"The Glory of Love"

I like this song. It feels much more contemporary to me than I would guess for a song from the 1930s, but with this song it might be that it enjoyed a come back in 1967 when it was in a movie, 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner', though I can't remember ever seeing this movie. This is a bouncy, happy song that doesn't tire my voice out, in contrast to the Stephen Foster songs that I was singing with my group tonight, which made me feel like screeching. It doesn't help, I suppose, when I'm a bit beat in general.

It feels like I'm entering a less-tense time with my daughter this last week or so, a time when the effort to keep our relationship warm and growing is less stressful, more fun. I know from past experience that this is merely a lull, that at some unpredictable point we will enter another screaming-every-possible-moment period. I know to enjoy this break while it lasts.

I am so afraid of her hating me when she becomes a teenager. I got along with my mother, basically, throughout my entire life. I call her a couple of times a week, normally, just to touch base, and I still feel like the kid trying to get her approval and love. Which is not to say that my relationship hasn't changed and grown, it absolutely has. I may never be able to even mention sex--and my much-younger sister seems to do this without thinking, I can't seem to stop cringing and turning away--but we are close, and she feels as much friend as parent. I value her input and advice as I work to live my life in some vaguely sensible way.

I saved all my teenage angst and anger for my father. We're close now, it only took until I was twenty-eight or so. Up until then we both kept trying, with varying degrees of success, and that's what saved us in the end. Though I never quite felt that I gained his respect in those years (I might, *might* have since, in a limited fashion), I always knew that he loved me. That meant a lot, when I was cussing him out more virulently (and literally, and to his face) than I did any other person in my life.

It's a weird thing, endless weird and strange, to be a parent. Remembering your own childhood, trying to figure out if it has anything at all to do with how you raise your own child. Yes, no, and the endless maybe: that's as close as I can guess.