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发表于 2006-12-21 23:47:18
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ID: hooksnare
活动：我的英语我的家人
我的文章： My English and My Family
My parents married in the age of institutional revolution, Great leader Mao told them that they should go and work in the countryside or mountain areas. So a standart intelligentsia-like courtship was borned. Mom knew it was time to start a family. A well-educated man who came from a middle-school 20 miles away from where she lived looked like a good bet. He was captivated by her figure and goodness.
“Marriage is long, and Feeling is fleeting.” The lightning romance didn’t last long. Different family background generated disharmonious note .She liked be hers own; he hated the thought. He loved be their whole-family—including my aunts,uncles, my grandfather and grandmother; she did not. He was a little slovenly, she was a little squeamish. They fought in the yard, at the dinner table, over money, over the perceived failings of their respective in-laws.There was a hope that they would change once they retired, but what remained steeled itself into bright bitterness. “I always thought we’d ...” my mother would begin, before launching into a precise listing of my father’s faults. The litany was recited so often, I can reel it off by heart today. As he listened, my father would mutter angry curses. Maybe it wasn’t a happy and perfet marriage, but as their 35th anniversary approached, I decided to throw a party. Thirtyfive years was a long time, after all; why not try to make the best of things? I’d provide the cake, the braised chicken, the wine, and they’d abide by one rule: no quarrelling and fighting.
We had a wonderful day. In hindsight it was an important celebration, because soon after, things began to change for my parents. As the days flowing and their son’s growing, their marriage was about the only thing they wouldn’t lose. It began when their memories started to fade. Added to the frequent house-wide hunts for glasses and car keys were the groceries left behind on the counter, notices of bills left unpaid. Gradually my parents couldn’t remember names of friends. Finally they didn’t remember that their grandchildren’s birthday. These crises would have at one time set them at each other’s throats, but now they acted as a team, helping each other with searches, consoling each other with “Everyone does that” or “It’s nothing; you’re just tired.” They found new roles—bolstering each other against the fear of loss. Financial control was the next thing to go. For all of their marriage, my parents stubbornly kept separate accounts. Sharing being unthinkable, they’d devised financial arrangements so elaborate they could trigger war at any time. He, for example, was to pay for everything outside the house, she for whatever went on inside. As the days fleeting , borderline became blurring(He bought eggs sometime, she got sofa at one time). The whopays dilemma was so complex for one trip that they finally gave up buying rice .I took over the books. Now no one knew how things got paid. Next I hired a housekeeper. Cooking and cleaning, chores my mother had long complained about, were suddenly gone. Finally—on doctors’ orders—we cleared the house of alcohol, the fuel that turned more than one quarrel into a raging fire.
You could say my parents’ lives had been whittled away, that they could no longer engage in the business of living. But at the same time, something that had been buried deep was coming up and taking shape. I saw it when my father came home after a brief hospital stay. We’d tried to explain my father’s absence to my mother, but because of her memory, she could not keep it in her head why he had disappeared. She asked again and again where he was, and again and again we told her. And each day her anxiety grew. When I finally brought him home, we opened the front door to see my mother sitting on the sofa. As he stepped in the room, she standed in amazement. I stayed back as he slowly walked toward her and she toward him. As they approached each other on legs rickety with age, her hands fluttered over his face. “Oh, there you are,” she said. “There you are.”
I don’t doubt that if my mother and father magically regained their old vigor, they’d be back fighting. But I now see that something came of all those years of shared days—days of sitting at the same table, waking to the same sun, working and raising me together. Even the very fury they lavished on each other was a brick in this unseen creation. In the early morning I once again heard the voices through the wall. “Where are we?” my father asked. “I don’t know,” my mother replied softly. How lucky they are, Their loving reassurances were sweet, touching and surprising.
Now I am no longer young. I appreciate them more each day. My parents does not change, but I do. As I grow older and wiser, I realize how extraordinary they are. How sad that I am unable to speak these words in their presence, but they flow easily from my pen. How does a son begin to thank her mother for life itself? For the love, patience and just plain hard work that go into raising a child? For running after a toddler, for understanding a moody teenager, for tolerating a college student who knows everything? I don't know how to bless them. I pray that I will look as good in the eyes of my children as my parents look in mine.
Maybe marriage is not a fairy tale, but it’s a achievable production. May Bodhisattva bless them. |
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Here I am yjj543000
发表于 2006-12-22 08:11:07
