Parenting and Big Bad Dilemmas
Jul. 3rd, 2015 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraFinally, I got the framing device right for the Eleanor story. This was an enormous relief. I had to watch umpteen million episodes of Million Dollar Listing Manhattan and tromp around 10 miles through jungle-like underbrush to achieve the necessary state of sunyata.
Of course, I am booked socially for the weekend starting today so I won’t be able to ride that particular wave any further for a couple of days.
Max texted me from the airport on his way back from Guatemala.
Robin and I had a rather tense phone conversation that made me so angry that I actually talked to B about it. Robin’s doing an internship with the Museum of the Earth in which he grinds up rock samples of potentially oil-containing rock from all across the globe to look at their diatom content. The lab is having equipment calibration problems and it doesn’t appear that the project will be able to model its predictive tool before running out of time. I made some small joke about how real science should be able to accommodate shifting hypotheses, and he hit the ceiling.
This made me furious. I make jokes about everything – Well. I try not to make them about cancer diagnoses – and if he can’t accept that by now, fuck him. Apparently monthly support payments, numerous monetary gifts on top of that, and paying for his phone aren’t enough to establish a presumption of good faith.
B must have said something to him – I got a “Thank you!” text with a selfie last night.
I’m still kinda pissed.
It dawns on me that neither of my kids likes me very much. Well. Max likes me, or likes what he thinks is me, but he doesn’t really know me. Thinks of me as this weird eccentric person who’s considerably less important than his peer group. The last day I was in California, we had this enormous fight because some of my few remaining possessions were all over a house that he hadn’t lived in in over two years, and he somehow thought it was obnoxious of me to demand them back.
I suppose kids never really get their parents. It would be too upsetting to see their parents as anything other than the embodiment of various archetypal qualities, both benign and annoying.
But really, I don’t ever want to be in a position where I’m dependent upon either of my children for anything.
So 20 or so years from now when mortality has me in its cross-hairs, I’m really gonna have to come up with a plan for a quick exit.
###
The thing I have to come up with now for the Eleanor story is some – bwahahaa-a-a-a – unspeakable evil that her father’s ghost is trying to perpetuate on the young girl. In Turn of the Screw, James’s always discreet and circular prose suggests that Peter Quint and the suicidal governess are possessing the bodies of Flora and Miles so that they can have sex. Pedophilia! Always a Big Bad. I’m not sure I’m really up for discreetly suggesting incestuous pedophilia, though.
What should the Big Bad be?
Of course, I am booked socially for the weekend starting today so I won’t be able to ride that particular wave any further for a couple of days.
Max texted me from the airport on his way back from Guatemala.
Robin and I had a rather tense phone conversation that made me so angry that I actually talked to B about it. Robin’s doing an internship with the Museum of the Earth in which he grinds up rock samples of potentially oil-containing rock from all across the globe to look at their diatom content. The lab is having equipment calibration problems and it doesn’t appear that the project will be able to model its predictive tool before running out of time. I made some small joke about how real science should be able to accommodate shifting hypotheses, and he hit the ceiling.
This made me furious. I make jokes about everything – Well. I try not to make them about cancer diagnoses – and if he can’t accept that by now, fuck him. Apparently monthly support payments, numerous monetary gifts on top of that, and paying for his phone aren’t enough to establish a presumption of good faith.
B must have said something to him – I got a “Thank you!” text with a selfie last night.
I’m still kinda pissed.
It dawns on me that neither of my kids likes me very much. Well. Max likes me, or likes what he thinks is me, but he doesn’t really know me. Thinks of me as this weird eccentric person who’s considerably less important than his peer group. The last day I was in California, we had this enormous fight because some of my few remaining possessions were all over a house that he hadn’t lived in in over two years, and he somehow thought it was obnoxious of me to demand them back.
I suppose kids never really get their parents. It would be too upsetting to see their parents as anything other than the embodiment of various archetypal qualities, both benign and annoying.
But really, I don’t ever want to be in a position where I’m dependent upon either of my children for anything.
So 20 or so years from now when mortality has me in its cross-hairs, I’m really gonna have to come up with a plan for a quick exit.
###
The thing I have to come up with now for the Eleanor story is some – bwahahaa-a-a-a – unspeakable evil that her father’s ghost is trying to perpetuate on the young girl. In Turn of the Screw, James’s always discreet and circular prose suggests that Peter Quint and the suicidal governess are possessing the bodies of Flora and Miles so that they can have sex. Pedophilia! Always a Big Bad. I’m not sure I’m really up for discreetly suggesting incestuous pedophilia, though.
What should the Big Bad be?
