When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices by Judith Viorst

When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices by Judith Viorst

Author:Judith Viorst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster


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STRIKING BACK

When a husband tells a wife

Stop screaming at the children

And he isn’t crazy about the drapes

And why doesn’t she learn where Thailand is

And maybe she should cut her hair

(All of which, needless to say, are implicit attacks on her intelligence, taste, desirability, and maternal instincts)

A wife

Can only

Strike back.

So sometimes I try

My mother’s technique

Which is silence for a week.

A brooding stare into the ruined future.

And no rouge for that look of

You are making me so miserable you are giving me

A fatal illness.

It occasionally works.

And sometimes I try

Weeping, cursing, expressions of bitter remorse.

And don’t ever expect to see the children again,

Which I often follow with phone calls pricing suites

At expensive hotels.

I’ve had limited success.

There is also the psychoanalytic confrontation

Which entails informing him

(More, of course, in sorrow than in anger)

That his sadistic treatment of those who love him is a sign of

unconscious feelings of inadequacy and

He needs help.

I’ve dropped this approach.

But there is always

Total recall

During which all the wrongs he has done me since first we met are laid before him.

And when this is combined

With refusing to go to the Greenbergs’ annual costume party,

Tossing and moaning in my sleep,

And threatening to commit suicide, take a lover, and drop out of the PTA because why try to save the school system when my entire universe is falling apart,

I start to feel

I’m really

Striking back.



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