I got all my polishing done. I thought I had downloaded the interior, the next step after the new cover. But I seemed to have lost my file. By three am, I couldn't keep my eyes open any more. I need to take lessons on this whole computer life. I have learned much over the years, but I still feel I'm coming from another century. I love and am fascinated by the technology, but I'm still a stranger in a strange world.
I sense the tension in world view with my children lately, too. I wonder if this is how our parents, the children of the adults of the roaring twenties felt in the late sixties. The late sixties truly rocked the world. The twenties I am told were a loose time before the Great Depression. My parents were the children of parents living in rebellious times. Our grandparents tried to shelter them.
Our parents felt they grew up in hard times, but moral times. They shielded us from want as much as they could. Some youth rebelled. I guess youth rebel.
As the whole standards jumbled, culminating in 1968, I remember as a kid, looking to the culture, absorbing the new values and my parents displaying a bit of clueless processing. I'm sure not as naive as I thought at the time. Divorce became easier then and the stories of couples splitting after twenty seven years or more, shattered complacency. I feared even my parents divorcing, but of course that was far from reality. The culture changes influenced my thinking in my preteen years.
In my late teens and early twenties, I veered from some of my parents' held beliefs. The ideas of the older ones in my generation affected me. As I grew up more, as an adult, I found myself returning more to ideas from my parents' generation.
I taught my children these ideas and values, as did my husband. Yet they as young adults question many cultural beliefs. It is not easy being straight, white, Jesus believing Americans any more, unless you are a Duck. Are we caricatured as the Archie Bunkers of our day? I wonder. Changes crash in the culture and I think, is this how the parents felt in the late sixties? A little off centered, staring at children you held, nursed, changed their diapers, fed, and basically poured your whole life into their lives so they will be great adults, now feeling they are strangers. I'm not disappointed, I only feel I'm peering into their world, but not a participant.
Maria, in my novel, deals with some of this. Mothers have life come out of them, when they give birth. The control we want is usually benign, that our children will have a better life. We want happiness, contentedness, joy and sometimes try to do every thing in our power to insure that bliss. Even as we know that is impossible, we find our lives revolving around that hope. As all nature, desires can run a muck, and evil enters. As King Solomon declared in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. I think like seasons, the culture turmoil rises and falls. Children have to find their own way at some point onto adulthood, we all know too well.
OK, now back to those files, so you can read a story instead!
