as many as possible, annihilate them in the cruelest way.

Part 1 A Woman is a Fate? Or a Bless? When a baby is girl is born, to some is a blessing. She will grow as wonderful woman, beautiful, with nice features and showers love as a daughter, a sister, as a wife, as a friend and as a mother. It is also luck, or a Mahalakshmi to the house. Some centuries back, and to some people when she is born, she is a fate. An ill fated to some in orthodox families and believe that she brings bad luck. So, there is this ritual in some places or villages where, when a new born baby girl will be poisoned to death upon her arrival on earth. It is brutal and devastating. Yes it is still happening till today. Where did this ritual came from? Who started it? Where was it written that the baby must be killed if it is a girl. And WHY? Has anyone thought, that it was a woman who carried her for 9 months, loved her from the day she is created in her womb, and the moment when she is born, the tear of a joy and her happiness the moment she sees her little tiny human girl arrived, and her dreams as mother and to love her all her life… will be no longer alive in the next few minutes? I have always respected woman, for uncountable reasons. As much as I am happy to see them successful, but it also worries me most of the time. 99.9% of it I am worried for them! The one who gave birth to us, is a woman. We also worship to a female God and beg her to show mercy on us. It is also a woman, who becomes a wife and satisfies a husband’s needs. But still, there are no respect shown to them despite knowing these basics. In some houses while her parents off to work, or being abandoned, or lets just say the parents passed. It is her responsibility to take care the rest of her family as the family head. When it comes to education, she is not safe to study among the boys, neither in higher education. Same goes to a woman at work. As she will have those wild eyes on her, she has to take care of her virginity, her womb, and her dignity. Beyond these, there are also some beasts, who is talented in sweet talking and flirtatious towards her. When she is too naïve and fall for the trap, it happens to be a one night stand. Once a woman marriage is fixed, she gets married and goes off to her in laws. Her life changes in the moment the knots tied by the man. In todays millennia, womens are still carrying the burden of the responsibility of her maternal side, together with her new in-laws. Every morning she wakes up, she serves the husband, deal the day with by preparing him for his day, every day. As well taking care of her new in-laws all of her life. Then, comes the pregnancy moment, again, she carries her child her womb, making sure he is safe in there, and taking care of her world on the outside. She loses all her beauty, her happiness, her wishes, her ambitions, and it is all sacrificed for the sake of her marriage. And then the cycle never stops. She raises her children, become beautiful, and then one day they too get married. But as mother, she never stopped caring and provide them all the love, the needs, etc. It never stops. There are some man and in laws who support their daughter in law and I have a big salute to them. They are an example for today’s woman millennia, don’t stop her for what she is capable of, and don’t clip her wings..

When you’re a parent, you know that bad things can happen. That’s why all mothers are insane. We live with the constant fear that something might happen to our kids. But nothing, no amount of fear or precautions, can prepare you for the reality of losing a child.

Oof! I’ve been stabbed!” The Duchess of Worthington did not look up from her needlepoint. “Perhaps that will teach you to fidget while at the hands of your dressmaker.” She cast a sidelong glance in the direction of her youngest child. “Besides, I highly doubt that Madame Fernaud ‘stabbed’ you.” Lady Alexandra Stafford, only daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Worthington, heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes. She rubbed the spot at her waist that bore the mark of London’s finest dressmaker’s needle. “Perhaps not stabbed—but wounded nonetheless.” Garnering no reaction from either her mother or the unflappable modiste, Alex slumped her shoulders and muttered, “I fail to understand why I must suffer this fitting anyway.” The duchess continued with her needlepoint. “Alexandra, there are plenty of young women who would happily assume your position, standing on that platform, ‘suffering’ through a fitting for that dress.” “May I suggest any one of them take my place?” “No.” Alex knew when she was fighting a losing battle. “I didn’t think so.” The

