And I suppose for some lucky souls it can be about both.
However, I likely don't fall into that category. For me, writing started out to be about coping with my older cousin dying when I was 8 years old. He died in a car accident when he was driving a car having just got his driver's license when he was 16 years old. He broke his neck running into a house with a car. And I needed some way to find to cope with this so I began to write about what I felt as an only child being raised by my parents who were 40 and 37 at the time I was 8 years old. This began something in my life. I had started out doodling pictures and making ellipse shaped flying saucers while doodling on notebook paper in school. I would draw pictures of Mt. Shasta with a UFO ellipse shape next to it for example because this sort of thing entertained me. Then at age 8 also my parents were given a piano (an upright) by someone in their church so I could get piano lessons which was a really good thing for me. My parents were ministers even though they also worked at jobs outside their church. So, for my Dad it was mostly a Sunday daytime, then Monday night sometimes Tuesday night, definitely Thursday night and then they took me Friday night to Youth Night at our church while they were in charge of a church from my ages 6 to 12 when my mother's father died. Then my Mom sort of had a nervous breakdown when her Dad died (because of all the unresolved stuff between them) and I was sort of to some degree set free from being the "Preacher's son" with all the good and bad stuff around all that. My Dad still led the Wednesday night groups ongoing though and sometimes Fundamentals on Tuesday night as well throughout my teens but my mother sort of withdrew a lot and then started working at Sears Roebucks part time.
But, writing I found (whether I showed it to anyone or not) helped keep my balanced and sane throughout my life. When I was having difficulty staying alive my mother at one point picked up about a foot deep of my writings and threw them all away because what I was writing scared her and I was pretty angry about this. But, after all, she was my mother and I sort of had to deal with this because what I wrote sometimes scared her.
Though she was an intuitive and never had a bad thing to say about anyone, I cannot say that she was a fully empowered person. Periodically, my Dad would make her cry and then she would get on a plane and leave for a couple of weeks to visit her relatives and friends in Seattle. The first time she did this we lived in El Cajon which is a suburb of San Diego, California and neither my Dad or I knew if she was coming back. However, 2 weeks later she flew back to us and to her Mom who lived with us who helped raise me a lot.
So, my mother wasn't taught so much to be "Captain of her own ship and master of her own destiny" like my Dad and I were. Women in the 20s and 30s were not prepared much more than caring for their children and their husband unless they went to college which my mother did not do. Instead when her father left when she was 18 she financially supported her mother for 10 years instead until she met my Dad and married him.
Since my Dad was Valedictorian of his High School Class he began debating with me by the time I was 8 years old about whatever I was interested in debating about. It didn't matter what it was he wanted me to get to the bottom of EVERYTHING in life and become a completely free thinker like he was. He wanted me never to give up on the things I believed in and just keep searching for the truth about everything no matter what happened in life.
And so I have.
By God's Grace
No comments:
Post a Comment