DADvocate

On Mother's Day, Just Muttering wrote about her father having been a jazz and literary critic who wrote Two Worlds of American Art: the private and the popular and how his influence had interfered with her reading "bad" books. As a child she had surreptitiously read Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames.

I completely stopped reading for a while, except for required school assignments, because I was judgmental about "bad" books, on the one hand, and only interested in them, on the other. Shortly after I got married, my husband and I found ourselves unprepared for an airplane trip and therefore without reading material. We found the airport store and he eagerly grabbed a Helen MacInnes story about Venice and asked me something along the lines of what did I want. I said a father-mimicking version of you must be kidding, I wouldn't read this junk. Knowing that it had been a long time since I read just for fun, he casually suggested I buy the junkiest book I could find. I scanned the over-wrought cover art and selected Peyton Place. I totally loved it and went on to read all of Grace Metalious's books and have been reading all kinds of both 'trashy' and 'good' books ever since, voraciously. So today, Mother's Day, my thanks to Chesterton for giving me a chance to remember, and to my children's father because of whom I stopped judging in such foolish ways and because of whose union with me and co-production of two wonderful people, I feel graced and loved today.

Two things struck me about her post.

First, that she is selfless enough plus cares and loves her husband enough to make a public expression of it on Mother's Day.

Secondly, the sometimes negative influence parents have on children with probably no awareness of it. Just Muttering's father apparently heavily prejudiced her against ordinary literature. I remember my father prejudicing me against many things just by my listening to his everyday conversations.

Often he would make comments to the effect that the more technical disciplines, such as engineering, computers (when they became common), and many of the sciences and the people in them were uncreative, boring, repetitious, uncreative, boring, repetitious, etc. All the creativity and excitement lay in the humanities, social sciences (except for sociology), and fine arts. He often made deprecated sales people and business people.

Consequently, I spent a lot of years trying to find a spot where I could be happy in a field that was "acceptable." My first strong clue that maybe I should be pursuing a more technical field came when I took the GRE exam my senior year in college. I scored some where above the 90 percentile in the quantitative side although 85-90% of my course work had been humanities and fine arts.

During graduate school I took a required computer lab course, loved it and found I had a strong aptitude for it. After that I began slowly taking computer classes and continued to enjoy them and do well. Seven years ago I made the big career move into computer programming. I'm very happy I did and wish I had done so sooner.

Ironically, I find a great deal of creativity and excitement in the field. Solving a programming problem is much like solving a brain teaser. Computers are actually quite limited in their basic functions. You must combine and arrange these functions in a variety of ways to attain the result you wish. I think of it as similar to what an artist does with the primary colors.

As parents we have a responsibility to our children to allow them to explore various interests regarding careers, sports, hobbies, etc. without being fettered by our prejudices. Discussing with children the pros and cons of all of these but our incidental comments and actions may have consequences way beyond our intentions if we are not careful. If we are still carrying around the prejudices of our parents, we need to toss them aside like Just Muttering did.