Full book review forthcoming, yet indulge me in some dabbles (most of which are from the perspective of a missionary wife and children). I swear there is just something about a southern woman finding empowerment in the strange lands of the Congo...
I married a man who could never love me, probably. It would have trespassed on his devotion to all mankind. I remained his wife because it was one thing I was able to do each day. My daughters would say: You see, Mother, you had no life of your own.
They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.
***
I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow. It's easy to point at other men, conveniently dead, starting with the ones who first scooped up mud from riverbanks to catch the scent of a source. Why, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, wasn't he the rascal! He and all the profiteers who've since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
***
Unable to work either the dishwasher or Methuselah's long memory into a proper ending for his parable, Our Father merely looked at us all and heaved the great sigh of the put-upon male. Oh, such a sigh. It was so deep it could have drawn water from a well, right up from beneath the floor of our nitwit household. He was merely trying, that sigh suggested, to drag us all toward enlightenment through the marrow of our own poor female bones.
I recently re-read this after my first attempts back in high school. It is a beautiful book, and while I found it challenging to read, it was worth the effort I had to put into it. I can't wait to hear your full review. I love each of the girls in their own ways, the Mother I had a hard time with, but I'm from a different generation.
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