Our joy, our peace, our happiness depend very much on our practice of recognizing and transforming our habit energies. There are positive habit energies that we have to cultivate, there are negative habit energies that we have to recognize, embrace, and transform. The energy with which we do these things is mindfulness. Mindfulness helps us be aware of what is going on. Then, when the habit energy shows itself, we know right away. "Hello, my little habit energy, I know you are there. I will take good care of you." By recognizing this energy as it is, you are in control of the situation. You don't have to fight your habit energy. In fact the Buddha does not recommend that you fight it, because that habit energy is you and you should not fight against yourself. You have to generate the energy of mindful­ness, which is also you, and that positive energy will do the work of recognizing and embracing. Every time you embrace your habit energy, you can help it transform a little bit. The habit energy is a kind of seed within your consciousness, and when it becomes a source of energy, you have to recognize it. You have to bring your mindfulness into the present moment, and you just embrace that negative energy: "Hello, my negative habit energy. I know you are there. I am here for you." After maybe one or two or three minutes, that energy will go back into the form of a seed. But it may re-manifest later on. You have to be very alert. Every time a negative energy is embraced by the energy of mindfulness, it will no longer push you to do or to say things you do not want to do or say, and it loses a little bit of its strength as it returns as a seed to the lower level of consciousness. The same thing is true for all mental formations: your fear, your anguish, your anxiety, and your despair. They exist in us in the form of seeds, and every time one of the seeds is watered, it becomes a zone of energy on the upper level of our consciousness. If you don't know how to take care of it, it will cause damage, and push us to do or to say things that will damage us and damage the people we love. Therefore, generating the energy of mindfulness to recognize, embrace, and take care of negative energy is the practice. And the practice should be done in a very tender, nonviolent way. There should be no fighting, because when you fight, you create damage within yourself. The Buddhist practice is based on the insight of non-duality: you are love, you are mindfulness, but you are also that habit energy within you. To medi­tate does not mean to transform yourself into a battlefield with right fighting wrong, positive fighting negative. That's not Buddhist. Based on the insight of nonduality, the practice should be nonviolent. Mind­fulness embracing anger is like a mother embracing her child, big sister embracing younger sister. The embrace always brings a positive effect. You can bring relief, and you can cause the negative energy to lose some of its strength, just by embracing it.

Emma?” His hands came to rest on her shoulders, and she pressed her cheek to the back of one. “What is it?” “She’s dead,” Emma whispered, as Steven pulled up a chair close to hers and sat down. Gently he took the letter from her hand and read it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and the gentleness of his tone made her want to cry. “The attorney didn’t mention Lily and Caroline. That means Mama probably didn’t know where they were.” “It means he didn’t mention them,” Steven corrected her quietly, touching her chin, turning her head so that she looked at him. “I expressly asked for news of my sisters,” Emma said, her lower lip wobbling. “Write to him again. Better yet, send him a wire.” Emma was gazing at the gathering twilight again, remembering the Kathleen she’d known. Although her mother had had a drinking problem, she’d been merry when she was sober, full of laughter and music. “I wonder if she died alone.” Steven drew her out of the chair and onto his lap, where he held her, pressing her head down against his shoulder. His arms felt so good around her that Emma began to cry at last; she’d found this man only to lose him. Thinking Emma was crying for Kathleen—and maybe, somewhere deep inside herself, she was—Steven held her tightly and waited for the emotional storm to pass. When it did he carried her to the bedroom, undressed her to her chemise, and laid her down like a child, pulling the slippers from her feet, laying the covers over her. She

