post 4.1.1.1 Dad remembers his mother

My childhood conclusion from the stories that my parents told, or from the stories that my Father told, to which my Mother concurred silently, was that the bad woman, the bad mother, had injured him in a permanent way, leaving him maimed and incomplete; and it was up to us good women, the good wife and good daughters, to support him and allow him to function and feel happy. And the most important part of being a good woman was to listen while he talked, while he declaimed, while he pontificated.  The bad woman argued with him.  The bad woman said that things had been a different way, and that was bad.



Arguing would destroy him. You could see him clench when someone questioned his worldview.  He clenched so fast, sometimes, that his breath hissed in.
  He rocked back on his heels, his head tipping back so that, if his eyes had been open, he'd have been looking at the ceiling, rigid with the enormity of what he was having to bear without violence.  

So I listened. Silently and out of love and duty.  

Of course, this is a child's memory.  I have no idea how often these rants I was silent through or how silent I actually was.  They stuck in the memory, though, and had their effect.  

Waiting became my standard operating procedure.  Waiting for the rant to end.  Waiting until I was old enough to move out and make decisions based on what I believed instead of what my Father was reacting to.  Waiting until I had something worth saying.

Hint: If you spend all your tie waiting, what you learn to do is wait.

post 2.2.1.0 Family Pictures

When I clear my desk, I'll write tasks and categories on 3x5 cards. That will feel literary, if only temporarily. I bought a file cabinet to sort my Mother's life and estate into, to sort her pictures and her Mother's pictures and her grandmother's pictures into. I have become the family archivist. 

There are days and weeks of work to do there. Possibly months. No one cares.

On the internet, there a term: bit rot. The internet is heavily interlinked, but sites are withdrawn or stop working all the time. Unless you comb through all your old work, testing links, your work will eventually be filled with links that go nowhere and attach to nothing. Bit rot.

Pictures are like that. Unless they are labeled, with time, place, and cast of characters, and unless you regularly pull them out and tell younger relatives the story of that time, that place, those people, the pictures will eventually suffer bit rot. Your children, grandchildren, nieces, whatever will look at them and feel no connection beyond, perhaps, 'who the hell are these people?'