[lit-ideas] Re: I shall say this only 5,000 times (allo allo)

From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:45:58 EDT
Not helpful, but I can't resist responding with another anecdote.   True 
story.  
 
When my oldest daughter was 5, the night before Easter, she lost a  tooth.
 
Under her pillow I found two notes -- one addressed to the Tooth Fairy and  
the other to the Easter Bunny.
 
Each note explained that they might "run into" the other and not to be  
scared.
 
I think those kinds of child-hood fantasies are exercises in imagination  and 
creativity.
 
But whaddo I know.
 
Julie Krueger
thinking all manners of myth are psychologically necessary to homo  sapiens

========Original Message========     Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: I shall say this 
only 5,000 times (allo  allo)  Date: 3/12/2007 2:23:13 P.M. Central Daylight 
Time  From: _pastone@xxxxxxxxxx (mailto:pastone@xxxxxxxxx)   To: 
_lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)   Sent on:    

David  Ritchie wrote:
> What a sad tale, made more so by the "of course."  



Reading this reminds me of something I've been  grappling with for about 8 
months now. 

As well as the fact that  Freelists keeps arbitrarily kicking me off the 
list, another reason that I've  been relatively "quiet" in the past little 
while 
is that next month, I'm going  to become a father [for the first time] and, 
despite what women will report, men  also have a harder time during pregnancy 
-- 
something which is HARDLY ever  mentioned, and if it is, it's just a laugh 
between women. 

Apart from the  whole anxiety of having another mouth to feed and how I will 
handle being  responsble [after 40 years of throwing caution to the wind] etc. 
I think the  main thing I feel trepidatious about is what to TELL the kid. 

As i was  watching some current event thing on television last night, I said 
to my  housemate, "don't people remember what it was like to be a child?" in 
response  to the way an adult was treating her child. I mean, really, this is 
important to  me. I don't want to tell my child about Santa Claus or Fairies, 
or Bunnies or  any of that stuff that they might think "sadly" or "of course" 
about me in the  future. 

When i was a child, I was for some reason a doubting kid. Even  though both 
my parents were fairly religious "christian" people, I wanted none  of it. All 
the other childhood myths were just as fantastically silly to me and  one by 
one they were debunked -- my sister and I counted the carrots at easter  before 
we went to bed and in the morning. We noticed that the tooth fairy and  Santa 
Claus had the same backwards handwriting, etc. Perhaps the fact that we  
would both become Engineers was early obvious. 

So I guess my question to  the group is: is it deprivation to let a kid grow 
up without this childish  nonsense? If it is... what exactly am I depriving 
him of?

Paul (soon to  be Mr.) Stone


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[lit-ideas] Re: I shall say this only 5,000 times (allo allo)

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