Tuesday, January 27 Nothing Is Impossible with God For with God nothing is ever impossible and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment. LUKE 1:37 AMP Gabriel, the archangel tasked with telling Mary that she would be the mother of the promised Messiah, spoke these words to her when she asked how such a thing could happen when she wasn’t married. She responded with humility and submitted to the Lord’s will. Two other times in scripture an angel announces a birth to couples who in human years were too old for such a thing to happen. When the angel told Abraham that Sarah would conceive and have a son within the year, Sarah laughed. When the angel asked why she laughed, she denied it at first and then said she was too old. The angel responded that nothing was too hard for God. And it happened as God said it would. Then Sarah’s laughter of unbelief turned into joy. Several months before Gabriel appeared to Mary, he showed up in the temple where a priest named Zechariah was sacrificing the daily offering. Gabriel told him that he and his wife, Elizabeth, would have a son in their old age. The child would be the forerunner to the promised Messiah. Zechariah’s unbelief led to losing his voice for the next nine months until his son was born and he gave him the name the angel had said. God delights in doing the impossible, waiting until the perfect time to fulfill His Word. Father, give me faith to believe Your Word as Mary received the news of Jesus’ birth, knowing that nothing is too hard for You.

men seem to use the word witch more than women. That’s because men have more power than women, and any threat to that power becomes a source of fear. When any person, man or woman, has wealth and influence, it tends to ensure a comfortable living for them and their families, and they will lash out at anyone who might try to take it from them.’ ‘I don’t understand how a witch having power means a man will lose his wealth,’ I said. Mother chuckled appreciatively. ‘Precisely. If a woman is called a witch, and ostracised and forced out of all good society, then other women won’t be influenced by her. Well, that’s what the men and sometimes women, think. Men see women as their property. They think to own them, and their bodies, like a horse, or a cow. Witches are often herbalists or nature worshippers who make their own coin, using knowledge of the lands to brew potions and remedies. There was an instance where a witch was drowned after being accused of planting bitter herbs in a farmer’s field which ruined his crops. The post-mortem found her with child, and the wife admitted to knowing it belonged to her husband.’ ‘So he lied.’ ‘Yes, and then in his defence stated the witch had used a powerful love potion to make him give her a child.’ ‘And they believed him?’ I said in astonishment.  ‘Unless it can be proved different, a man’s word is often taken over a woman’s, especially if that woman has a poor reputation.’ ‘Can

I don’t know if that’s true when you lose a child. But I hope, for Lily’s mother’s sake, that in time, she finds comfort.

One of the hardest things about losing my mom at a young age was that everyone else seemed to still have their moms. That feeling of isolation lasted beyond the initial shock and heartache of losing her, and it became even more difficult after I had my own daughter. It felt so cruel that they would never get to know each other. When I was pregnant, I’d often wonder if my baby would look like her. I secretly hoped that my child’s arrival would, in some way, bring my own mother back. Then my daughter was born—with sparkly blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. She was lovely, but she didn’t look a thing like my mom (or me, for that matter). She didn’t really act like her, either. But that was okay! She is an entirely different person, after all.

Avery had not known this, and the pain this knowledge brought now was far worse than the self-righteous fury she had felt for years. For her mother never to have looked for her was maddening, but for her to have tried and failed was heartbreaking, too heartbreaking for Avery to bear. She wanted to press her palms into her eyes and cry like a child. She wanted to shrink until she was small enough for her mother to pick up and cradle against her chest. She wanted to be a baby again, to go back to the beginning, to the time when she was her mother's only child and there were no sisters to let down or lose. Before she found drugs, before she left home, before she met Chiti, before she ruined her life.

The art of not experiencing feelings. A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.

