days of the week: Parents are People

Posts here at "days of the week" are often lovely; there's a heart-breaking one about miscarriage here, for example. But read this too:

days of the week: Parents are People: "I've always suspected that in the minds of children, mothers are more props than people, and that even as children turn into adults, it is hard for most of us to concieve of mother as 'person' whose existence is complicated by ambuigity and desire. Perhaps this is why psychiatrists were in their heyday so keen on blaming mothers -- they were still seeing us through childish eyes, seeing us as need-meeting machines rather than regular folks.

What complicates this notion that mother is not a person, somehow, that for many of us, mother also serves as the first model of what it means to be human, how we should move through our days.
"