Why Curmudgeon?

I was born at the time when Hitler was beginning to take over Europe, a couple of years before the US decided to get into WWII. My generation has no handly handle, like Baby Boomers, or the Me Generation. We have no group identity that I know of. Some of us became The Beat Generation, but I think on the whole we were more the Silent Generation. Or maybe the Between Generation. Most of us grew up with that war hanging very heavy over our heads. It's astounding to me now, to know that our country has now been in Iraq for about the same length of time that we were involved in bringing WWII to an end.

I graduated from college in 1959, a year ahead of most people my age because I skipped the fourth grade. I got married the day after graduation and had my first child slightly less than two years later, while my husband was still in grad school working for a PhD. My second child -- both boys -- came about nine months after he got the degree, so you can see how that worked out. I didn't go back to grad school myself until my youngest was 3 years old and I had inherited a bit of money that allowed me to get a babysitter and to pay the tuition. By that time it was the 60s and I was able to be involved in the civil rights movement on campus, which I did in a big way, and that was how I more or less joined the world again. That was when the adult in me really began to grow. Motherhood was still just an extension of who I thought I was supposed to be, and that idea was planted in me not by my own mother but by my maternal grandmother.

My grandmother was a bit of a rebel, but she was also a thoroughly Southern woman, a "lady", and I grew up with a consciousness of needing to be a nice person first, and a good person second. I think it was hard for me, always, to see that there even might be a difference between being nice and being good.

It was an immersion into the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protest movement that taught me the difference, because being nice wasn't getting us anywhere. Yet I still have the conflict, still feel it every time I get riled up about something.

I have been in a more or less continual state of rile, if there is such a thing, since George W Bush began doing the things he has done after 9-11.

And I might never have been aware that I even have an Inner Curmudgeon if these things hadn't happened. Who knows, I might have even slid into aging gracefully, or something similar to it.

When I was getting my master's degree in psychology I had a very wise teacher who told us that growth never occurs when a person's inner self is in a state of balance and peace. It's the turmoil that makes us grow.

More tomorrow.

(Oh, and just so you'll know, I've promised myself not to edit what I post here, so here it goes, typos and all.)

-- Dianne