So what are the cognitive adaptations of which religion is hypothesized to be a by-product? The first is our hyperactive agency detection device, which leads us to infer that unseen forces are human agents (Thompson & Aukofer, 2011). This likely evolved as a protection or precaution adaptation (Boyer, 1992). We mistake a shadow for a burglar but never mistake a burglar for a shadow—an error management mechanism that helps us to avoid costly errors such as being robbed or mugged. This adaptation leads to misapplied anthropomorphism, as when we say “the sun is trying to come out” or “the clouds look angry.” Clouds and skies, of course, don’t have agency, yet we attribute human-like motivations to them as if they were agents with motives and intentions. Again, it is a small step to infer a god with human-like agency—a god that wants us to pray to him, worship him, sacrifice for him, and will punish us if we disobey him. Even children have what is called “promiscuous teleology,” the tendency to attribute purposes to people, groups, societies, cultures, mother earth, the universe, and god. A second class of cognitive mechanisms consists of theory of mind adaptations, by which we infer unseen beliefs, desires, and intentions in other people. Theory of mind adaptations are extremely useful in predicting the behavior of other people, their proper function. It is a small extrapolation to go from “there are people watching me who have a desire for my well-being” to “there is an all-seeing god watching me who has a desire for my well-being.” That is, we imbue these agents with motives, goals, and desires. Next comes the attachment system, which originally evolved in the context of mother–child bonds for protection and nurturance (Kirkpatrick, 2005). A 2-year-old reaching out to a mother to be soothed bears resemblance to a worshiper reaching out to a god: “we never lose the longing for a caretaker… [and] a god is always there for us” (Thompson & Aukofer, 2011, p. 45). Adaptations to form attachments, in short, get transferred to supernatural agents. Reciprocity adaptations are also activated, as when we make sacrifices for gods or make covenants with gods and expect that the gods will provide us with benefits in return.

When a mother is afraid that her child will die when it has only a pimple or a slight cold we speak of anxiety; but if she is afraid when the child has a serious illness we call her reaction fear,” Karen Horney wrote in 1937. “If someone is afraid whenever he stands on a height or when he has to discuss a topic he knows well, we call his reaction anxiety; if someone is afraid when he loses his way high up in the mountains during a heavy thunderstorm we would speak of fear.” (Horney further elaborated her distinction by saying that while you always know when you are afraid, you can be anxious without knowing it.) In

Well God knew I was like that, so God gave me Kaitlyn. Hyperactive from before birth, we thought Kaitlyn was going to be a boy, because the lore is that the more active babies are inside their mother’s womb the more likely they are to be boys. Well she wasn’t. Trying to hold Kaitlyn when she was a year old was like trying to hold a live salmon. I had a spiritual crisis because of this child. Many Catholic churches have the tradition of young children sitting with their parents at mass. It was no fun with Kaitlyn, because she was the worst-behaved child at church, which was not only embarrassing, it was bad for business. I treated half the children in the congregation and if my child was the worst one, people would lose confidence in me. So after a while I stopped going to church. Have you ever seen children on little yellow leashes in the mall? After having Kaitlyn I believed in little yellow leashes because she was always trying to get away. But my problem was that I wrote a column in the Daily Republic, a local newspaper where I lived, and whenever I went to the mall people recognized me and said things like, “Hey, you’re Dr. Amen! I loved your column.” I just could not deal with, “Hey, you’re Dr. Amen! Why is your child on a leash?” So what I used to do with Kaitlyn was put her in her stroller and tie her shoelaces together so she couldn’t get out. Now, I am not proud of that but when you have a hyperactive child you do things just to survive.

The scar on my face. Do you know how I got it?” “Your family was attacked by some Craven when you were a child,” he answered. “Vikter…” “He filled you in?” A faint, tired smile pulled at my lips. “It’s not the only scar.” When he said nothing, I slipped my hand out from under my sleeve. “When I was six, my parents decided to leave the capital for Niel Valley. They wanted a much quieter life, or so I’m told. I don’t remember much from the trip other than my mother and father being incredibly tense throughout the whole thing. Ian and I were young and didn’t know a lot about the Craven, so we weren’t afraid of being out there or stopping at one of the smaller villages—a place I was told later hadn’t seen a Craven attack in decades. There was just a short wall, like most of the smaller towns, and we were staying at the inn only for one night. The place smelled like cinnamon and cloves. I remember that.” I closed my eyes. “They came at night, in the mist. There was no time once they appeared. My father…he went out onto the street to try and fend them off while my mother hid us, but they came through the door and the windows before she could even step outside.” The memory of my mother’s screams forced my eyes open. I swallowed. “A woman—someone who was staying at the inn—was able to grab Ian and pull him into this hidden room, but I hadn’t wanted to leave my mom and it just…” Dark and disjointed flashes of the night attempted to piece themselves together. Blood on the floor, the walls, running down my mother’s arms. Losing my grip on her slippery hand, and then grabbing hands and snapping teeth. The claws… And then the soul-crushing, fiery pain until, finally, nothing. “I woke up days later, back in the capital. Queen Ileana was by my side. She told me what had happened. That our parents were gone.

