This is a great post! I would just like to say that healing can
really come from gentle birth, breastfeeding and attached parenting -
all things that lactnetters are trying to promote.
With respect,
Anita
Breastfeeding Counsellor
Australia
On 25/11/2009, at 11:58 PM, Susan Burger wrote:
> Dear all:
>
> I can certainly empathize with living in a bad neighborhood. I
> lived in the Central District of Seattle when it was a bad
> neighborhood and prostitutes hung out on the corner and men (not
> women) harassed me when I walked home from school. In what was
> then Zaire, I was often harassed by men and had a friend who was
> raped in another area of the country. I've lived in many and even
> lived in countries where entire areas might be considered bad
> neighborhoods. Every time I visited Cambodia I would decide not to
> visit Angkor Wat because there was a bridge blown up or some other
> incident. In the Philippines, I had to talk a driver out of
> killing his boss on a three-hour ride where he was waving a gun
> around. I could fill pages of "incidents", but in the 33 countries
> I visited or lived in, I always found people with whom I found
> community and similarities.
>
> I can also empathize with having fears about your child or
> children. The most painful incident for me was when my son was
> completely ostracized by all the mothers at his Jewish nursery
> school within the first month of starting school. They would call
> to their children to get away from my son. It turns out that one
> mother had spread the rumor that my son had bitten a girl. The
> nursery school director was so appalled by their behavior that she
> had a mandatory meeting for all the parents where she explained
> that biting is normal behavior and unavoidable in nursery school,
> that there was no evidence that nursery school at age 2-1/2
> benefited children, what they did about preventing biting and what
> they did when it happened and that my son was NOT the biter. She
> also implemented a once a week talk with a child development
> specialist. I considered it group therapy and forced myself to
> go. It took me a long time of going to that group (with many times
> of having to force myself not to fall asleep and drool on the
> coffee table when the mothers would talk about Prada bags) to
> finally feel a sense of community with those mothers. In the end,
> I actually credit those mothers with teaching me that threaded
> through the light gossip of mother to mother conversations are very
> important underlying themes that build a community of assistance to
> develop pragmatic solutions for rearing your children. I
> eventually even came to understand that the mother who started the
> rumor was extremely insecure about her own parenting and thus,
> acted out by making comments about the rest of us.
>
> My son had his head smashed repeatedly against a brick wall in
> third grade to the point of a light concussion. Despite the fact
> that that child is from a particular “group”, my son’s best friend
> is also from that “group”. So, my son has not attributed the
> behavior of the child who beat his head against the wall to a
> “group” behavior. At the age of 8, he already realized that this
> child has circumstances at home that are going to make his life a
> challenge. My son also takes martial arts and has a black belt now,
> so in fifth grade my son is now unafraid, but still avoids this
> child so as not to provoke him. Last week this child again tried
> aggressive behavior by slugging my son and then stole my son’s
> lunch box, my son knew that if didn’t react the child would get
> bored with the lunch box.
>
> I am grateful that something my imperfect parents did in my rearing
> enabled me to look beyond the group and discovered the underlying
> reasons why people sometimes behave in unacceptable ways. I’ve
> never for a moment when I actually considered it important whether
> someone on Lactnet is “liberal”, “conservative”, “libertarian”,
> “democrat”, “republican”, “working family party (which is a
> category on New York State ballots)”, “socialist” or “communist”.
> I find that all too often these labels are used inappropriately to
> label someone when they may disagree with the person who is doing
> the labeling.
>
> It is perfectly fine to label the threatening behavior of the
> prostitutes on that street corner is unacceptable. At the same
> time it is unacceptable to label all prostitutes as immoral when in
> fact those prostitutes may have lived through horrors of sexual
> abuse that you may not have endured. Similarly, while I can
> understand how unacceptable it may feel to be labeled and pressured
> to undertake a test that you don’t want, it doesn’t mean that
> labeling entire groups is acceptable. Ditto for politics. In the
> United States, how we vote is a private affair and I never assume
> from a person’s behavior to know how they vote.
>
> I hope that all those who live in threatening circumstances can
> eventually live in sufficiently secure circumstances and heal the
> wounds that can develop into fear and hatred of the “other”.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Susan E. Burger
>
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