January reading

Still reading Isabel's Bed, but I finished another novel in the meantime. Decided to take a paperback book I owned with me on my trip to Washington D.C. So I went to the bookshelf at home and decided to take along Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon. An interesting book about private schools and people who are in charge of them. Funny, I just read My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman and that too was about private schools. Back to the novel by Beth Gutcheon. She writes about a disagreement that a wife has with her husband over her daughter's life choices. Why is it so hard to disagree with the one person you are in love with, especially about the person that you both love? It seems there ought to be a better way of handling disagreements. It divides families. Sometimes I just think it is because women cannot think like men and men cannot think like women. Laura Schlessinger said something really great, at least I think she said it, "Don't let a man define what motherhood means to you." In that sense don't let your husband tell you how you should feel as a mother, how you should behave as a mother, and how you should think as a mother. Mothering is very emotional. Men just don't get it. It's a good book about family problems, which we all have at one time or another.