When you take all causes into account, more than 170,000 people die every single day. The plane crash counts for one-seventeenth of one percent of that. Perhaps you’ll tell me that deaths from bad health or natural causes aren’t so interesting. Maybe. But for almost every single one of those 170,000 deaths, somewhere a family grieved. If you’re a mother, would it hurt you more to lose a child in a plane crash or from a common disease? It’s about the same, don’t you think? The real headlines should be about the amazing efforts out there seeking to reduce that human suffering. To take just one example: In 1990, despite decades of development aid and medical progress, more than 35,000 children died every day. Now, thanks to the heroic efforts of those who have devoted their lives to tackling malnutrition and preventable childhood diseases, that number is less than 14,000.

(these are my highlighted parts of the book) Not human, thought Maura, as the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. My god, what have I brought back from the dead? This poor woman's already died once. Let's not have it happen again. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give to the court in the case now in hearing shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Corpses have woken up in morgues. Old graves have been dug up, and they have found claw marks inside the coffin lids. People are so terrified of the possibility that some casket makers sell coffins equipped with emergency transmitters to call for help. Just in case you're buried alive. The resurrection of Christ wasn't a true resurrection. It was merely a case of premature burial. When they ask you to play a child, it means they want you to be scared. They want you to scream. They enjoy it if you bleed. It's not strength, Mila. It's hate. That's what keeps you alive. Duplex rounds are designed to inflict maximum damage. In marines, we call them "torso meat tags" because they're useful for identifying your corpse. In a blast, there's a good chance you'd lose your extremities. So a lot of soldiers choose to get their tattoos on their chest or back. The world is evil, Mila, and there's no way to change it. The best you can do is to stay alive...and not be evil. You're worse tan a whore. You don't just sell out yourself. You'd sell out anyone else. But these bars look different; these are not to trap people in; they are meant to keep people out. Come on baby. Stop being so goddamn stubborn. Help your mama out! Some babies are born screamers. They refuse to be ignored. God put mothers on this earth for a reason. Now, I'm not saying it takes a village to raise a kid. But it sure does help to have a grandma. Human. A02/B00/C02(7cm)/D42 Scalp hair. Slightly curved, shaft is seven centimeters, pigment is medium red. Reality's a bitch, ain't it? And so am I. Whenever there are big boys playing with a lot of money, you can bet sex comes into it. When I open my eyes again, I see more of Anja peeking out from the sand. The curve of her hip bone, the brown shaft of her thigh. The desert has decided to give her up, and now she is re-emerging from the earth. Nothing that happened to you was your fault. Whatever those men did to you - whatever they made you do - they forced on you. It was done to your body. It has nothing to do with your soul. Your soul, Mila, is still pure.

