noticelifewriting

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A Reflection on Creating a Commonplace Book

A commonplace book is a way for a reader to catalog the interesting, perplexing, moving, and useful words, phrases, passages, and thoughts they come across while reading. Commonplace books act as memory holders as well as memory aids. The purpose of a commonplace book is to retain useful information that a writer could possibly incorporate into his own work. For our class, we were not concerned with collecting items for later use. Instead, our goal was to read the assigned texts for the course and curate a commonplace book filled with what resonated with us. We wanted to interact with the text and the authors and use what we found to explore our own thoughts and ruminations. At the beginning of the semester, our class goal for the commonplace book was not as clear to me as it is now. However, the process of constructing my own commonplace book allowed me to negotiate with the complex ideas, themes, and histories we were reading while also furthering my education of what memoirs are as I discussed them, and, in a way, created my own form of life writing.

The first challenge I had while making my commonplace book started at the very beginning of the process and the problem was how should I create the actual “book.” There were so many different avenues I could take that the options became overwhelming. I have kept many journals and composition books before that I filled with ruminations, quotes, poems, and drawings, so, I thought that I could organize my entries in a notebook. As soon as I tried to make the first entry in the notebook, I knew immediately that it wouldn’t work. I felt uninspired and I could not envision how the notebook would turn out in a way that I would be proud of. I abandoned that I idea and began looking for new ways to curate my project.

Last semester, I took the digital portfolio course in which I learned how to build a website and I spent a lot of time learning how to use Wordpress. All students at Agnes Scott College are required to make a digital portfolio in the form of a self-designed website. While working on the portfolio, I learned that I could make a subdomain, which is basically a website within a website. After the notebook idea failed, I thought that I could create a subdomain for my commonplace book. I visited the library guide on how to create a subdomain. With that knowledge, I created the subdomain, which I named Noticing Life Writing based on the course and Professor Stamant’s famous quote “notice what you notice.” However, not too long into the process I began to feel discouraged. It had taken me months of work last semester (and over my four years at Agnes) to build my website. Having to start over from scratch was so daunting that I did not know how to proceed. Consequently, I again searched for a way to house my entries. This led me to create a Tumblr. With Tumblr, you do not have to build an entire website. All I had to do was write a post and pick an image.  After creating a few posts, Tumblr seemed like the best fit and I was finally happy with the format of my commonplace book. Nevertheless, the journey did not end there.

After I had made around twelve posts on my Tumblr, I started thinking about the website again. I never deleted the subdomain I had created and I now had something that I could actually put on the website. I revisited the subdomain, and as a test, I copied and pasted a few of the posts I had made on Tumblr. When I saw the posts on the website I felt reinvigorated. I began looking at themes, and, when I found one that I liked, I felt inspired to keep going. I played around with the theme some more and I started working on the pages. The first page I had was the posts page, which did not require actual building. I moved on to creating an About the Blog page where I explained who I am and what the blog was for. The hardest page to create was the page where I listed the books I had read. I wanted to find a layout that allowed me to display the covers of the book while also linking the viewer to the posts that were made about a certain book. It took me days of sifting through add ons and widgets before I finally found one that worked. After I got the books page finished, the only thing left to do was finish the posts and simply make a page for the reflection.

The posts were both extremely difficult and incredibly enlightening to make. When I first started the posts, they were only analytically focused. However, after the third post, I was like a crash test dummy in the way I slammed into a wall. I couldn’t come up with anything else to say. I made a meeting with the professor to talk about the problem I was having. When I was told that the assignment was not supposed to be difficult and that I should be writing my thoughts, I was able to find new inspiration. Instead of trying to write a thesis-driven essay for each post, I wrote from a more introspective place. I began constructing my posts around personal connections I had to the text, and I realized that I could still be analytical while allowing myself to write what I wanted to write. When I freed myself from the restraints I placed on myself, I was able to write posts more easily.

The entire process of creating a commonplace book allowed me to learn more about myself and write down thoughts I have had for years concerning racism, family dynamics, human mortality, memory, etc.  Each post brought me closer to myself and to the authors as I felt bonded through similar experiences. I felt most connected to bell hooks who comes from a similar background as I do. She discussed her childhood growing up as a black girl and I related to almost everything she wrote. The ability to connect with the authors, as I did with hooks, and my inner self allowed me to create posts that were like my own life writing, giving me an even deeper appreciation for the memoirs we were reading in class. Through this project, I learned how important it is for writers and readers to always be interacting with and challenging the text. It is so easy for a person to forget or to let important words, phrases, passages, perspectives, and messages they read escape their conscious if they are not engaging and negotiating with the text. With my commonplace book, I have stored thoughts and ideas and experiences that have shaped me and will continue to shape me as a person.

