Quote

The caretaking has to be done. Somebody's got to be the mommy. Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.

Mary Catherine Bateson

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Mary Catherine Bateson
Age: 81 †
Born: 1939
Born: December 8
Died: 2021
Died: January 2
Anthropologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Mary C. Bateson
Take
Invisible
Caretaking
Done
Step
Slack
Needs
Steps
Mommy
Make
Somebody
Individually
Society
Provision
Making
Inadequate
Women
Underestimate
Need
Fill

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Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.
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Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
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Improvisation and new learning are not private processes they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
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When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
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... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.
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...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.
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I had repeatedly accepted inappropriate burdens, stepping in to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, I think I carried them well, but the cost was that I was chronically overloaded, weary, and short of time for politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers, and simply resting.
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Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
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In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
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The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.
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Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson