My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.
Aspen Matis
Related
This was a vision of wildness contained – caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was str...
ASPEN MATIS Mothers are programmed to teach the fit. They are unequipped to listen to pleas, to alter their patt...
ASPEN MATIS I hated my inability to explain my life on the trail to her and my mother’s inability to comprehen...
ASPEN MATIS It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries.
The rumors dissipated, then changed. Event...
ASPEN MATIS I walked home holding Tom’s hand, not letting it go even as he tottered across a soccer field wher...
ASPEN MATIS I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking bac...
ASPEN MATIS The freedom of the woods lingered in me here; I felt lighter. I hoped to be changed by it, allow thi...
ASPEN MATIS I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the begin...
ASPEN MATIS I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a chi...
ASPEN MATIS My mom used to tell me, “I don’t like my mother, but I love her.
ASPEN MATIS I began to lust after our conjoining life.
ASPEN MATIS Happy people have everything to give.
ASPEN MATIS Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.
ASPEN MATIS In fact, because I liked him so badly, I needed to continue on my course. I was finally becoming the...
ASPEN MATIS Squatting on my bed–after twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total–I put m...
ASPEN MATIS But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the trut...
ASPEN MATIS I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I’d been, to find who I wante...
ASPEN MATIS He hadn’t treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and som...
ASPEN MATIS My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always kno...
ASPEN MATIS death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply...
ASPEN MATIS I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding t...
ASPEN MATIS I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a...
ASPEN MATIS Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind...
ASPEN MATIS From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t ...
ASPEN MATIS The entire time, he’d only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never ...
ASPEN MATIS I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full o...
ASPEN MATIS Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.
ASPEN MATIS Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably — this name that I’d been gi...
ASPEN MATIS I wish I had a great relationship with my mother.
CHELY WRIGHT As a child, our house had a backyard lined with roses tended vigilantly by my mother. So the fragran...
THELMA GOLDEN My entire life changed when I became a mother - my priorities, my understanding, appreciation of lif...
KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN Before I was born my father disowned me. You know those ones who get the females pregnant, and then ...
DREXEL DEAL My beauty and independence were new for me. They brought me pride and satisfaction; they changed my ...
ASPEN MATIS I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.
ASPEN MATIS In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheer...
ASPEN MATIS When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth t...
NANCY FRIDAY My mother and grandmother had me in church, and I was the kid that played in church. But pastor was ...
JOE GIBBS I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To ...
ASPEN MATIS Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had ...
ASPEN MATIS My identity and my security are not in my spiritual progress. My identity and my security are in God...
J.D. GREEAR My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had n...
ALAN GARNER A people's relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its moth...
JOHN HENRIK CLARKE I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shat...
JOAN LINGARD Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt a...
JAMES MCGREEVEY I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling,...
ASPEN MATIS It was a way for me to hang on to my identity. For me, during this period of my life, it became a fo...
DONNA HOLLEN BOLMGREN For this entire walk, my desire had ashamed me, as if my wanting to be kissed that night mitigated t...
ASPEN MATIS I have a great relationship with my mother-in-law. We're both Leos, we understand each other.
TORI AMOS I completely admire my mother for raising a child with cerebral palsy at home.
NATALIA VODIANOVA He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted pe...
ASPEN MATIS The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.
ASPEN MATIS Narrative storytelling enables us to derive ideas from the disparate facts, incongruent motives, con...
KILROY J. OLDSTER As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to rev...
TANITH LEE My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grim...
GUNTER GRASS My therapist told me that I over-analyze everything. I explained to him that he only thinks this bec...
MICHELLE TEMPLET I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life.
CAROL ANN DUFFY When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birt...
NANCY FRIDAY As a child I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do ...
TRACY CHAPMAN My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, ...
JULIAN CASTRO The capacity for extravagant emotion that my husband finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, es...
AYELET WALDMAN The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make my...
ASPEN MATIS Walking in solitude fixes nothing, but it leads you to the place where you can identify the malady�...
ASPEN MATIS I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.
FRIDA KAHLO I experimented with my own one-man show a couple of years ago in Aspen when HBO used to have their c...
ALAN ZWEIBEL You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but i...
LYNN JOHNSTON The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense l...
ERICH FROMM I've always wanted to be a mom. I had a great relationship with mine. I'm ready to pass on t...
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
QUENTIN CRISP I love hiking in the mountains in Aspen. Breathing the clean, fresh air is great. Plus, it gives me ...
CHRIS EVERT My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would...
ISIDOR ISAAC RABI As a child and a teenager, my attitudes and actions assumed the superiority of my race in almost eve...
JOHN PIPER I love children and I love family and I love that interaction. Because I had a really close relation...
ALICIA KEYS I was angry about the fact that my father would beat my mother on a daily basis, that my mother woul...
RICK JAMES My mother was totally different from the mothers of my friends. She would never separate from me. In...
CHANTAL AKERMAN She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me ...
ASPEN MATIS I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. Th...
ASPEN MATIS I was safe in this world. This was a place for creatures—I felt I had become more of a creature th...
ASPEN MATIS I was no longer following a trail.
I was learning to follow myself.
ASPEN MATIS We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.
ASPEN MATIS Childhood is a wilderness.
ASPEN MATIS I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is w...
JANDY NELSON If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good moth...
AYELET WALDMAN In the power of my newfound strength, I saw clearly—even though I’d been empowered to have my ol...
ASPEN MATIS People get so trapped by their technology now. Real life is so much better. I love talking with my m...
SAMMI HANRATTY teacher:"I'm teacher, not because i want to teach children something. I am teacher just because I li...
MY TEACHER My mother is Ukrainian. She immigrated to the U.S. from Canada as a child.
