Thoughts

I read the comment below on this page and it spoke me:

(68) Mark, April 23, 2010

The Inner Conflicts We Are Left With

Do abusive parents run out of 'credit' as a pschologist once suggested to me? Do we owe abusive parents anything especially in their old age? Are they sick or just bad or a mixture of both? Can we hate them and love them at the same time? Can we really honour/love the person whilst forgetting the behaviour? Abuse of a child by a parent, IS rejection of that child and as such does the parent really have a right to expect anything in return when they get old? and should we feel obligated to them? Parenting is a two way street, just giving birth to someone and sharing your genes with them does not automatically give a parent a right to anything where there has been abuse. Yes we are probably programmed genetically to take care of aged parents with an unwritten rule of reciprocity. But where the risks to survivial of the victim and their genes have been made so great by an abusive parent, does that 'rule' of reciprocity written as 'honouring the parent', even through a third party, still stand? An abusive partner, even after decades of marriage would likely not be yearned for, in time: not so an abusive parent. However much harm the abusive parent may have caused, part of us still loves them and part of us still feels obligated to them and part of us still misses them if we are estranged from them through necessary need to be apart for our own sanity. We love them and part of us may also hate them. We want to be with them but we also want and or need to be apart from them. This conflicted position, is beyond forgiveness or dispassionate understanding of the abusers illness, it is beyond love and beyond hate, it is beyond anger and beyond yearning. It is a no man's land of inner conflicts which cannot be computed and resolved, which cannot be integrated and laid to rest because the powerful forces of love and hate, parenting and genes are constantly at work and no human could resolve them totally. And this, ultimatly, is the burden and legacy of childhood abuse.

Comments

Board Game Review: Hues and Cues

Last week we received Hues and Cues from The Op Games. We recently finished playing through Scooby-Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion (a fantastic game in The Op Games catalogue designed by Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim, and Kami Mandell that you should absolutely pick up to play with your family) and wanted to give another game from the same publisher a go. I picked Hues and Cues because I’ve been pleasantly surprised by other “test whether our minds think the same way” games such as The Mind and Wavelength. In Hues and Cues , players gather around a large central board comprised of 480 graduating colors of the rainbow surrounded by an x-y axis and scoring table. White and black (which are technically not colors) are conspicuously absent as are shades (mixtures of color + black; e.g., grey) and tints (mixtures of color + white; e.g., cream). On each player’s turn, they draw a card with four colors and the x-y axis codes of those colors depicted and they select one. They a...

Board Game Review: Expeditions Gears of Corruption

L ast year I reviewed Expeditions and ranked it #1 among all Stonemaier games on account of the challenging intellectual puzzle it presents. This year I have played my way through the new expansion, Gears of Corruption , and I’m delighted to let you know that it makes the base game even better. That the expansion so cohesively builds on the base game should not be a surprise to anyone who closely examines the original box for Expeditions. All expansion components perfectly fit in that box including the 2 new mechs that nestle in the placeholder cubbies clearly made for them. That can’t be coincidence. There might a few features rolled into Corruption of Gears that were developed as a result of consumer feedback on the base game (I’m looking at you, wild meeple), but my theory is that Stonemaier did a Lord of the Rings maneuver with this game and its expansions, designing the entire game with most of the additions integrated up front, and then breaking it into base + expansions fo...

Board Game Review: Expeditions

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat). Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers. During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds ...