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Books > Health, Home & Family > Family & health > Family & other relationships > Intergenerational relationships
'There is so much aching love in this book, such pain and beauty.
Behold, and rejoice.' - Tim Winton, author of Cloudstreet Was he
thinking, do I have to be this kind of boy to survive? Is this what
being a boy is? As a boy growing up on the south coast of England,
Howard Cunnell's sense of self was dominated by his father's
absence. Now, years later, he is a father, and his daughter is
becoming his son. Starting with his own childhood in the Sussex
beachlands, Howard tells the story of the years of self-destruction
that defined his young adulthood and the escape he found in reading
and the natural world. Still he felt compelled to destroy the
relationships that mattered to him. Saved by love and
responsibility, Cunnell charts his journey from anger to
compassion, as his daughter Jay realizes he is a boy, and a son.
Most of all, this is a story about love - its necessity and
fragility, and its unequalled capacity to enable us to be who we
are. Deeply thoughtful, searingly honest and exquisitely lyrical,
Fathers and Sons is an exploration of fatherhood, masculinity,
authenticity and family.
Adpoted at Age four tracks the life of a four year old that had
been shunted around foster homes for the first four years of his
life. In and out of the orphanage everytime returning in poorer
health. He is finally adopted by a childless couple, although poor
by most standards who became loving parents with great values and
standards that set his life in the right direction. From there it
traces his acceptance and rejection by certain members of his newly
acquired extended family and his development through elementary
school, high school and ultimately into the job market with all the
twists and turns along the way. Searching for his original identity
at birth culminates in a brick wall ending... to be resolved much
later in life. He eventually is recruited into the Banking Industry
as a Management Trainee and has many interesting experiences in the
Consumer Loans Department of many local Branches. Because of his
past experience as a Collector he at one time becomes the Bank's
roving collection /repo person and some of the situations he
relives are both entertaining and worth a chuckle.
Sue and Lou never had any fears or doubts about raising their three
children. They were not like their parents. They welcomed the
teenage years. They knew their kids might experiment with drugs and
alcohol, just like they had. So they talked with their kids about
their own experiences they had as teenagers. As a family they were
very close. They took their kids camping to Glamis, the desert, the
beach and the Colorado River. They went to Big Bear every winter
and they golfed almost every weekend as a family. By the time their
youngest was in high school, their oldest was already 24 and their
middle child was 19. Their youngest would always tell them not to
worry, that he would never be like his older brother and sister.
Young Adam had witnessed all the trying times his parents had with
his two older siblings; alcohol, drugs, house parties, and
pre-marital sex. Adam's friends always came over to the house and
Sue and Lou knew them all. They were all good kids. But when Adam
told his mom he had smoked marijuana, it was not like when the
older siblings had experimented with it. Sue and Lou would quickly
discover he was using it to escape from the hurt and pain he felt
after his first love broke up with him. But what Sue and Lou didn't
know was that their worst nightmare was growing in their youngest
son. Without having a true understanding of addiction, this family
will go through a hell they could have never imagined. In order to
keep from having a breakdown Sue started writing about how this all
started. It all began with a story Adam wrote in his Freshman
English class titled "The Day I told my Mom I Smoke Pot."
Imagine a parent's worst nightmare - losing a child. Not to disease
or accident, but to a kidnapping. Randy Anglen's only son was
abducted to South America by his Chilean mother when he was 20
months old. Anglen fought to get his son for 4 years, fighting a
Chilean court system that ignored international law and protected
the mother. Anglen searched the streets of Santiago for his son,
hatched plans to steal his son out of Chile, paid witnesses and
private investigators and made numerous trips to Chile. He was as
close at 10 feet from his son, but physically unable to get to him.
Chilean courts handed him setback after setback, despite the best
efforts of a team of attorneys and U. S. Department of State
personnel. The story does not have a happy ending. Anglen writes
this book so his son will know what happened -what his daddy did to
try to get his son. This is a story of intense grief, fear,
frustration and injustice. A story of a father's fight to save the
bond between him and his son. A story of a father's love for his
child. A story of a corrupt and inefficient South American
bureaucratic system that destroyed the relationship between a
father and his son. After reading this story, you will give your
children an extra hug.
Many grandparents experience a surge of joy with the birth or
adoption of a grandchild. For years afterward, time together is
eagerly coveted, pictures are treasured and displayed, and multiple
gifts along with various kinds of support are gladly provided.
Richard Olson, a retired minister, professor of theology, and
grandparent many times over, presents the unconditional love of a
grandparent as indicative of a vocation, a calling from God. He
explores the vocation of grandparent in all of its multiple
dimensions of being and doing. Informed by a biblical perspective,
the book explores the author's personal journey of grandparenting
and includes conversations with a diverse set of other
grandparents. Olson examines biblical examples of grandparenting
and suggests that the grandparent vocation has possibilities that
often go unnoticed. These include care, enjoyment, and response to
issues throughout a grandchild's growth. He also addresses concerns
for our grandchildren's future world, and how grandparents can
engage in mutual conversation about faith, morals, and values in a
changing world. In addition, Olson discusses increasingly common
relationship types such as grandparents serving as primary
caregivers, adults becoming step-grandparents through marriage,
interreligious family systems, and grandparents handling children
with special needs. The book includes questions for personal or
group reflection.
A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and
inheritance of suicide in one American family. In 2009, Juliet
Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she
learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a
disturbing pattern in her family. Her father's father had taken his
own life; so had her mother's. Over the weeks and months that
followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning
to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many
fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold? In
three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In
the winter of her father's death, she struggles to make sense of
the loss-sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking
to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and
her mother depart Minnesota for her father's burial in her parents'
hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise
and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now
literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There,
Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the
final days of the grandfathers-one a fiery pro-labor politician,
the other a melancholy businessman-she never knew. And finally, she
returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of
loss, and of how to break the cycle. A stunning elegy that vividly
enacts Emily Dickinson's dictum to "tell it slant," Sinkhole richly
layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories
to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.
In her galvanizing new book, A.C.E.S. - Adult-Child Entitlement
Syndrome, Barbara Jaurequi provides a thorough and enlightening
description of A.C.E.S., a widespread family dilemma in the United
States today. Ms. Jaurequi developed her theory of A.C.E.S. through
her successful work with hundreds of married couples and their
Living-At-Home adult-children. Her book delivers an
easy-to-understand, explicit step-by-step guide on how to
compassionately compel adult-children to move out of their
childhood homes and into the world of personal responsibility once
and for all Through the application of a thoughtfully crafted
program that will empower their adult-children to discover and
achieve personal independence, couples will ultimately learn how to
re-focus their attention away from their adult-children and onto
other neglected areas of married life, thereby enabling them to
enjoy their marital relationships as never before. This is a
provocative, compelling, and particularly timely work that is sure
to intrigue readers as they recognize the presence of the syndrome
in their own families. A.C.E.S. - Adult-Child Entitlement Syndrome
is surely one of the most important contributions to Family Systems
Theory to come along in decades.
The star of Marvel's first Asian superhero film, Shang-Chi and The
Legend of the Ten Rings, tells his own origin story of being a
Chinese immigrant, his battles with cultural stereotypes and his
own identity, becoming a TV star, and landing the role of a
lifetime. In this honest, inspiring and relatable memoir, Simu Liu
chronicles his family's journey from China to the bright lights of
Hollywood with wit and humour. As a child, Simu's parents left him
in the care of his grandparents, bringing him to Canada when he was
four. However, Simu soon senses that his new guardians lack the
gentle touch of his grandparents, resulting in harsh words and hurt
feelings between him and his parents, who find their son
emotionally distant and difficult to relate to. Although they are
related by blood, they are separated by culture, language, and
values. As Simu grows up, he plays the part of the pious child
flawlessly - he gets straight As, performs exceptionally in
national math competitions and makes his parents proud. However, as
time passes, he grows increasingly disillusioned with the path that
has been laid out for him. Less than a year out of University, he
is fired from his first job and hits rock bottom. He develops a
determination centred around creating his own path. This leads him
to not only succeeding as an actor, but also opens the door to
reconciling with his parents. We Were Dreamers is a story about
growing up between cultures, finding your family, and becoming the
master of your own extraordinary circumstance.
From the author of A Wedding in the Family, Annette Byford
continues her examination of how mothers experience life changes in
family contexts and how it impacts their sense of who they are. The
book picks up the theme of family transitions and moves it to the
wider focus of what happens to a family when children grow up and
leave home, and the particular challenges this phase brings.
Becoming a mother is not just a question of learning how to bring
up a child - it brings a profound change of identity. The same
happens years later, when children leave home and the job is,
supposedly, 'done.' The author draws on her own experiences, both
personal and professional, to discuss how mothers negotiate this
change. She includes material from interviews with mothers and
looks at these experiences against the background of analytic
psychotherapy and family therapy. Also included is an exploration
of images and depictions of mothers-in-law, grandmothers etc in
literature and media, along with several, illustrative short
stories on the theme of mothers and their adult children.
Throughout the book there are discussions about what constitutes a
successful or unsuccessful transition. This title will appeal to
readers, mainly mothers, who are over fifty and interested in
psychological processes in families, who may well have read books
on childcare when their children were young, but who find
themselves unprepared for this stage of motherhood.
The teacher in this story was a short stocky lady, who, though
mentally challenged had an uncanny ability to teach. She could not,
or rather would not carry a conversation, but she did have the
tenacity to cause those around her to learn whatever she was
teaching: What she wished to eat; where she wanted to go; who would
be her companion. Her name was Cheryl. Cheryl's mother, Beverly,
was 39 when she took a tumble down a flights of steps while exiting
a building where she had been the evenings keynote speaker. That
fall did not show the full penalty immediately. It would be three
more years before Beverly would be diagnosed as having Multiple
Sclerosis. That disease would take everything from her.
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