A Conversation with Elizabeth
1998
Abrupt endings and new Beginnings

From:          larry.m..mixson@bvs.com (LARRY M. MIXSON)
Date:          Mon,9 Mar 1998 10:49:30 -0800
To:            Elizabeth
Subject:       Re: Abrupt endings and new beginnings
 
The ways in which our parents shape and influence us when we are growing up goes to the core to who we are. What the parents say, do, and how they act toward their children can have amazing effects upon them. I'm sure you know all of this from you psychological studies, but it still surprises and amazes me to hear people talk about their parents influence and how it affected them. To hear about your mother and how she never said the loved you are rarely expressed her feelings toward you helped me to understand you. My mother was just the opposite, she expressed their feelings and has always said she loves me. Every time we talk on the phone she ends with "I love you" just before she hangs up. To hear it so often has had the opposite effect on me, it goes in one ear and out the other and I sometimes wonder if she just says it as some kind of automatic response. It seems even as "adults" we often have child like responses to out parents and often struggle to overcome the influences they implanted in us as children. I sometimes think about what it would be like to start with a "clean slate", without all that emotional baggage from the past, but then our past is what makes us who we are.

Yes, I would agree that "analytical" better describes how I remember you.

Your comments on "object constancy" impairment makes since to me. Perhaps that is what I "suffer" from with friendships, "out of sight, out of mind." I am now facing it again in that I will be leaving my current job in which I have made several new friends. One guy, Rick, and I really got along well together and have become good friends. I have been helping him finish his basement. He and his wife (also named Julie) joined Julie and I one weekend stay at a B&B and hiked up Old Rag with us. I know I will have work at maintain the relationship after I leave this job.

                        Rick, Julie, Julie and Me at
                                start of the Old Rag trail

No I have not seen "Jacob's Ladder." I'll look for it at the video store. I did see Titanic. I resisted for weeks as I thought "why go, it's just another movie about the Titanic, you know how it ends (joke)." After my father in law went to it and had great things to say about it I thought perhaps it might be worth seeing. Julie, Anne and I went to see it together. I really liked it. I liked that the scientific aspects of it were right on track with what I have recently read but the love story is what really made the movie.

I understand about your need for abrupt endings. What I do is keep a larger window open so that if someone comes up I can just click on the larger window and it then covers the mail window. This way I don't have to wait for the mail window to close. What I found more interesting about what Turkle said about multiple windows is not the multitasking aspect, but that some people have completely different personalities in different windows.
I came down with a sore throat last night and didn't sleep well so probably will go home after lunch. Till, tomorrow.

Grit