I'm adopted, so I'm pretty different from her. I'm a lot like my biological mother in terms of temperament (luckily for me, and it's made me think there's a lot more to nature than nurture, at least in my life). I can't decide whether religion was, on balance, a negative or a positive for my adoptive mom. I think religion saved her as she grew up in the slums of Chicago, but it warped her sexually, ruined her young adult life, almost made her in to a spinster, and made her really angry for the rest of her life.
I'm a fairly calm, unusually logical person, completely different from my manic depressive emotional adoptive mom. I think it was bad for my mom to lose the religious prop in her life- in later life she was on halcyon instead of religion, and I think religion, ANY religion, is probably better than drugs, but I don't know that for certain. Maybe she wasn't any happier when she was religious- I didn't know her then. I guess I HOPE she was happier then, because I never knew her to be truly happy, and I think we all want the best for the people we love, even if we have to imagine them having the best, at some time or place that is occluded from our vision. |