BOB SCHAFFER When I was a child, next to my own mother, no woman that ever lived took as much interest in me, gav...
HEBER J. GRANT The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language ...
AMIN MAALOUF The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense l...
ERICH FROMM If you're having a baby, nature has arranged the perfect food for your child—breast milk. I breast...
WAI LANA YOGA I was born by myself but carry the spirit and blood of my father, mother and my ancestors. So I am r...
ZIGGY MARLEY The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire.
ASPEN MATIS My mind is killing me”
— The Glass Child, Stuck In My Mind
CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON I always had the sense that nothing was never good enough - striving for perfection. My mother and I...
DOROTHY HAMILL For a long time, I felt like my identity was to fight. My identity was to be a world champion. That ...
DOMINICK CRUZ My parents kept the best aspects of the Asian culture, and they Americanized the family. My mother w...
ANDREA JUNG My mother used to pitch to me and my father would shag balls. If I hit one up the middle close to my...
EDDIE MATHEWS Since my mother passed away, my father and I forged a bond that is so tighter than one could possibl...
JENNA MORASCA Part of me always wanted to do something useful for the world. It came from my mother. She is a paed...
ESTHER DUFLO My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch
JACK NICHOLSON
More Aspen Matis
The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire.
ASPEN MATIS It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries.
The rumors dissipated, then changed. Event...
ASPEN MATIS I walked home holding Tom’s hand, not letting it go even as he tottered across a soccer field wher...
ASPEN MATIS I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking bac...
ASPEN MATIS The freedom of the woods lingered in me here; I felt lighter. I hoped to be changed by it, allow thi...
ASPEN MATIS I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the begin...
ASPEN MATIS I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a chi...
ASPEN MATIS My mom used to tell me, “I don’t like my mother, but I love her.
ASPEN MATIS I began to lust after our conjoining life.
ASPEN MATIS Happy people have everything to give.
ASPEN MATIS Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.
ASPEN MATIS In fact, because I liked him so badly, I needed to continue on my course. I was finally becoming the...
ASPEN MATIS My body was smarter than I was. I was with someone who would never hurt me, and so I finally relaxed...
ASPEN MATIS Squatting on my bed–after twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total–I put m...
ASPEN MATIS Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably — this name that I’d been gi...
ASPEN MATIS She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me ...
ASPEN MATIS But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the trut...
ASPEN MATIS My beauty and independence were new for me. They brought me pride and satisfaction; they changed my ...
ASPEN MATIS I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I’d been, to find who I wante...
ASPEN MATIS I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling,...
ASPEN MATIS I hated my inability to explain my life on the trail to her and my mother’s inability to comprehen...
ASPEN MATIS This was a vision of wildness contained – caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was str...
ASPEN MATIS He hadn’t treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and som...
ASPEN MATIS My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always kno...
ASPEN MATIS death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply...
ASPEN MATIS I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding t...
ASPEN MATIS He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted pe...
ASPEN MATIS I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a...
ASPEN MATIS I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To ...
ASPEN MATIS My mother overstated the dangers of the world – invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof...
ASPEN MATIS The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.
ASPEN MATIS Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind...
ASPEN MATIS From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t ...
ASPEN MATIS I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.
ASPEN MATIS The entire time, he’d only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never ...
ASPEN MATIS Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had ...
ASPEN MATIS I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full o...
ASPEN MATIS I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. Th...
ASPEN MATIS Vividly seeing that love had always been my mother's guide, I could finally release my anger—let g...
ASPEN MATIS When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we lov...
ASPEN MATIS It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.
ASPEN MATIS Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add ...
ASPEN MATIS Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. ...
ASPEN MATIS I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identi...
ASPEN MATIS If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad �...
ASPEN MATIS I was safe in this world. This was a place for creatures—I felt I had become more of a creature th...
ASPEN MATIS If I was going to put myself into a situation wherein I had no one to depend on, I needed to step up...
ASPEN MATIS I was no longer following a trail.
I was learning to follow myself.
ASPEN MATIS I was beginning to feel compassion for myself.
ASPEN MATIS The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make my...
ASPEN MATIS For this entire walk, my desire had ashamed me, as if my wanting to be kissed that night mitigated t...
ASPEN MATIS I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things tha...
ASPEN MATIS Mothers are programmed to teach the fit. They are unequipped to listen to pleas, to alter their patt...
ASPEN MATIS I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively,...
ASPEN MATIS In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheer...
ASPEN MATIS A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had brok...
ASPEN MATIS We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.
ASPEN MATIS I didn’t know if I was brave or reckless.
ASPEN MATIS Childhood is a wilderness.
ASPEN MATIS On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's inf...
ASPEN MATIS She had wanted me to hold rape inside me like a dark pearl, keep it in there, as it grew, as I grew ...
ASPEN MATIS Walking in solitude fixes nothing, but it leads you to the place where you can identify the malady�...
ASPEN MATIS And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab m...
ASPEN MATIS Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.
ASPEN MATIS I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the sham...
ASPEN MATIS She told me that my rape was not my fault, that I should feel no shame, that – simple as it may so...
ASPEN MATIS The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe a...
ASPEN MATIS In the power of my newfound strength, I saw clearly—even though I’d been empowered to have my ol...
ASPEN MATIS I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that di...
ASPEN MATIS Instead of seeing how much pain I can dish out towards those I disagree with, or who I believe have ...
ASPEN BAKER I want a future abortion conversation known for its openness, respect and empathy, so instead of gen...
ASPEN BAKER We were walking down to the pit to dance, ... Then it went off. People were running and screaming. I...
JENNIFER ASPEN Aspen Auto Clinic is more than an auto repair shop… it's a place you can trust. With the finest me...
ASPEN AUTO CLINIC