There was something about last week’s column that left me dissatisfied. I wrote about the difficulty of helping my 8-year-old daughter Emilie process disturbing news, particularly when she tends to over-focus on life’s ugliness.
But what I really wanted to discuss – via the vehicle of our obsessive replaying of the death of the trampled Wal-Mart worker Jdimytai Damour – was emotional enmeshment.
I find myself these days, to a surprising degree, dealing with the problem of enmeshment. This surprises me because not so long ago I wrote a book that was largely a polemic against enmeshment: against the boundary collapsing that I think is the signature characteristic of motherhood (and parenthood) in our time.
Clusty search: Judith Warner.