“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your mother looked up to him because he made money. She held his money up to your father, and in many ways let your father know that she did not think much of him. Overall, as a male or as a breadwinner. To her he fell from an initial high estate—meaning his early success, that offered her the possibilities of wealth and social status. All of this was in the back of your mind. Your early financial success also pleased your mother, and she felt that you had fallen from a high estate, not having lived long enough to see your financial gains.

As she was in life, she would not have understood in any case unless the money definitely came from a recognizable, socially accepted output on your part. To some extent, the affair of Crowder’s death made you look at yourself through what you thought were your mother’s eyes. You were judging yourself, and have, with some regularity, according to those standards. This is at an emotional level, of which of course you do not intellectually approve.

In a fashion you see your father as inventive, creative, and highly vulnerable. These ideas merge with conventional beliefs about age, so that it seems you must take stock. But when you take stock with the feelings we are describing as the emotional yardsticks, those feelings consider valid only the beliefs that go along with them—a traditional male role: the accumulation of money through traditional means—and they discount as legitimate the accumulation of knowledge or wisdom as a pursuit of life. Your mother would say “posh.”