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“You would almost think it is the human preference to believe in what doesn’t exist and to dispute, even damn, what does” (198).

Hogan, Linda. The Woman Who Watches Over the World. W.W. Norton &  Company, 2001.

The modern day United States of America is almost perfectly summed up in this quotation from Hogan. One of the main political and social issues in the country at the moment is the debate around climate change. The topic is something that I am always thinking about and that Hogan is also negotiating as well. There are people who choose to believe that climate change is not real though the evidence that climate change exists is undeniably clear. It is so obvious that it is perplexing that people could believe that it is not real. It’s similar to the flat Earth debate, which also seems like it would be obvious to people that the Earth is round. I find myself wondering why people purposefully choose to be ignorant. The clearest answer to me is that they are either afraid and stubborn or they are seeking power. For the former, I think people fear the terrible effect that human actions have on Earth, and they realize the only way to fix the problem is for them to change. They are afraid of the future, but they also don’t want to change their lifestyles. So, they choose to resist the truth. For the latter, this is usually concerning people in positions of power like governments or corporations who benefit from the way things are. They choose to resist the truth in order to keep the power and money they have. As far as this quotation, I think people choose not to believe what is clearly in front of their eyes because it would make them uncomfortable. However, if we are going to have any chance of saving this world, we are going to have to get uncomfortable and BELIEVE in the hard things. You can’t fix something if you don’t believe there is a problem. We all need to come to terms with the effect our presence has on Earth, and then we need to change. 

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“To lose memory and time throws the idea of the self into doubt. It splits apart all the notions of psychology. We humans consist of a unity of selves, the body a juncture, a union where the two roads meet.” (173)

Hogan, Linda. The Woman Who Watches Over the World. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

At many points while reading Hogan’s text, I had moments of existential panic. Her comments on memory, like in the quotation above, was one of the particular points in the novel where I was questioning human existence. I wondered if what makes us who we are as people is just an accumulation of memories, and, if those memories are lost, are we lost as well? When people lose their memories, do they become new people? Is there a core to a person that is unchanged? In psychology, there is a sort of debate of whether people are shaped by their environment (nature) or by their genes (nurture) or both. I am a believer that humans are shaped by both. I feel like the loss of one would irrevocably change a person and their identity. When I think of a person losing their memory, I think about all the ways in which they are and aren’t the same person. Does it even matter if you are the same person or not? For people who regain their memory, do they have to contend with the person they were before the memory loss and the person they became? Can someone be two people at once? Even now as I write this post, I realize I am again questioning human existence and identity and personhood. I don’t really have any answers to these questions, but I do think these are questions that should be thought about. 

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“This is a book about love. It didn’t begin that way. I sat down to write about pain and wrote, instead, about healing, history, and survival” (16).

Hogan, Linda. The Woman Who Watches Over the World. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

When I read these lines in Hogan’s book, I began making my own predictions and assumptions about what she meant and what was going to happen in the text. Throughout the memoir, Hogan describes how her assumptions and expectations were consistently broken, specifically concerning the way she saw love. At first, I saw love and pain as a dichotomy. My idea of love and pain as a dichotomy made me believe that she was going to talk about her experience with pain and how something in her life had imbued her with love or helped her love, which changed her experience of pain. However, what I think both Hogan and I learned is that love is not exactly what we may have thought it to be. Hogan did not receive much emotional and physical affection as a child. This caused her to seek the love she didn’t have. She found that she had created an idea of love that was false. For example, she adopted two girls who were abused in numerous and horrific ways. Hogan believed that simply loving them would be enough, but she realized that love was not a magical band-aid. She saw that love was a kind of pain. While reading her memoir, I also began to understand more about love and it’s nuances. Love can be healing but it can also hurt. It can be painful to love someone even as they are suffering, violent, and cruelly warped by their past like Hogan’s daughter Marie. Hogan’s text allowed me to see exactly how emotions like love and pain were as multidimensional as the humans who experience them.

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All my life he has been the face of hatred;

the blue eyes of the Confederate flag,

the pastry bald of white men pulling wooly

heads up into the dark skirts of trees, 

the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of 

German shepherds, still clenched inside 

the tissue-thin, (still-marching), band-leader 

legs of Black schoolteachers, the single-

minded pupae growing between the legs of 

white boys crossing the tracks, ready to 

force Black girls into fifth-grade positions, 

Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101. (66)

Finney, Nikky. “Dancing with Strom.” Head Off & Split, TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011, pp. 63-68.

