2 results for (book:ur1 AND session:679 AND stemmed:father)
mystical
Linden
photograph
n.y
church
Your mother felt, then, that each played a fitting part in the marriage, in that your father had in her eyes great prospects, and she had given him two sons. It was only later that she felt he had not fulfilled his part of the bargain, and that you began to feel insecure. She had forced herself to focus all of her great emotional power into the marriage structure as they both understood it; but your father would not concentrate his own abilities into the cultural and financial structure as he had agreed to do in the tacit contract.
(The photograph of me, taken and dated by my father [Robert Sr.], has been kept in one of the Butts family albums for 53 years. In it the time is June 1, 1921. I’m almost 2 years old. I have curly light-colored hair. I wear a one-piece suit, long white stockings, and black shoes. I stand in the side yard of the house my parents rented in Mansfield, a small college town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps a dozen chicks cluster in the grass at my feet while I stare down at them, quite entranced. In blurred focus behind me an unknown teen-age girl sits on a swing that’s suspended from a tree limb, and an empty wicker stroller-type carriage [mine?] stands beside her. Parked in a driveway in back of her is a four-door touring car with a fabric top. I might add that Mansfield is only 35 miles below Elmira, N.Y., where Jane and I live now.
That child enjoys great feelings of vigor and safety. In your family relationship so far, so good. You were mainly surrounded by love and affirmation. Your parents were young. Your mother had produced two beautiful boys; and she was also a perfectionist in her way, and in her framework — one never understood by your father.
Your own character is in its way more direct, meaning that you maintained a more immediate focus. When that picture was taken, however, your parents were beginning to realize their difficulty. Your first year was one in which your father and mother were filled with expectation. Linden sensed that lack. He was secure, but not as secure as you had been, as the division between your parents was beginning to show.