At 10:15 PM +0000 28/3/02, domfox wrote:
>she was a normal girl, not a victim of abuse or violence or poverty or
>neglect, and that was a crowd of normal children.
Somebody, I can't remember who it was, did an analysis of Hitler's
childhood (a typical bourgeois German upbringing) and said it made
the perfect conditions for producing a Fascist dictator. I have a
feeling that a "normal" English upbringing might not be so
different... And I suppose I had a fairly "normal" childhood, maybe
aside from moving three countries before I was seven. My parents
divorced when I was 14; and I guess I get exercised abour children
being blamed for behaviours that result from some kind of neglect or
abuse, because I and my sisters were roundly blamed for how we
behaved afterwards; we "went off the rails", we "stuffed it up", we
were (and still are) "failures". Neither then nor later was there
any acknowledgement that the divorce happened to _us_ as well
("children are tough, dear"), and both my parents still maintain the
fiction that they were "civilised". I have often thought that it
wasn't the separation as such, but the violence of the atmosphere at
home for years beforehand, that caused the real damage; my parents
fought every night, when we were in bed, and I remember creeping to
the kitchen door and listening to their accusations; at one point my
mother stabbed my father; and I was the major emotional prop for both
my parents (and my sisters until I left home) through my mother's
breakdown &c. None of this is especially unusual, but I do know that
it caused me a fairly radical emotional dissociation which has taken
most of my adult life to undo (as far as is possible, which will
never be complete). That dissociation can result in cruel
behaviours; I would probably have been cruel if I could have been,
but I didn't have enough power as a child, and I also remember my
school uniform was full of holes, and I was very shy and introverted,
so I was bullied by othger children instead. I couldn't wait to grow
up and leave school... Maybe the cruelty came later, in adult
behaviours which I couldn't fully understand; and I have often
thought that writing requires, at some profound level, a measure of
cruelty. All this seems to me unfortunate, but, to return to our
earlier discussion, I can't think of it as evil; life seems too
complex to fit into such absolutes. My parents weren't evil, those
other children weren't evil; and no doubt all of this plays into my
wanting to write, though I was writing very early, before most of
this happened. But maybe it's possible that such situations can
create the right conditions for the kinds of moral choices which I do
think of as evil.
I think from different viewpoints we're actually talking about the
same thing, the necessity to understand the reality of what happens
to children, to acknowledge the actuality of the passions which occur
in their lives. (No, I don't feel sorry for your son! Perhaps you
pity my poor children, having to put up with me...) This without
romanticising childhood, which is another way of avoiding its
realities. Which comes down, I suppose, to respecting the otherness
of children; that they are not merely projections of their parents'
or other adults' desires. A bit of a tall order, when the rights of
most adults are not respected either, but still.
Best
Alison
--
"The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
Albert Camus
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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