"Is all this thinking really necessary?" - My Mother

I thought too much. How do I know? My mother told me so. It began when I was very young and I could not stop doing it. My mind chewed on everything that came my way. Why this? Why that? I was told that thinking too much was unattractive in a small girl who ought to keep her mind on what other people thought and keep her opinions to herself. My mother told me that this negation of self was vital to securing my future as a wife, who must adopt her husband's thoughts, at least in public. It seemed to me that childhood was only a perverse rehearsal for the death of the intellect in this life, and for pot luck suppers in the next. 

 

An afterlife? I rejected the idea as silly. How could adults who worked during the week as engineers, accountants, and teachers, turn into pudding heads on Sunday? Did they believe the nonsense about invisible beings that lived in the sky, or were they pretending in front of us kids? If it was a pretense, why would they lie to their children?

There I was, barely aware of myself as a human being and with a huge mystery already pecking away at my mind. Why did this extraordinary gulf exist between how I experienced the world and how everyone around me claimed life worked? Why were children asked to be inventive and creative, and then told not to ask questions and to merely repeat ‘correct’ answers? This absurd situation taught me that I didn’t exist: only the ability to reflect what was told to me by others could make me acceptable.