It's amazing the little things your fathers can pass down through you by just doing things. That through their actions you learn how to be tender, kind, loving despite how simple the problem is. I remember by dad pulling a sliver out of my foot one summer and the sliver broke so he had to dig deeper with the needle to get it and I was screaming and crying with pain. When it was done he gave me a love and rubbed my injured foot and then told me to buck up and that I was making a big deal out of nothing. But when I was really hurting, or sick, or injured he was there by my side in an instant taking care of me with tender loving care. Sadly these are all past tense memories and I have very few present memories to match them in quantity and quality.
Unfortunately from my Fathers actions and observing him I have also learned to be unkind and unloving. It's pain full and a strange transition when one moment of your life you are being given love and learning how to give in return and then having it being withheld from you. Luckily I was smart enough not to put that part of my fathers lessons that he past to me into practice, but I will practice and take to heart the good lessons he thought me through his example.
So what is some things you guys have learned from your fathers or mothers, or both?
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Alisha, I enjoyed the fact that you responded to a poem without a prompt. This shows us that your first reaction to the poem was to relate it to your own personal experiences. I think that is one of the great things about reading poetry , it recreates memories of our own, taking us back to a certain moment or event where we didn’t really have the words to describe what we were feeling. I agree that a parent can give us gifts through examples, even if those examples are what they didn’t do. Thank you for sharing your insightful memories.
ReplyDeleteIt is a truth universally acknowledged that if a poem doesn't evoke some personal emotion, it must be crap. I think Ms. Austen would even agree to that. It is vital that a poem make you feel something, even if it is negative.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that you related this to your personal experience speaks volumes about the author's ability to help you relate to them or their situation.
I appreciate you mentioning that some of those vital experiences from your youth are not so common in your life today. I think that as we continue to grow it becomes more difficult to have those quality moments. Sadly, we need them as much in adulthood as we do in childhood, but they are often few and far between.