‘Suma the Elephant’ is a little book that looks like it’s for children but is actually a metaphor for adults.  Reading it, we see that the things that hold us back are actually little strings that would be easily broken.  The ending will surprise you and make you long for all the Suma’s in the world to be free!

Roberta you are absolutely right.  It’s important to step outside the situation and ask ‘what is really going on here’.  If there are no boundaries, if people are caught in a co-dependent situation where there is the ‘pay off’ of being the martyr or victim then you’ll have the results you describe.

Bravo to you Ruth Charny for doing what most of us do not have the emotional strength to do.  The low point in parent/child relations most likely came about because for the first time in our country’s history, children were looked upon by their parents as something they could spoil, pamper, and give ‘what they never had’.  Of course this made selfish oafs out of most and doing one’s own thing became the mantra for all.  A sense of obligation to one’s parents and grandparents disappeared as easily as one could pack a bag and move a thousand or more miles away.  The words family and disfunctional became redundant and  reality could be created with credit cards and using one’s home as a bank where constant withdrawals could be made. Everything became sanitized as this dream of a perfect life took form so naturally when parents became elderly and infirmed they could be placed where strangers would take the place of family.

Moving a parent in is so much more than an opportunity to correct a wrong, it is an expression of being truly human (humane) and perhaps touching on being divine.

If Joan Ganz Cooney, one of my hero’s as creator of ‘The Big Bird’ that could…Sesame Street…(wife of Peter G. Peterson, always wise and circumspect,  founding chairman of the Institute for International Economics, chairman of The Blackstone Group, and on and on) …well, if J.G.C. won’t comment, then who would dare…not I!