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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Exaggerated Self-Pity Is Poison Bell Syndicate WNU Features j "U7HEN MY SISTER was three and I almost five years old, our loved Daddy was killed in a motor crash," says a letter lying ly-ing here on my desk. "Mother was left penniless, but she resumed her old profession of teaching and we had some happy years, we three together. Our little four-room four-room apartment was full of love and harmony and Lily and I wanted only to be with mother for the rest of our lives. "When mother married the family fam-ily doctor, a widower," the letter goes on, "what has proved to be a fatal injury to my development took place. I was not conscious of it then, naturally, but the seeds of what grew to be absolute morbidity morbid-ity were sown then. Sense Of Injustice "Our stepfather loved Lily and me, but two boy babies came to take our places, and at 12 and 14 we were sent to boarding school. Our happy country summers and the letters and packafces from Mother never could remove our sense of deep injustice and it has colored both our lives. Lily never married and has worked for years in the county home for mental cases. I have married twice unsuccessfully ahd now feel that while my present husband is an absolute angel, I am too sick, weary and disillusioned to be a good wife for him or good mother to my boys, now 17 and S years old. "It was my psychoanalyst who, searching painstakingly through my past, unearthed this unhappy situation situa-tion in my girlhood and has helped destiny it is to complicate further rather than help straighten out this enigma that is life. Some 40,000 of us die in auto crashes every year, so that detail didn't particularly distinguish these little sisters. Terrible, but it's 'the truth. And as for a pretty mother, at 29, taking a second mate, for happy years of motherhood and companionship com-panionship was that such a crime never to be forgiven? "Mother," says anothei part of Diana's letter, "was always trying to make us like Uncle Rob, as we called her husband. But we saw through her devices." In other words, you and Lily were ungracious little jealous minxes and did all you could to ruin your mother's chances for happiness in her marriage. I'm all for modern psychological methods when they deal with the problems of the immediate present. Many good doctors and teachers and all good mothers know how to handle those cases that arise in connection with almost every child's development Their adroitness adroit-ness in analysis and method is amusingly evident to those of us who can remember our own young vagaries, inhibitions 'and fixations only under simpler names. As long as the psychologists take today, to-day, tell their patients just what's wrong today, then I'm with them. But when they encourage us to dig into the past, to discover that at four months one's bottle was late in arriving and at three years Mother said she already had kissed us goodnight and was going downstairs now and that these heinous crimes lived on and malignantly affected all our later years, then that is sheer nonsense. Silly? You'll find all these instances in-stances solemnly portrayed in a recent moving picture that supposedly sup-posedly represents a woman's experience ex-perience in a madhouse. These are the causes that sent her there. . , too sici and weary . . ." me enormously by putting the blame for this injustice where it belongs on the accident that robbed rob-bed me of my father and my mother's second marriage." This is only part of a 17-page letter, let-ter, which I have not answered. It takes more patience than I possess to sympathize with such a woman. And yet she is typical of actual hundreds who write me every year that fancied slights injustices in-justices and disadvantages far back in their perfectly normal, everyday, give-and-take, up-and-down American childhoods, have upset their mental balances for life. It has become the fashion to seek back for something Mother or Dad did or something they left undone and lay today's stupidities, resentments, resent-ments, failures and flaws In char-actei char-actei all to that. Must Compensate For Wrongs But, good heavens, which one of us hasn't suffered wrongs far deeper than these imaginary ones Diana lists here, not once, but all through our younger years! Parents Par-ents will have favorites, teachers will put the blame on the wrong child, and young bewilderment and confusion will lead children into embarrassing and humilating morasses. mo-rasses. Unless we make up our minds, at 5 or 7 or even earlier, that that's the way the stupid world of grownups is and develop iome sort of shell, philosophy or spiritual balance to offset it. we shall gro up like Lily and Diana lopsided human ' beinss whose wretched |