In this poem from Finney, she talks about how the face of Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina senator who was opposed to the Civil Rights Act, was the “face of hatred” and how, for her, he is representative of the atrocities committed by white males against black people. When reading this section of the poem, I thought about some of the feelings I have concerning racism. I am a liberal and a part of my own moral code is to oppose injustice, racism, prejudice, violence, etc. However, I find myself having to remind myself of this when I see people, specifically white people, continuing the tradition of racism and prejudice against black people. Recently, there have been so many news stories about police officers beating and killing black people for no reason at all. The color of a black person’s skin seems to automatically set these officers off, and any move (and sometimes no movement at all) a black person makes is a threat. It makes my blood boil seeing black people repeatedly abused, hurt, dehumanized, and murdered by racists. My instinct is to hate all white people when I see this blatant racism aimed at black people. However, I remind myself that it is exactly that kind of thinking that breeds racism and the struggles my people face. I try to direct my feelings in more positive directions. I remind myself that there are white people who are fighting for justice for black people. I remember that these heinous acts are done by individuals, and it is those people who I will hold accountable and towards whom I will direct my rage. 

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The Clitoris

is 9 cm deep 

in the pelvis. 

Most of it scrunched & hidden. 

New studies show

the shy curl

to be longer

than the penis, 

but like Africa,

the continent, 

it is never drawn 

to size.

Mapmakers, and others, who draw

important things for a living,

do not want us to know this. 

Finney, Nikky. “The Clitoris.” Head Off & Split, TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011, pp. 56-57.

Throughout history, women have been made to despise, hide, and change their bodies. When it comes to the female genitalia it is almost a taboo to even discuss it. Women try to hide the fact that they are on their periods, going so far as to hide their feminine products in their clothes when they go to the restroom. Some women may not even understand their own anatomy because a patriarchal and misogynistic society has enshrouded the female body in a cloud of shame. If women are not trying to hide from their body, they are trying to change it. Women are consistently shown images by the media of what a desirable woman should look like. In trying to achieve impossible standards of beauty, women go on insane diets, load up on make-up, change their hair, obsess over clothes, etc. We see the extreme of this body modification in the number of women getting plastic surgery. The fact that society doesn’t want women to be comfortable and rejoice in their bodies as it is should tell us something. I think this male-ruled world wants to govern and manipulate women’s bodies and women’s feelings about their bodies because they know that there is an immeasurable strength and power in the female body. As Finney says, they “do not want us to know this.” They do not want us to know our own power. They are afraid of what we could do and accomplish if we realized just how strong we are.

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She had grown up in a place:

where only white people had power,

where only white people passed good jobs on

to other white people,

where only white people loaned money

to other white people

where only white people were considered human

by other white people,

where only the children of white people had new

books on the first day of school,

where only white people could drive to the store

at midnight for milk

(without having to watch the rearview). (8)

Finney, Nikky. “Red Velvet.” Head Off & Split, TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011, pp. 7-12.

In this poem about the revolutionary Rosa Parks, Finney discusses how Parks faced growing in a world designed for only white people to succeed and thrive. These lines were hard-hitting as they described the ways in which black people have to be always on edge. They have to work harder than their white counterparts just to be seen. White people got to live in a sort of comfort. Finney lists the ways white people had advantages that black people didn’t have. They got jobs over blacks, they got new school books, and they could drive to the store without fear. However, I think the most important privilege white people have comes in the middle of the stanza. White people are seen as human. Much of U.S. history is filled with the dehumanization of black people. Black people were seen as less than animals. They were used as tools and were beaten with whips and then with batons and fists. White people came first, even when it came to seats on a bus. Rosa Parks decided she wanted to cut a piece of comfort pie for herself. After a long day of working, she just wanted to sit down. Sitting was a privilege. Rosa Parks, in her moment of rebellion, opened a door for black people. When Rosa Parks decided not to sit at the back of the bus it was like creating a tsunami in a calm sea.

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Carson, Anne. Nox. New Directions, 2016.

