Relationships
HOW OUR WAY OF ORGANIZING EXPERIENCE GOVERNS OUR ATTITUDES TOWARDS ONE ANOTHER
Excerpt:
“In order to change our beliefs, we must know them — a daunting proposition. For the beliefs that hold us in thrall, the deepest ones, lie hidden within our bconscious minds and constitute the conceptual bedrock upon which we stand.”
Ann Kreilkamp
Relationships
COYOTE WOMAN, SOFTLY SNORING
Excerpt:
“This was the first inkling I had that I was in a situation which I didn’t understand at all, and that no matter how many words came out of these women’s mouths, their “wisdom” probably had more to do with who they were, how they lived, than with any “answers” they could give me.”
Ann Kreilkamp
Relationships
MEDITATION ON MY HUSBAND’S MOTHER
Excerpt:
“Jeff and I had been together for one year when his parents decided to visit us. We were both surprised. Rhoda and Amos live in a big house in New Jersey, near New York City. Jeff and I live in a yurt in a tiny unincorporated village in Wyoming. The culture shock, for them, would be enormous.”
Ann Kreilkamp
Relationships
MEDITATION ON MY MOTHER
Excerpt:
“I’ve heard it said that a woman doesn’t come into her own until her mother dies. If so, then I am still unconsciously tied to a mother who, nearing 90, is very much alive. Or is she? How alive is my own mother?”
Ann Kreilkamp
Relationships
HEALING OF THE MALE AND FEMALE BEGINS WITHIN ME
Excerpt:
“Yet this is the first man in my life who doesn’t think I’m ‘too much,’ ‘too intense.’ No need to keep that secret diary anymore. I can be completely myself with him . . . We are exactly matched: two giant, thundering, selfish, pompous egos; two sensitive, vulnerable, defended, loving hearts . . .
Ann Kreilkamp
Relationships
THE UNSPEAKABLE WOUND
Excerpt:
“Dinnertime. The enormous modern kitchen holds cranky children under the feet of women preparing food, clanging pots, talking. In the middle of it all sits Helen, propped up in an armchair, all 90 pounds of her, only 56 years old and she is ancient, wizened, her face etched into a perpetual scowl by the stroke 15 months ago."
Ann Kreilkamp
Relationships
THIS FROZEN MALE RAGE WITHIN US ALL
Excerpt:
“Over the next few days, I go back through my memory of that evening, slowing it down like a film in the editing room, taking it apart step by step, frame by frame. I notice how, when he says that, I flinch. I notice how I feel the woman next to me on the couch flinch too, how we turn to each other for solace.”
Ann Kreilkamp
Relationships
YOU’D THINK WED GET CYNICAL
Excerpt:
“For me, those words “’til death do us part” sound like a death sentence. Yoked together forever. Bound. Bound up. In bondage. No release . . . Gag! I feel suffocated already! On the other hand, I can conceive of a relationship which lasts beyond so-called “death” into other lives as well.
Ann Kreilkamp