Weaning Your Baby Off Breast Milk The paediatrician in Sector 62 Mohali recommends the following tips for weaning your baby off breast milk: Recognize the Signs Your baby starts giving signs showing that they are ready for weaning. The signs include: Sitting with support. Holding their head in an upright position. Expressing interest in what you are eating. Losing their active tongue-thrust reflex. Acting cranky during feeding sessions. Apart from your child showing signs, you can also be the one to stop breastfeeding. You can check with your best paediatrician in Mohali to see if you are ready to start weaning. Set a Schedule Once you prepare yourself to start weaning, give yourself at least a month to move through the process. Giving some time to yourself and the baby gives you time for obstacles. If, however, your child is going through teething, you can wait for some time before weaning. Start Slowly Easing into weaning gives you and your baby some time to adjust to the change. You may start it slowly by dropping one breastfeeding session per week. Once you notice that both you and your baby are comfortable with the change, you can start dropping more sessions until your baby is having solids. Provide Physical Comfort Breastfed babies are used to skin contact with their mothers. Hence, when you are into weaning, you must give them the physical connection in other ways. For instance, you can cuddle them while singing a song reading a book or give them a massage. Let Your Baby Decide Some babies wean on their own when they are given the control. If you are comfortable with your child taking the lead, rely on one rule “Don’t offer, don’t refuse”. You nurse them when they show interest and do not initiate it when they don’t want it. Resistance is Normal If you are the one to start weaning, it will be normal for your babies to resist weaning. Once they become normal with it, they will start showing interest in solid foods and drinking liquids from a bottle. Take Care of Yourself Your baby is not only the one who will be adjusting to weaning. As a mother, you must also deal with a whole range of emotions. Some mothers may even feel rejected when their baby does not show interest in feeding. You may also feel nostalgia about your baby getting older. Accustom yourself to the routine and know that this is necessary. At Motherhood Hospitals, we have a team of experienced super specialists backed by the latest in infrastructure and facilities. We have the best Paediatricians in Mohali that consists of a team of paediatric specialists that cater to all the needs of children, across age groups, and provide the best care for your child’s development.

It is very desirable in all government to avoid the infliction of disgrace. When a child loses his self-respect, and feels dishonored, one of the strongest motives to correct conduct is lost. If a child can be induced good-naturedly, and yet justly to pronounce sentence upon his own conduct, a very powerful influence is brought to bear upon the mind, which is salutary in the highest degree.

A memoir in which the author shares his impressive journey of emigrating to the United States to escape a difficult life in an impoverished Nigerian village. Born into an extremely poor family in Nigeria, ‘Deji Ayoade had early memories of wanting to come to America to do better for himself. For years, he dreamed about having a bright future in the United States. At seven, he promised his mother that one day he would be a doctor in America and take her and his siblings away from their dangerous and impoverished existence. By the age of thirty-three, ‘Deji had been in the United States for five years and was living his dream. He had earned a master’s degree, married and had a child, been recruited into the Navy, and become a US citizen. He makes good on the promise to his mother and brings her, his sister, and his sister’s baby to the United States. UNDERGROUND: A Memoir of Hope, Faith, and the American Dream is a well-structured, compelling memoir written by a determined man with big dreams, ambitious goals, and the strength to never lose sight of where he is headed. Commitment, intelligence, and drive contribute to his fulfilling what he deems to be his purpose in life. His accomplishments in the armed services are nothing short of admirable. Ayoade draws readers into the 1980s culture of the poorer regions of Nigeria with vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of areas in which they lived. His credible recreation of scenes reveals insight into the civilization that had considerable influence on him. Family dynamics also play a significant role in Ayoade’s life. His recollection of his father’s contradictory behaviors both confuse and enlighten him. His fond memories of his grandmother—the family member he trusted the most—are heartfelt and touching. While coming to the United States offers many positive experiences for Ayoade, it doesn’t come without problems, and one that the author talks about with deep emotion and candidness is racism. Thoughtful in the way he acknowledges possible differences of perspectives, he describes how it feels to be looked at differently. One scene in particular demonstrates just how prejudiced and insensitive people can be when it comes to racial biases. Ayoade writes from the heart with emotion and honesty that demonstrate his passion for what he does in life. His ability to weave together a cohesive story from so many disparate fragments is remarkable. His religious faith and commitment to never-ending improvement for himself are inspiring and a basis for being a role model for others. UNDERGROUND: A Memoir of Hope, Faith, and the American Dream–author ‘Deji Ayoade’s reflections on overcoming enormous obstacles and emigrating from Nigeria to the United States–is candid, heartwarming, and inspirational.

