Red at the Bone is not my kind of book but even so, it was worth browsing through it. Ran into this line for instance that holds a deep meaning for me. It comes in the context of a bunch of ninth graders challenged to think about the image of Christ hung to the cross and left to die. They had to think "Literal or Metaphoric. Truth or Fiction." The narrator takes says:
.But now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible.,
A mother's love is a very complex thing. It took me close to four decades to make sense of my mother's love for me. It involved setting up figurative walls, moats, bridges and dams to deal with its heedless flow. It is indeed love but expressed in ways that can be destructive if the recipient does not know how to channel it.
My my case, I was salvaging what was left of my life at that point when I came to such realization. I have learned as a mother myself that my love for J is a product of what I come from and my life experiences. It took the separation in the form of her leaving to another country for college that I was able to begin the process of releasing us both from that baggage. I think I know what it feels like to be hung from the cross of a mother's love.
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