My mother came to New York for the first time last week. She's not a big traveler type. She's been "blaming" me for making her travel half way around the world.
She hasn't even step on New York ground, and yet she already had opinions.
"It's too big. It's not as nice as Washington," she said. On our way from JFK she said: "New York looks like the moon from the plane." The moon? That must be the first.
I guess the flatness of Manhattan and the water around it reminded her of the mental image of the moon she has. No, she has never actually seen the moon;-)In person, I mean.
It's kind of fun to observe New York through her eyes. She liked the shopping stretch from the Empire State building to The Penn station. The Time Square too.
But then, just hours later:"This city is so dirty."
I guess I can understand this love-hate relationship with this city. And with people. Especially with certain people.
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Serbian mothers or simply older generation? What is the main factor that makes our Serbian moms so critical of anything and everything that does not fit into the framework of their ordinary? Sometimes it pisses me off and makes me think that it is only my mother’s personal trait. Sometimes, I make an overgeneralization and think that this overarching criticism is a trait of all Serbian moms (alas, Marija’s mother just confirms this conclusion of mine). Finally, I wonder if this will happen to me one day, too. Will I in time become so set in my ways, so comfortable with my own routines and reliant on my own experiences, that everything that does not match with my view of the world instantaneously acquires a label “insufficiently good”? In any event, I have decided to be adamantly against this a priori negativism that often emanates from my mom’s facial expressions when first faced with something new and unknown.
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