There are all sorts of families," Tom's grandmother had remarked, and over the following few weeks Tom became part of the Casson family, as Micheal and Sarah and Derek-from-the-camp had done before him.He immediately discovered that being a member of the family was very different from being a welcome friend. If you were a Casson family member, for example, and Eve drifted in from the shed asking, "Food? Any ideas? Or shall we not bother?" then you either joined in the search of the kitchen cupboards or counted the money in the housekeeping jam jar and calculated how many pizzas you could afford. Also, if you were a family member you took care of Rose, helped with homework (Saffron and Sarah were very strict about homework), unloaded the washing machine, learned to fold up Sarah's wheelchair, hunted for car keys, and kept up the hopeful theory that in the event of a crisis Bill Casson would disengage himself from his artistic life in London and rush home to help.

As a young man I started searching for my own identity by looking into family, friends and insideMyself. My mother always taught us to live free even when confined, meaning “never let anyone break you down physically or mentally.” Since my living environment was so heavily impacted with violence and illegal activity I found myself adapting to social norms that later in my adult life would negatively affect me. For example, certain physical reactions that were acceptable, as a child would give you a reputation on the street as tough guy, don’t mess with him. The same mentality later in life, as a man would label you as a predator of some sort and a woman abuser. It was hard to understand the true value of a man and all his worth and everything he is capable of achieving, when you’re surrounded by pimps, hustlers and con men that all may make more money than the men with trade jobs and have more of an appealing lifestyle for the short- term progress.

Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.

Two weeks ago, Aaron and Isaac, I learned your mother Laura has breast cancer. My heart feels impaled. These words, so useless and feeble. Laura is only thirty-five years old. Her next birthday will be in only three days. I write this letter to you, my sons, with the hope that one day in the future you will read it and understand what happened to our family.Together, your mother and I have created and nurtured an unbreakable bond that has transformed us into an unlikely team. A Chicano from El Paso, Texas. A Jew from Concord, Massachusetts. I want you to know your mother. She has given me hope when I have felt none; she has offered me kindness when I have been consumed by bitterness. I believe I have taught her how to be tough and savvy and how to achieve what you want around obstacles and naysayers.Our hope is that the therapies we are discussing with her doctors will defeat her cancer. But a great and ominous void has suddenly engulfed us at the beginning of our life as a family. This void suffocates me.

She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn't true, and she knows that now--people love different people in different ways--but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little. I look as though I just can't make it, she looks like can't nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful. I think that's why Sis was always in front of that damn mirror all the time, when we were kids. She was saying, 'I don't care. I got me.' Of course, this only made her come on stronger than ever, which was the last effect she desired: but that's the way we are and that's how we can sometimes get so fucked up. Anyway, she's past all that. She knows who she is, or, at least, she knows who she damn well isn't.

Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.

But we left camp after a while and we was driving in a real spooky place cause all the roads up near camp are dark and in the woods and we had to drive for a while to get to a highway cause there was no street lights or anything and nothing but woods and my dad asked me if I had a good time and I told him I did, but that’s really a lie and I felt like telling him what it was like at that mean old camp, but I thought he’d get mad and tell me I’m making it up and I thought I’d tell him some other time like Febuary and cause I didn’t think he’d believe me anyway, but so I changed my mind and then I thought I should tell him now cause he’ll wonder howcome I never told him sooner, so when he said that’s a nasty gash and when he said what did I do, stumble on the trail and hit a big rock or something? I told him no and I told him that lots of bad things happened to me at camp and that I never want to go there again cause I hate it and I almost cried. But he said I always had a bibid emigination cause he’s sure it wasn’t that bad! And I don’t know about those big words either, but what he said made me kind of mad cause grownups always think they know what happened to you better than you do yourself.

ဘဝမွာ မိဘရယ္ ၊ သားသမီးရယ္ ၊ ညီအစ္ကိုေမာင္ႏွမရယ္ ၊ ေနာက္ဆံုးလင္မယားဆိုတာေတာင္ မေတာ္တဆ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ၾကတာမို႔ တစ္ေယာက္နဲ႔တစ္ေယာက္ မတန္တဆ မေမွ်ာ္မွန္းထိုက္ဘူး ၊ မလိုခ်င္ မေတာင္းခံထိုက္ဘူး ။ ေပးသမွ် ကိုသာ ေက်းဇူးတတင္ ယူထိုက္တယ္ ။

People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything’s going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lecherous uncles and crumbling grandparents. The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. It was not normal, but surreal; not humdrum, but filled with event; not ordinary, but bizarre. He remembered with what excitement he had listened, at the age of twenty, to the Reith Lectures delivered on BBC Radio by Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist and interpreter of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, a year earlier, had succeeded Noel Annan as provost of King’s. “Far from being the basis of the good society,” Leach had said, “the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Yes! he thought. Yes! That is a thing I also know. The families in the novels he later wrote would be explosive, operatic, arm-waving, exclamatory, wild. People who did not like his books would sometimes criticize these fictional families for being unrealistic—not “ordinary” enough. However, readers who did like his books said to him, “Those families are exactly like my family.

We can't leave the past in the past because, the past is who we are. It's like saying I wish I could forget English. So, there is no leaving the past in the past. It doesn't mean the past has to define and dominate everything in the future. The fact that I had a temper in my teens doesn't mean I have to be an angry person for the rest of my life. It just means that I had allot to be angry about but, didn't have the language and the understanding to know what it was and how big it was. I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment which is what is called having a bad temper but, it just means that I underestimated the environment and my anger was telling me how wide and deep child abuse is in society but, I didn't understand that consciously so I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment but, it wasn't. There is almost no amount of anger that's proportionate to the degree of child abuse in the world. The fantasy that you can not be somebody that lived through what you lived through is damaging to yourself and to your capacity to relate to others. People who care about you, people who are going to grow to love you need to know who you are and that you were shaped by what you've experienced for better and for worse. There is a great deal of challenge in talking about these issues. Lots of people in this world have been hurt as children. Most people have been hurt in this world as children and when you talk honestly and openly it's very difficult for people. This is why it continues and continues.If you can get to the truth of what happened if you can understand why people made the decisions they've made even if you dont agree with the reason for those decisions knowing the reasons for those decisions is enormously important in my opinion. The more we know the truth of history the more confidently we can face the future without self blame.

إن قاعدة اللقاء في ظاهرة الزوجية الكونية هي التخالف، وليست التوافق، فاللقاء الخصب المنجب يجب أن يتم بين متخالفين ومتباينين، ومن ثم فإن العلاقة بين الرجل والمرأة تقوم على التخالف، على المستويات العضوية والعقلية والنفسية، وهذا التخالف هو الشرط الأساس لوجود ظاهرة (التكامل) والتعاون، حيث يظهر لكل واحد من الزوجين أن كمال البنية المشتركة بينهما - وهو الأسرة - لا يأتي من أي منهما على انفراد، وإنما من خلال اللقاء الإيجابي بينهما، وتكميل أحدهما للآخر.

Comparing marriage to football is no insult. I come from the South where football is sacred. I would never belittle marriage by saying it is like soccer, bowling, or playing bridge, never. Those images would never work, only football is passionate enough to be compared to marriage. In other sports, players walk onto the field, in football they run onto the field, in high school ripping through some paper, in college (for those who are fortunate enough) they touch the rock and run down the hill onto the field in the middle of the band. In other sports, fans cheer, in football they scream. In other sports, players ‘high five’, in football they chest, smash shoulder pads, and pat your rear. Football is a passionate sport, and marriage is about passion.In football, two teams send players onto the field to determine which athletes will win and which will lose, in marriage two families send their representatives forward to see which family will survive and which family will be lost into oblivion with their traditions, patterns, and values lost and forgotten. Preparing for this struggle for survival, the bride and groom are each set up. Each has been led to believe that their family’s patterns are all ‘normal,’ and anyone who differs is dense, naïve, or stupid because, no matter what the issue, the way their family has always done it is the ‘right’ way. For the premarital bride and groom in their twenties, as soon as they say, “I do,” these ‘right’ ways of doing things are about to collide like two three hundred and fifty pound linemen at the hiking of the ball. From “I do” forward, if not before, every decision, every action, every goal will be like the line of scrimmage. Where will the family patterns collide?In the kitchen. Here the new couple will be faced with the difficult decision of “Where do the cereal bowls go?” Likely, one family’s is high, and the others is low. Where will they go now? In the bathroom. The bathroom is a battleground unmatched in the potential conflicts. Will the toilet paper roll over the top or underneath? Will the acceptable residing position for the lid be up or down? And, of course, what about the toothpaste? Squeeze it from the middle or the end? But the skirmishes don’t stop in the rooms of the house, they are not only locational they are seasonal. The classic battles come home for the holidays. Thanksgiving. Which family will they spend the noon meal with and which family, if close enough, will have to wait until the nighttime meal, or just dessert if at all? Christmas. Whose home will they visit first, if at all? How much money will they spend on gifts for his family? for hers? Then comes for many couples an even bigger challenge – children of their own! At the wedding, many couples take two candles and light just one often extinguishing their candle as a sign of devotion. The image is Biblical. The Bible is quoted a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. What few prepare them for is the upcoming struggle, the conflict over the unanswered question: the two shall become one, but which one? Two families, two patterns, two ways of doing things, which family’s patterns will survive to play another day, in another generation, and which will be lost forever? Let the games begin.

