Life Gets Better by Wendy Lustbader

Author:Wendy Lustbader
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Her daughter’s lament was a fundamental blow to her view of herself. Her first impulse was to fend it off, to show her daughter how wrong she was and how her complaint held little merit. The pain was so intense that she wanted to say awful things and withdraw. Instead, she held her tongue and asked for a cooling-off period.

At first, she just waited for her daughter to come to her senses. Then, she learned that everyone in her family felt they could never quite measure up. She began considering how she had managed to convey such exacting standards to her children. “For a while, I couldn’t figure it out, how this could have happened. It was outside my awareness, completely against my intention.” Reviewing an array of memories, she saw how her displeasure had unwittingly leaked out—through gestures that communicated disappointment, a tone of voice that expressed irritation, barbs disguised as jests. “It made me cry when I realized that what my daughter had said was true. Then I cried when I saw her finally relaxing in my company, after I eased up. She was able to just be herself.”

This woman also saw how she had oppressed herself with excessively high expectations: “What I had been putting onto my kids was half of what I had been laying on myself over the years.” She had carried a perpetual sense of not having made enough of herself, somehow not attaining all she had been meant to achieve. With the impact of these realizations, she was able to sit back and take stock of her own accomplishments for the first time. “I have the feeling of starting over, of taking things easier. It’s a whole new life for me.”

Making room within our self-conception for what comes to the surface on such occasions is a choice. We can gather up our hurts and doubts, daring to confront these uneasy layers of ourselves, or we can back away from further scrutiny. A willingness to be unsettled is essential to gaining new ground, and in later life we may have the verve to go through with it and allow ourselves to be shaken up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.