Anne Carson’s Nox is a book that is exceedingly difficult to assign a genre. It has aspects of a scrapbook, a journal, a memoir, an elegy, etc. For our class that is focused on the genre of memoir, I tried to look at the ways in which this book is a memoir. How can I or a bookstore label this book as a memoir? I think what makes this book a memoir is the reminiscing on memories. It is a nonfictional life narrative that is focused on specific moments in Carson’s and her brother’s life. Every entry is focused on retelling, negotiating, and reminiscing on her grief and her brother’s life. The part of the memoir that I think can confuse a reader when they are trying to identify what genre this book belongs to is the Latin entries and definitions. It makes one wonder if the book is more of a dictionary or a Latin workbook than a memoir. However, the way Carson uses Latin makes this book more of a memoir in my opinion. Translations are an exceedingly personal matter. The events in a person’s life and their experiences will shape how they choose to translate a word. The word miser can be translated as poor, miserable, wretched, or unhappy amongst the many possible options. The grief that Carson feels could lead her to translate the word in a different way than a person who wasn’t grief-stricken. I think the memories encapsulated in the exposition, images, and collected memorabilia along with the Latin and the translations of the Latin make this text a memoir. 

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Carson, Anne. Nox. New Directions, 2010.

Recently, I was sorting through all of my clothes, and, as usual, I debated throwing some clothes away. In the past, I have hoarded my clothes. I have clothes from when I was in elementary school that I have grown attached to. I got around throwing them away by putting a box of old clothes in my shed. My clothes have become collections of my memories. They are my past. Right now in my life, I find that I want a change. As a person, I am undergoing changes. I am about to graduate from college and start teaching high school students. I have also become way more confident in myself and I want to branch out fashion wise. This means updating my wardrobe, which is hard because it means throwing out old memories in order to make new ones. 

The thought of throwing away memories made me think about what point there is in saving memories. I was struck with the thought that the memories I’m saving only matter to me, and when I die, the things I save can never hold the same importance to others as they did to me. Carson is negotiating something similar in this text. This memoir is like a scrapbook of memories. In the image pictured, Carson has compiled postage stamps that one can assume she received as a part of the letters her brother sent her before he died. They are an amalgamation of saved items and preserved memories. The text also deals very much with death throughout. These mementos can’t really mean the same thing to readers as they do to her. These relics of the past are so powerful in that they can hold so much, but they are also extremely sad in the way that, in the grand scheme of things and compared to death, they are meaningless.

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Carson, Anne. Nox. New Directions, 2010. 

In her memoir, Anne Carson starts the book with a poem by the ancient Roman Catullus. She uses this poem as a way to lead into the story she tells about the death of her brother. Catullus 101 is a poem in the style of a Hellenistic grave epigram and it is a farewell to Catullus’ own brother who is suspected to have died on his way to Troy. Throughout the text, Carson provides possible ways to translate each word. In the middle of the text, she translates the entire poem, but the defining of words doesn't stop there. In the memoir, she says that “nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy” and that she has “never arrived at the translation [she] would have liked to do of poem 101) (7.1). The fact that she continues to translate each word even after she has already translated the poem indicates her struggles in translating. She shows that a translation is never complete in the way that one's story is never complete. She has had this poem in her mind for decades, but the meaning of that poem probably changed for her when her brother died. I think she’s also highlighting how we as people are always in translation. We are constantly trying to figure out our own translations, and often we find that the translation we come to is unsatisfying, that its not quite right. We find that we can not boil ourselves down and that the words we have fall flat.  

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“We are six girls who live in a house together. We have different textures of hair, short, long, thick, thin. We do not appreciate these differences. We do not celebrate the variety that is ourselves. We do not run our fingers through each other’s dry hair after it is washed. We sit in the kitchen and wait our turn for the hot comb, wait to sit in the chair by the stove, smelling grease, feeling the heat warm our scalp like a sticky hot summer sun” (92). 

hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. Holt Paperbacks, 1996.

This book overwhelms me. I am overwhelmed by the accuracy. I am overwhelmed by the words that bring truth to light. I am overwhelmed by the feelings that have lain in my subconscious for so long being unearthed and verbalized. This book repeatedly makes me pause and consider. It makes me truly understand the phrase “representation matters.” You don’t really understand how representation matters until you witness it. Until you see yourself so accurately portrayed in words or images. You feel a connection that you never felt before. You feel bonded to the world outside of yourself.  I see myself and my family in nearly every chapter. This memoir is as much of a text of criticism as it is a text of life writing, which makes sense because hooks is a critic. Through her own experiences, hooks is able to critique, to connect, to bond, and to bring to the forefront the lives of many young black girls. It is through women like bell hooks that there is a newfound love black women have for themselves. Specifically, in relation to this passage, black women have a newfound love for their hair. More and more products are being made and aimed at natural hair upkeep and styles because black women have begun embracing their hair and themselves. 

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“Good hair - that’s the expression. We all know it, begin to hear it when we are small children. When we are sitting between the legs of mothers and sisters getting our hair combed. Good hair is hair that is not kinky, hair that does not feel like balls of steel wool, hair that does not take hours to comb, hair that does not need tons of grease to untangle, hair that is long. Real good hair is straight hair, hair like white folk’s hair. Yet no one says so. No one says Your hair is so nice, so beautiful because it is like white folk’s hair” (91).

hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. Holt Paperbacks, 1996.

Images: Top Left, Pre-Relaxer (around age 4); Top Right, Last time with a relaxer (Jan. 2014); Middle Right, First time styling hair naturally (July 2015); Left Bottom, After taking down plaits (July 2015), Right Bottom, Three years in (July 2018).

I spent most of my life separated from my natural hair. My mother decided, when I was between eight to ten years old, that my hair was too much to handle and she began giving me relaxers. In middle school, after I would get a relaxer, my mom would take me to get my hair done in braids. My hair was straightened, in braids, or about to be put into one of the two until I graduated from high school. I always hated relaxers. They were annoying, they were time-consuming, and they burned. My hair also never seemed to grow past my shoulder. It stayed at nearly the same length for years. 

Sometime in high school, I started putting relaxers off, and, before I knew it, I hadn’t gotten one in over half a year. I was still getting my hair straightened, however.  I wanted to see my actual curl pattern, but I was too nervous to experiment while in high school. So I waited. The summer after graduation, I decided to try and put my hair in a “natural style.” I went to a beauty supply shop and found products that claimed to help make my curls more defined. My hair was still transitioning (returning back to its natural state). I had gotten my last relaxer in January 2014 and I graduated in May 2015, so more than a year and a half had passed since my last relaxer. I plaited my hair, waited a few days for maximum effect, and I took the plaits out to find my hair in its most natural state since I was a little girl. It was powerful. My hair was mine and it started growing again. I never realized that I was missing something. My journey back to my own hair has been one that has revealed myself and my culture to me over and over. 

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“Saru tells me that white folks and even some niggers like to make fun when a colored person says that they are part Indian but she says in those days there were many such unions, many such marriages. She talks sadly about this need in people to make other people deny parts of themselves. She tells me that a person cannot feel right in their heart if they have denied parts of their ancestral past, that this not feeling right in the heart is the cause of much pain” (49).

hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. Holt Paperbacks, 1996.

As a black woman, growing up I unintentionally denied parts of myself. Many black women have done this. One of the common -- and now more recognized -- ways this happens is through the changing of our physical appearance. We straighten our hair, we change the way we talk, we police our behavior, and in some cases, we try to take an eraser to our skin in hopes that we can turn a colorful canvas into pristine, white printer paper. Black people have constantly tried to change themselves to fit in with a standard that they can never fit into. In our lives, we try to be contortionists, and the trick that we are so desperate to perform perfectly is bending our bodies to fit inside a very small box. Each failed attempt only causes more pain. As hooks’ grandmother says, when we deny parts of ourselves we cannot feel right in our hearts. We have to unbend ourselves and allow ourselves to be who we are.

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“I see the black-and-white photo of a fat baby wearing a pink dress sitting on a bed. I know this is not me and has never been for this baby has no hair. Her skull is smooth and shiny like polished silver with black jade for eyes – this cannot be me. The grown-ups identify it as me, happy baby, smiling baby, baby with no hair. I know who I am, the one not seen in the photo, the one hiding under the bed, hiding in the dark, waiting for the camera monster to go away” (47).

hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. Holt Paperbacks, 1996.

The image above is me as a toddler.

Looking at images of yourself as a baby or a toddler can be disorienting. Inherently, you know it is you in the image (at least you are usually told that it is you in the image). However, knowing and seeing isn’t always believing. This photo of myself as a toddler is perplexing to me. The longer I state at it the more I see that the little girl in the photo and the me as I know myself now are two different people. She looks so innocent which makes sense, but also she lacks more than a decade of knowledge and experiences that have constructed the person I am now. We can’t be the same person and yet we are. I feel like the relationship between myself and the girl in this photo is similar to the relationship between the author of a memoir and the self they are trying to capture in the memoir. There is the author and then there is the protagonist of the memoir. The author and the person written about can seem like two different people, but they are the same. We, as humans, change so much from day to day that the person we once were can cease to exist, replaced with someone entirely new. Or maybe there’s a disassociation because we are aliens that have replaced real people and we’ve been given memories of the real person. We may never truly know.

