Suggested Book: White Oleander

I just finished the book White Oleander by Janet Fitch. This is on the Oprah's Book Club list. Not that "The Great O" knows everything, but this was an interesting and very emotional book. I can't say it was enjoyable or that I liked it exactly, but once I started reading it I could hardly put it down. This book oozes with pain almost from beginning to end and I don't really recommend it to someone who is going through a trying time in their own life. I feel sadder having read it, which is something I didn't really need.

That said, I'm sure you just want to run right down to your local library and check it out. But I know that God speaks in and through endless ways, even through a novel that is gritty, and cold, with bad language, and speaks very little of God or Christianity. What this book has reinforced in me is how desperate our children need us in their lives. Not only need us to physically be there, but really BE there, whole, and with their every need ahead of our own. They need us to give them something they can hang onto when we're not there. And enable them to find their home outside of ourselves. Our chldren will remember us when they grow up. They will remember the years when they were two, three, and four years old and drove us totally nuts. They will remember how we dealt with them on some level. Maybe only in their dreams at night, but they will develop a grasp of who we are as their parents from these early times we spend with them.

Is my son seeing the whole, put together me or just bits and pieces of what I have to offer him at the moment? Am I making an effort to shield him from my jaded perspective of life so that he has a chance to grow up untouched by the things that have shaken me? How do I do that without hiding from him myself and my soul? Is it worse for him to really never know me or to know what has made me who I am? What a tragedy for our children to know so little about us, our pain, our humanity, and our joy. Somehow we have to instill in them what we have extracted from our experiences in hopes that they won't have to go through what we went through to get the same information.

We have a very difficult job. Too many wrong moves, and the outcome could be disastrous. We know we can't do it "right" but still we have to try.