With a break in the mother-child bond among siblings, each child might express his or her disconnection with the mother differently. One child might become a people pleaser, fearing that if he’s not good, or he makes waves, he’ll lose connection with people. Another child, believing that connection is never hers to have in the first place, might become argumentative and create conflict to push away the people close to her. Another child might isolate and have little contact with people at all. I’ve noticed that if several siblings have breaks in the mother-child bond, they’ll often express anger or jealousy, or feel disconnected from one another. For example, an older child might resent the child born later, perceiving that the younger child received the love that he or she did not get. Because the hippocampus—that part of the brain involved in creating memories—isn’t fully operational until after the age of two, the older child may not consciously remember being held, fed, or cuddled by the mother, but remembers the younger child receiving their mother’s love. In response, the older child, feeling slighted, can unconsciously blame the younger child for getting what he or she did not. And then, of course, there are some children who don’t seem to carry any family trauma at all. For these children, it’s quite possible that a successful bond was established with the mother and/or father, and this connection helped to immunize the child from carrying entanglements from the past. Perhaps a window of time opened in which the mother was able to give more to one particular child and not the others. Perhaps the parents’ relationship improved. Perhaps the mother experienced a special connection with one child, but couldn’t connect deeply with the others. Younger children often, though not always, seem to do a bit better than first children, or only children, who seem to carry a bigger portion of unfinished business from the family history. When it comes to siblings and inherited family trauma, there are no hard and fast rules governing how each child is affected. Many variables, in addition to birth order and gender, can influence the choices siblings make and the lives they lead. Even though it may appear from the outside that one sibling is unscathed by trauma, while another is encumbered, my clinical experience gives me a different perspective: Most of us carry at least some residue from our family history. However, many intangibles also enter into the equation and can influence how deeply entrenched family traumas remain. These intangibles include self-awareness, the ability to self-soothe, and having a powerful internal healing experience.

In a dear little village Remote and obscure A beautiful maiden resided As to whether or not Her intentions were pure Opinions were sharply divided She loved to lie Out 'neath the darkening sky And allow the night breeze To entrance her She whispered her dreams To the birds flying by But seldom received any answer Over the field and along the lane Gentle Alice would love to stray When it came to the end of the day She would wander away Unheeding Dreaming her innocent dreams she strode Quite unaffected by heat or cold Frequently freckled or soaked with rain Alice was out in the lane Who she met there Every day Was a question Answered by none But she'd get there And she'd stay there 'Til whatever she did Was undoubtedly done You might also like Mad Dogs And Englishmen Noël Coward You’re Losing Me (From The Vault) Taylor Swift Cupid (Twin Version) FIFTY FIFTY (피프티피프티) Over the field and along the lane Both her parents would call in vain Sadly, sorrowfully, they'd complain 'Alice is at it again.' Although that dear little village Surrounded by trees Had neither a school, nor a college Gentle Alice acquired From the birds and the bees Some exceedingly practical knowledge The curious secrets that nature revealed She refused to allow to upset her But she thought When observing the beasts of the field That things might have been organised better Over the field and along the lane Gentle Alice would make up And take up Her stand The road was not exactly arterial But it led to a town nearby Where quite a lot of masculine material Caught her rolling eye She was ready to hitchhike Cadillac or motorbike She wasn't proud or choosy All she Was aiming to be Was a pinked-up Minked-up Fly-by-night floozy When old Rogers Gave her pearls as large as Nuts on a chestnut tree All she'd say was 'Fiddle-di-dee! The wages of sin will be the death of me!' Over the field and along the lane Gentle Alice's parents Would wait Hand in hand Her dear old white-headed mother Wistfully sipping champagne Said 'We've spoiled our child Spared the rod Open up the caviar and say "Thank God!" We've got no cause to complain! Alice is at it again!

In my opinion, heroes exist in different degrees, like great men and women: some are even greater than others. But in essence, I believe that a hero is a person who risks his or her own life—maybe even losing it—in a selfless, successful effort to save the life of another. For example, if a mother dives into a river to save her struggling child, she isn’t really a hero; but if she dives into a river to save a struggling child unknown to her, she is clearly a hero if she is successful and if not, she certainly behaved heroically. Likewise, acts of self-defense, even when the lives of others also are at stake, do not quite rise to the level of heroism, although they may be courageous. In addition, the degree of individual heroism grows with various factors, such as nobility of purpose, the degree of risk, and so on. So wartime itself does not produce heroes; instead, it awakens the giants among us.

Love is what I had (I was ten) Holy, mother of god, we are in the shower together he bubbled up yet not covered up, and back down will it around until I would come, I got some just call me, he was just enjoying me being cute, he washed my hair and played with my body, like my boobs feeling the and rubbing, suck, and kissing them, flicking with his fingers and others, HOT steamy water pouring on our head, as we were hugging it out, and do it all. Rubbing my legs and crap- I say freak, yeah, but I don’t swear like that! I fasten the garter around his hip's legs side to side around his hips, and as I am arching my back to slip the silk stocking off my toes, I unclasped my bar for him to see them fall, as we go to bed for the night, we were body unstop of body, and we even had our toes laced, together on one foot, like our hands. I have to bite my lip to stop my impatient moan from escaping, yet it all comes out of me. Scorching flush rivalries over my skin, my face hot and red that down there pink feeling has a handprint on my body. My figure is shaking with shock at the news of us doing this tonight at this age. A baby they say I show them? No freaking way, no way should I be doing this yet they will never- ever no, NO WAY!!! Unserviceable my awareness is tiresome to grasp this staggering bit of data. Of why… Like a small child gets out and the woman is here to say, I’m downhearted, helplessly trying to fit everything together in my mind, like I should some time you have to say what the hell and go with it and piss on them. My inner goddess is quickly losing my virginity, the light in the room fading recklessly as I see it all there looking at it deeply, but I can’t settle on that now. I am not sure we're ready for all of this just yet. Gritty again I feel as I work my way in, I scan the room for anything I might have elapsed to say when my eyes fall on my ribbons on the wall. I would say anything to make him think about not going in so fast, yet I want it all. The blinking to every downward moment, seeing it all so fast, what to do, it was hard, not slow and good, I don’t remember it all.

I've since learned that when you lose your same sex parent as a child, it's very common to believe that you, too, will die at the same age as your parent, or when your child is the same age you were. It's a kind of 'instinctive' knowledge, like knowing if you jump into your bed from far enough away, the monsters aren't allowed to grab your ankles.

It is most noticeable when they describe childhood experiences that were free of pain and fear. They could enjoy their encounters with nature, for example, without hurting the mother or making her feel insecure, reducing her power, or endangering her equilibrium. It is remarkable how these attentive, lively, and sensitive children, who can, for example, remember exactly how they discovered the sunlight in bright grass at the age of four, at eight were unable to “notice anything” or show any curiosity about their pregnant mother, or were “not at all” jealous at the birth of a sibling. It is also remarkable how, at the age of two, such a child could be left alone and “be good” while soldiers forced their way into the house and searched it, suffering the terrifying intrusion quietly and without crying. These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. She cannot even experience them secretly, “just for herself”; she will fail to experience them at all. But they will nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.

A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. But they will nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event. Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear.

Children can be alone without anyone knowing it, even when they're surrounded by love. Yes, I must have been an odd child, though it didn't show so much at first. I went about on my own, and was hardly ever with others my age. ... The person I was with most often was my mother. No doubt we were much alike--both serious. We walked and talked with each other as if we were the same age and had the same experience of life. In fact, neither of us knew much about it. She was quite untouched by what is usually called by that name--by all the meanness, malice and confusion which men call life and which they pride themselves on knowing so well. She knew only the simple things: what is was like to bear children and then lose them, what is was like to love a man who had been young and strong and who was growing toil-worn like herself. Such things she knew, and it may be called enough.

I was told once that to lose a child to adoption is like losing a child to death. But it isn’t. It’s worse. Death is final. You grieve, accept and eventually move on. It is irreversible. When a baby is taken for adoption and placed with another mother, the grief is far harder to bear. I would always know that somewhere out there was my son. A little boy growing up in a new family. He would be unaware of me but not a day would go by without me thinking about him. Death had to be easier than that.