Maureen Dowd’s overwrought mother: Do parents sometimes attempt to impose their own psychodramas on their children?
Can they sometimes display bad judgment in the process?
Well actually yes, that sometimes occurs! Remember Maureen Dowd’s column from May 1998?
Dowd was in Belfast, observing the attempted resolution of the troubles. As she started, she recalled a psychodrama her mother once dropped on her head:
DOWD (5/20/98): Here is what you need to know about the Irish soul.Poor Dowd! She had to move to a different hotel, all thanks to Cromwell's bad conduct.
We are an unforgiving people. We believe in the Evil Eye. We like to fight. We don't like to compromise. We lie in wait for the worst. We lurk about in the past.
When I first moved to New York, I called my mother to tell her I was going to stay in a residential hotel called the Oliver Cromwell. There was a long pause, then tearful anger. "He encouraged his soldiers to throw babies up in the air and impale them on their swords as they came down," she snapped. I found another hotel. In Irish time, 1651 and 1981 were only moments apart.
We Irish “lurk about in the past.” So do many other adults. Sometimes, they can impose a brutal past on their children in the process.
For extra credit: Does overwrought parenting yield top results? Do you ever read Dowd’s troubled columns?
Word of warning: Your lizard brain is going to tell you that only “white” parents can do this.
We’ll suggest that your lizard is wrong.
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