My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexities of parenting and the desire to protect one's children from hardship.
In this quote, Dorothy Allison expresses her experience as a parent raising her son, Wolf, in a middle-class environment despite her own challenging upbringing. She highlights the contrast between their lives, acknowledging her efforts to shield him from the struggles she faced in her childhood, which illustrates a common parental instinct to provide a better life for the next generation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the challenges and triumphs of parenting.
Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
I guess what really forms you as a person is what you do within your family to receive love or attention. In my family, what you had to do to receive attention was to have good conversation at the dinner table or for me to do well at school, and those were really my focuses because that was what was valued the most.
My mother... would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, 'I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?' You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
I now see that is a woman's God-given role to tend to the home and take care of the children: it's just that the entire planet is our home, and every child on it is one of our children.
I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
Yes, your family history has some sad chapters. But your history doesn't have to be your future. The generational garbage can stop here and now.
I describe family values as responsibility towards others, increase of tolerance, compromise, support, flexibility. And essentially the things I call the silent song of life-the continuous process of mutual accommodation without which life is impossible.
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