Happy to bore you

I am an old woman now, 65, but I’m still struggling to heal the wounds of childhood. And as I look at my friends and family members—even my 89-year-old mother—I see that they are wrestling with the same task. The variety of childhood wounds is so vast, and the injuries so often exacerbated by re-infections along the road to recovery, that sometimes it seems that the whole point of adult life is to cauterize the beginning of life. 

So when I look at my children, I fear that the annoyance they sometimes cannot conceal has its roots in some dreadful cruelty of mine that they cannot completely forgive. But then I realize, No, it’s nothing so grand. It’s just that I cannot remember what I’ve told them before and so I repeat myself, tell the same old stories so often that they jump in to stop me by providing the punch lines before I can get to them myself. 

And since the stakes are high, I feel relief that I’m just boring, not harmful.