I'm really fed up. I'm just tired of telling my children to go to bed every night, at 9:30 to my daughter and at 10:30 to my son. But if I don't tell them to quit whatever they are about and hit the sack they keep doing things, wide awake from their own inner caffein that their brains somehow manage to produce from scratch. They are probably fascinated by life.
I remembered having read a paragraph from R.D. Laing;
Sleeping and waking, eating, drinking, digesting, urinating, defecating and breathing are biological basics. These basics are deeply socially programmed. They are all subject to disturbance. A great deal of the disturbances doctors are asked to treat are socially conditioned disturbances of these socially conditioned, biological, organic functions. (Wisdom, Madness & Folly, 1985, p.25)
As a parent I am so violently representing the society to control their basic needs. And here, to control means to time; mostly by giving them time limits for such and such activities. How disgusting. How necessary. To shape them into admittedly "human."
Another quote from the same book:
She was nineteen, and a circus-horse rider. She and her horse fell. The horse rolled over her head and had to be destroyed. She was completely 'out' for several days. When she came round, she WAS a horse. She looked like a horse. She had horse's eyes. She neighed. She grazed on the grass outside the ward, naked, on all fours. After three or four weeks she turned into herself again, over the course of two or three days. I wanted DESPERATELY to UNDERSTAND this sort of thing. (p.87)
Well, well. I'd love to understand that sort of thing, too. When in fact did I become human? When did I quit that more comfortable life of mine as a dog?
