Making Memories

Reflections on Parenting from the Head of a Psychiatrist and the Heart of a Father

# 1 best seller both in Texas and Houston on Amazon.com after its release in 2000.

Table of Contents
Excerpt form MAKING MEMORIES
A Common Reader review
The Mid-West Book review
The Psychiatric Times review
Additional reviews on Amazon.com

Introduction
UNEMPLOYED
“AH-HA” EXPERIENCES
MAKING MEMORIES
DESIGNING SOFTWARE
BELIEVING AND OTHER REVERSE TRUTHS
34 PRINCIPLES OF PARENTING (A WORK IN PROGRESS)
THE EVERYDAY CREATIVITY OF PARENTING
REAL BOYS AND REAL MEN
TO THE FATHER OF A DAUGHTER
ADMIRABLE RESTRAINT (& OTHER TRIALS OF PARENTING)
HOMEWORK: THEIRS AND OURS
THE MEANINGS AND MADNESS OF MONEY
NECESSARY MASKS
AN INTERIM WEATHER REPORT ON THE STORMS OF ADOLESCENCE
THE ART OF LETTING GO
BEING THERE
FIRST DATE; LAST ILLUSION
WHERE HAVE ALL THE HEROES GONE?
ROMANTIC, BLIND, STEADFAST (AND OTHER TYPES OF) LOVE
LOVE IS A VERB
THE LENGTHENING SHADOW OF THE PAST
ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
SOLACE AND SOLITUDE
INTERNAL STORYLINES
WHERE FEELINGS RESIDE
PICTURES OF FAMILY GHOSTS
AN ANNOTATED REALITY
WHERE MEMORIES RESIDE
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOMEFRONT
RETURN TRIPS
UNCONSCIOUS CONTRACTS

Excerpt form MAKING MEMORIES

Lauren and I walked across the dam of the tranquil lake in front of our farmhouse with only the clattering of the loose rocks of the gravel road breaking the silence of dusk. We crossed the meadow and climbed into the blind to view wildlife out for nighttime feeding. We sat in the two folding chairs in this small space eight feet from the ground, peering out the slot windows into a near darkness for movement. Later, our high beam light probed the darkness to search for the double pin point light of bobcat or deer eyes.

In ten more days, she would leave for college, and this was our last weekend at the farm before she’s gone.

The destiny of parenthood is the irony of having the end in mind from the beginning. By the time you?ve got it down, you aren?t it any more. Still, that moment of recognition of the coming loss, when you can no longer pretend to ignore the inevitable, really hits–even though it was always there–like a moment when you embrace what you?ve known all along, and understand it for the first time. As my Dad did in his own simple way at another farm long ago, had I taught her the soul of the soil, the rhythm of the seasons, the circle of birth and death?

As Lauren and I sat in the blind looking for critters of the night, hopeful for that bobcat, I wondered if we would ever sit here again in the future, after new trails and fresh scents took her to different terrain. I wondered if we would have to search for common ground in the tomorrows ahead. Time would soon create a new expansion of her path that she could not yet imagine. I worried only slightly that she would always be able to remain firmly at the center of that orbit and see it clearly. Yet I knew that some of her learning would lead her back to that place inside her, the home she has always known, to rediscover it again and again. She would come to know the necessary paradox of it ever being the same, and ever being different.

The ancient gravity of earth and home will always have its familiarity, I reassured myself, the native soil for us both.

*****

From the chapter “Necessary Masks”

Mumbling. The unspoken code of adolescents to talk around the edges of meanings, to mumble partial responses to our queries, while seemingly engaged in much more important activities such as eating or leaving the room. This ubiquitous conspiracy of inaudibility must be genetic, biologically triggered to begin at pubescence. It never has to be planned by its perpetrators. And it’s not gender related, as best I can tell.

At this phase-specific point in their lives, when mumbling begins, we say, “I didn’t hear you — you were mumbling,” and they reply, “You’re just getting old and can’t hear anymore.” This phenomenon of mumbling rivals their ability to render themselves acutely useless at crucial moments. It is as if they do not want their clear thoughts to touch us, a taboo of contact.

We must know, as parents, that it is simply their confusion in listening to their own silent whispers of feelings. The mumble says, “I’m different from you and I don’t want you to hear me clearly so you’ll remember how separate you are from me,” while it also says, wrapped in the same envelope, “Come closer and listen more carefully so you can really hear what I may not yet know how to say.”

Review: A Common Reader

New Titles: Reader?s Delight Selection

“After many years of close reading on the theme, and months of hours trying to wrap my own sentences around it, I consider myself something of a connoisseur when it comes to writing about parents and children and the various subjects?memory, love, worry, etc.?their relations suggest. So I must admit that I was somewhat surprised, and delightedly so, to find this unexpected book taking up a place on my very short shelf of treasured volumes on such matters.

MAKING MEMORIES is an eloquent, magnanimous, touching, illuminating, insightful work, and reading it is one of the most inspiring things I?ve done in quite a while. I can only thank Dr. Krueger for writing it.”

– James Mustich, Jr., Publisher, A Common Reader

Review: The Mid-West Book Review

5 Stars

Dr David Krueger draws upon his experience and expertise to explain and document in MAKING MEMORIES how children shape their parents. It?s about how fathers and mothers learn from their children, and must ultimately learn to say good-bye to their sons and daughters so when those children-as-adults live out their independent lives, the emotional bonds of parenthood and inter-generational communication remain healthy and effective. MAKING MEMORIES is highly informative and recommended reading for students of family dynamics, parenting, and is accessible to the non-specialist general reader with an interest in parent-child relationships.

Review: The Psychiatric Times

“This is a fascinating, enjoyable and brief book. Krueger is a warm romanticist who writes in an easily read, informative style. His topic will be of interest to intelligent lay people, physicians, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals.”
– Gene Usdin M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, LSU School of Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana