Filing my teeth to a point

[sovay]

Yesterday we bought hamantashn from Mamaleh's as part of Hamantashen for Ukraine; the flavors were chocolate toffee and raspberry halvah. The ones I made this afternoon with my niece were apricot, sour cherry, poppy seed, and prune which was more improvised than usual because our usual source for lekvar was dead out of stock. She began by just wanting to drop the fillings on the dough once I had rolled and stamped it out and by the second batch was imperiously forbidding me to fold more than one or two cookies per round because she wanted to make them all herself. (Poppy seed is emerging as her favorite flavor. It makes me so happy.) Toward the end, she made a couple in the shape of trilobites, which we agreed were appropriately festive, and a little cat-face with pinched-out ears and chocolate studs of eyes and whiskers out of the handful of dough she had been using as a fidget. Some years we make a triple recipe; this year it was only a double, but there were still enough survivors of the quality control stage to be divided between the three households with a share for the twins, for whom she ran over a care package before leaving. I believe her plan for the coincidence of St. Patrick's Day and Purim is to wear something green and also cat ears to school tomorrow. I like her so much.

Comments

[mrissa]

It is so nice when we can like the people we love.

[sovay]

It is so nice when we can like the people we love.

I don't know that I love people I don't like. How do you differentiate the two?

[mrissa]

When Younger Godchild was born, I looked down at that one-day old person and I loved them with an absolutely helpless protective love. I would have done anything for that baby. Did I like them as a person? I mean...as much as you can like someone who is essentially an occasionally noisy potato. There was not a lot of person established at that point. But when I sang to them, "Auntie Marissa loves you, yes she does," I was not telling any lie, because I did, I absolutely did.

I am really grateful that, now that they are not a potato, the person they have established is one I can really put my back into liking. Because I am not sure how quickly the whole-hearted protective love would have gone away, if it would have at all, and then I would have been stuck loving someone I did not like. Which is not something that happens with adults where I get to know the person, where I have some sort of choice in the matter. But Dr Bestie's mother handed me that baby, and oh yes, I loved them, that is my one and only instance of love at first sight.

Hmm, oh, I guess there's another example: there are a few relatives for whom I have residual childhood fondness still built in and now I know that I do not like them as people at all, and the residual childhood fondness has taken awhile to evaporate. And that is very uncomfortable. I care very deeply about their fate, I want the best for them very much, and also I think they are loathsome on several philosophical levels and do not want them around. This sucks. I do not recommend it.

[minoanmiss]

I hear you on the relief and delight of finding that someone I love from birth is growing into someone I increasingly like and continually want to be aorund. :)

[minoanmiss]

I love my parents, maybe. I care about their wellbeing. I am persistently sad that the way I live my life (apostate, unmarried, not a medical professional, etc) makes them sad. But I insist on being myself, and I don't even talk to them about subjects as innocuous as the weather, because I've learned they can turn anything I say into a lecture about how fat I am and why I should return to their orbit. So, I don't care for their company at all. I don't want to be around them. I don't like them.

(I love reading about your relationship with your parents, so very much.)