![]() ![]() I love my life. I love having the things that I know will be in shorter supply if I become a parent. Things like quiet, free time, spontaneous travel, pockets of non-obligation. Generally speaking, I’ve enjoyed myself as a solo (or partnered) human. I’ve always had a hunch that as I continued on my path my feelings about parenthood would coalesce one way or the other and I would follow that where it took me. Well, my path has taken me here, to the point where all of my peers are having children and expounding on the wonders (and of course, trials) of their new lives, while I keep enjoying the same life. I’m a forty-one-year-old man and have been able thus far to postpone that decision while I got all the other pieces of my life in order. For those of us who aren’t lucky enough to “just know,” how is a person to decide if he or she wants to have a child? Please try my blog and/or my new book, Love, Loss, and Moving On. ![]() If you like the way I wrote this story, you will like other things I have written. I found each chapter to be a tiny beautiful thing. Cheryl Strayed’s hard-earned life lessons are well-written gems. ![]() If they want their words to be viscerally felt, every chapter in this book provides a lesson in how to use personal stories to make this happen.īut more than that, I want to give a copy to all my friends. I want to give a copy to every public speaker and/or essayist I know. What a perfect world it would be if every parent put the welfare of his/her child first. I want to give a copy to every couple I know who is divorced with kids. Bust she was her best self more often than it’s reasonable for any human to be. And you know what’s so never-endingly beautiful to me? She was. She had every right to hate him, to turn us against him, but she didn’t…It isn’t fair that she had to be so kind to such an unkind man…She had to be her best self more often than it’s reasonable for any human to be. The love I had for him was tremendous, irrefutable, bigger than my terror and sorrow…My mother never spoke an ill word about my father to my siblings and me. What you need to hear is how much, as a child, I loved him. But those aren’t the stories you need to hear. I have so many horrible stories about the years with my dad, who was often violent and mean. In Cheryl Strayed’s words, “Some very hard things happened. Over the next nine years they had three children. They got married even though they were not in love. She says her parents were both nineteen when her mom got pregnant. She asks: “Am I obligated to send pictures and keep him updated about his child since he sends somewhat pitiful emails every couple of months about himself?” She goes on to say that she wants to do what is best for her child even though she wants to kick the baby’s father in the groin.Īs part of her response “Sugar,” tells her own story on the topic of fathers. Her child’s father is not in the picture and indeed lives in another state. But read the visceral way Cheryl Strayed imparts this information thanks to the use of personal storytelling. The bottom line is that the parents need to put the child’s welfare first. It is for any estranged couple raising kids in whatever degree of togetherness or lack thereof. I loved many of the chapters, but will tell about the one that seems most significant to me. Since the book is a series of letters with wise answers, it reads like a book of short stories. Instead, she told the stories of her life in order to help the letter writer learn applicable life lessons. In the introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, Steve Almond tells us that advice columnists are supposed to adhere to a code – “focus on the letter writer, dispense the necessary bromides, make it all seem bearable.” But this is not how Cheryl Strayed did things. It was also made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. The book was chosen by Oprah for her book club. If the name sounds familiar, she is the author of the blockbuster memoir, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. He imaged that the perfect writer for this column would be “a woman with a troubled past and a slightly reckless tongue.” For the first year of the column, however, Almond wrote it himself. It was created by Steve Almond who envisioned it to be a different kind of advice column, both irreverent and brutally honest. An Advice Column that Evokes a Visceral Responseĭear Sugar was the name of an advice column in an online publication called The Rumpus. ![]()
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