Updated quote:Billy sipped the last of his coffee from the mug and shut down his laptop. 1,000 words wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t as bad as no words at all. It hadn’t exactly been a great couple of years, and the royalties from his first few books were only going to hold out so much longer. Even if he didn’t have anything else to worry about, there was always Sara to consider. Sara with her big, blue eyes so like her mother’s.He sat for a moment longer thinking about his daughter and all they’d been through since Wendy had passed. Then he picked up his mug with a long sigh and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it in the sink.When he came back into his little living room and the quiet of one A.M., he wasn’t surprised to find her there, over to the side of the bookshelf hovering close to the floor, just beyond the couch.Wendy.Her eyes were cold and intense in death, angry and spiteful in a way he’d never seen them when she was alive. What once had been beautiful was now a horror and a threat, one that he’d known far too well in the years since she’d died. He and Sara both.He stood where he was, looking at her as she glared up at him. Part of her lower perspective was caused by kneeling next to the shelf, but he knew from the many times she’d walked or run through a room that death had also reduced her, made her no higher than four or four and half feet when she’d been six in life. She was like a child, trapped there on the cusp between youth and coming adulthood. Crushed and broken down into a husk, an entity with no more love for them than a snake.Familiar tears stung his eyes, but he blinked them away, letting his anger and frustration rise in place of his grief.“Fuck you! What right do you have to be here? Why won’t you let Sara and I be? We loved you! We still love you!”She didn’t respond; she never did. It was as if she used up all of her words before she died, and now all that was left was the pain and the anger of her death. The empty lack of true life in her eyes left him cold. He didn’t say anything else to her. It’s all a waste and he knows it. She frightens him as much as she makes him angry. Spite lives in every corner of her body, and he’s reached his limit on how long he can see this perversion, this nightmare of what once meant so much to him.He walked past the bookshelf and through the doorway. He and Sara’s rooms are up above. With an effort he resisted the urge to look back down the hall to see if she has followed. He refused to treat his wife like a boogeyman no matter how much she has come to fit that mold. He could feel her eyes burn into him from somewhere back at the edge of the living room. The sensation left a cold trail of fear up his back as he walked the last four feet to the stairs and then up. He could hear her feet rush across the floor behind him and the rustle of fabric as she darted up the stairs after him. His pulse and his feet sped up as she grew closer, but he was never as fast as she was.Soon she slipped up the steps under his foot, shoving him aside as she crawled on her hands and feet through his legs and up the last few stairs above. As she passed through his legs, herpresence never more clear than when it’s shoving right against him, he smelled the clean and medicinal smells of the operating room and the cloying stench of blood. For a moment he’s back in that room with her, listening to her grunt and keen as she works so hard at pushing Sara into the world, and then he’s back looking up at her as she slowly considers the landing and where to go from there.His voice was a whisper, one that pleads. “Wendy?

Більшість людей - самотні й беззахисні. Вони хапаються одне за одного, тримаються, прив'язуються одне до одного, заважають одне одному жити. І все тому, що самі розуміють випадковість і умовність своїх стосунків. Більшість людей і живуть разом випадково, вони від початку переконують себе, що мають бути разом, а потім довго-довго мучаться. І жоден досвід тут не допоможе. Досвід не дає тобі нічого, він, скоріше, чогось тебе позбавляє, скажімо, ілюзій. Люди багато говорять про свої почуття, проте в більшості випадків навіть не знають, якого кольору очі в того, з ким вони сплять. За рік вони вкотре посварились і розійшлись. Але згодом помирились і далі живуть разом, тому що люблять одне одного, а все інше, за великим рахунком, мало кого обходить.