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 are in the

Board Game Review: Brass Birmingham

Here’s a story of a lovely lady (spoiler: it’s me) and her pride and how it has led to the discovery of the single greatest board game I have ever played. It’s probably also a good primer for other reviewers on increasing your reach. At GenCon this year, I was perusing the wares of the various booths and my eyes caught a glimpse of two beautiful game boxes. Each had crisp metallic lettering with an old world feel and artwork that radiated European class. I made my way to the booth and waited patiently to speak to to the team manning it as there were many buyers lined up to purchase the games. I didn’t know anything about the games (Brass Birmingham and Brass Lancashire), or the publisher – Roxley Game Laboratory – but I knew I wanted to review one or both of the games. Almost every board game love story I star in in can be summed up this way: I am seduced by the artwork or theme and then I stay for the right mechanics. When the lead rep spoke with me, he gently rejected my request. He

Board Game Review: Lost Cities Roll & Write (A Comparison to the Original Lost Cities)

I really love the card game Lost Cities , designed by Reiner Knizia. When my husband Christopher and I were first getting to know each other, we used to meet up at Starbucks sometimes and play games. Lost Cities was one of our frequent picks. It’s a head to head, two player game in which both players are trying to outscore each other by laying down ascending runs of card suits on a small board between the two of them. There’s a theme laid over the mechanism (completing expeditions in the lost world) but it’s basically pasted on and so that is the last we will speak of it. So there we were, newly in love, eyeing each other across the table, smiling and flirting, and doing our best to beat one another at Lost Cities . It was awesome. And now, with the roll & write genre having made an impressive rebound a few years ago (let’s not forget the mechanism has actually been around since the 50s with Yatzee ), Knizia has ported his award winning game Lost Cities into this format, releasi