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“Big Mama – to us she is special, unique, one of a kind. We do not know that there are other big mamas in the world” (25).

“We think her kindness and generosity are related to her fat. She never yells at us – never treats us harshly, The grown-ups say she lets us have our way. They are not eager to let us go and stay at her house. We come back spoiled” (26). 

hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. Holt Paperbacks, 1996.

Images 1 and 2 are of my grandmother. Image 3 is of my mother and grandmother.

In this short chapter of the book, hooks talks about her grandmother, and, through her discussion, I felt a kinship to hooks. I also had a grandmother who was very much like the woman hooks describes. She was lenient with all of her children’s children (with the boys more so for some reason). Growing up, she was the one cooking in the kitchen, making meals that I knew no chef could compete with. She was a kind woman and her extra weight seem to help her exude more kindness than people with less flesh attached to their frames. She was strong and hard and sweet and soft all at once. What hooks passage makes me realize about my own childhood is how I believed my childhood was unique. After reading hooks’ memoir, I see that my childhood is not as unique as I thought, which is actually a good thing. Through hooks’ narrative, I can see that there are other people who share my experiences. I see parts of my life and history reflected and represented in hooks’ text. These kinds of shared experiences is what makes a culture. hooks sets out to have this memoir be something that young black girls can connect to. This scene is one of the many ways she represents some of the shared experiences of black girls.

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Spiegelman, Art. “Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Trouble Began.” The Complete Maus, Pantheon Books, 1997, p. 259.

I don’t think it is possible to read Maus without feeling intense emotion and pain. Throughout the story, you are witnessing what Vladek sees and the trauma he undergoes. Spiegelman spends all of Maus I and Maus II presenting his father as a complex character. At one point, Spiegelman wrestles with how his father may come across as a stereotypical Jewish cheapskate. Spiegelman’s commits to providing detail and getting as close as he can to his father’s history. His commitment means showing the reader the parts of Vladek that make readers invested in this story as well as showing sides of his father that would make a reader turn away from this story. When I read this section of the novel, I was shocked and hurt. I spent hundreds of pages witnessing Vladek’s suffering due to prejudice and racism only for him to look upon another race in a similar contempt as he was once looked at. This, to me, was a betrayal. I almost hate to say it, but it destroyed a good part of my perspective of the book. I still empathize with Vladek and despise what happened to him, but I found it hard to look at Vladek in the same way as I did before I read this page. 

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“Fathers are easier to admire than to love. Biology, after all, makes the mother the original parent -- or, as my younger son once put it, teasingly, the “real” one -- and the father secondary. In the delivery room, for those heterosexual couples who have this particular experience, he is the only nonessential person. He witnesses but does not share his wife’s birth pangs. He looks on as one woman becomes -- presto -- two people. Meet your son, says the nurse, but see, here is the cord that gives the lie to her words. It binds his wife and this new person together. The father? He must come between them. Cut the cord. Even our language reflects this order of things: “to father” is to inseminate, while “mothering” is nurturing” (x).

Abbot, James C., Jr. The Burdens of Aeneas: A Son’s Memoir of Duty and Love. Mercer University Press, 2018.

The image above is of me, my mother, and my father.

A dark thought that consumed me in my childhood was the thought of my parents’ death. Most likely, this thought was sparked by my mother reminding me that I would miss her when she was gone. I probably had done something that wasn’t as appreciative of her as she would have liked, so she responded by saying that I would miss her when she died. When she would say things like that I would think about what I would do if she or my dad died. The thought made me very uncomfortable. I thought about if I would miss one of my parents more and if one of them was my favorite. For my dad, it was easy to consult my feelings. I knew I would be devastated. I love my dad so much and he is such a sweet man that I just want to be around him all the time. I also really love dads in general, I think they are precious little people. They often make me want to cry, especially when they are hurt or sad. For my mom, it wasn’t as easy and it made me feel horrible to think I may have a favorite. But I sort of realized that I could imagine what I would feel if my dad died or something happened to him. I’d be extremely sad. With my mom, it was unimaginable. I couldn't (and still can’t) fathom a world where she didn’t exist. I think this gets at the idea Abbot brings up here. It’s easy to look at my dad and admire him, but for my mom, she’s not quantifiable. I existed inside her, literally feeding from her very body. It’s sad though how dads can sometimes seem less important. I love my parents both so much.