Letters to the Editor
EHJ
Published Letters: 117 Editor's Choice: 6
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Everything changes...
[Read the article: What else I lost]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I understand that it is painful to lose a close friendship. It happens to us all. Did the writer deserve an "explanation." Yes, but the reality is that most of us don't really want to know the truth about why we're being rejected. I think most people find it impossible to sit down honestly with someone else and say...I want to end this friendship for these reasons. It is too difficult to have that conversation with someone else. Sometimes the reasons cannot even be articulated. It is much easier simply to avoid and drift away. I suspect that that is how the vast majority of friendships end.
So, the friendship may have been a casualty of 9/11 or maybe not. Maybe there were problems before, maybe not. Who really knows, or can know the truth of what happened from everyone's point of view. I'm going to give the essayist a bit of advice though. Girlfriend, you come across as very self serving and self pitying in this essay. Maybe you're still so hurt that this essay does not truly reflect who you want to be as a human being. Eliminate your ancient grudges against your friend, e.g. the wedding incident. Eliminate the reference to sending an expensive wedding gift that you could ill afford and all that stuff about how you tried to be there for her at great personal sacrifice. Eliminate all those little digs at your friend and the other people in her life, eliminate your defensiveness and the stuff about not being lovable, eliminate the vague, unjustified criticism of the "left" and then maybe people will take something meaningful away from your essay. There are universal truths about how grief can change people, and relationships, how painful it is to confront rejection without explanation, the struggle to come to terms with the very personal effects of a national tragedy.
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There but for the grace of God...
[Read the article: A mother's love]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the most insidious side effects of parenthood is never feeling like you've done enough. If you send your kids to public school, you feel guilty because their friends go to private school. If you let your kids eat at McDonald's once a week you feel guilty because the neighbor never lets her kids eat anything but nutritionally loaded organic home cooked fare every day. If you only read to your kid every other day, you're the one responsible for the fact that she didn't make the gifted class.
If your child never achieves your expectations of academic success, career success, economic success, no matter how much you rationalize it or justify it, you're going to feel defensive about your performance as a parent.
From what she is telling us, Sallie Tisdale didn't deprive her son of anything that a child requires to thrive and succeed. His lack of initiative, drive and responsibility is no reflection of her skills and dedication as a parent and she owes him nothing more than her love and what she feels she can afford to give him economically. I think that pervasive feeling of guilt and never feeling like you've done enough underlies some of this essay, but it's also an exploration of why some members of the working class never seem to move up, it's also an expression of frustration and heartbreak, it's an exploration of what parents owe their children in general, and how deprivation of critical resources in the early stages of childhood has devastating consequences. I am always amazed at how venemous people can be in their judgment and criticism. These are human beings we are talking about who deserve respect and compassion.