Hit and Run

Okay, got that out of my system. Now onto my actual topic, which got eaten before, which is le driveby comment, i.e., unsolicited and jugmental parenting advice offered by the clueless or vicious (it's all over the blogs I visit: see here, here, and here).

Sometimes, I think the unlucky recipients can protest too much: I'm on a couple of parenting lists, and I've benefited hugeously as a parent and over all biped from the collective wisdom. But then there's the other kind of advice, the kind that MB is talking about. Entropy is scary: if your child is disabled and bad stuff has happened, I can ward it off with my superior knowledge and competence. Better to distance oneself: truly confronting or empathizing rips away the veil and then we have to see how little separates all of us, lalala I can't hear you.* Which is, I think, why I have these lines from Anne Sexton running through my head so frequently, aside from the fact that I seem to have something resembling Norton Anthology Tourette's (yes, I know I quoted this recently, but no one's reading anyway, and it's my blog):

This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
although your fear is anyone's fear,
like an invisible veil between us all...
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.

*I am not not not going to quote one of my other favorite passages from Middlemarch, when the narrator muses that if we really listened, could hear the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. See? I didn't get up and look up the exact words.