Word: motheral
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Many people were just plain scared. In Oslo, callers were on the phone to the State Institute for Radiation Hygiene after news reports told of an invisible radioactive cloud over the most densely populated part of Norway. Sample queries: "I am a mother of small children. What measures should I take against the radiation in the air?" "I am pregnant. Are the radiation beams dangerous to the child I am bearing?" Public-health assurances that the radiation was too low to pose a hazard failed to stem the concern. "Mass hysteria in a situation like this is not uncommon," said...
Pryor presents us with a film that says, "Sure, I messed up my life with coke and booze, but it's all because my mother was a prostitute, my father was a brute, we lived in a brothel, and the bullies down the block beat...
...ratifies the conventions of the Victorian novel. In the first volume of his autobiography, God Stand Up for Bastards (1973), Leitch recalled his adoptive parents and the mysterious couple who secretly and illegally relinquished their nine-day-old infant. "This title might seem like a calculated insult to my mother," he began. "In a way it is. But I have a sneaking hunch--and hope--that hard words may entice her out of the shadows...
...total, instantaneous. Her expression revealed a moment of fear so acute it was like a pain." Like many other adopted children, her son had his own fears. Were his own flaws environmental, or were they "symbolic perhaps of a greater human carelessness which would forever tie me to my mother's defection...
...time he unearths the most persuasive evidence of his origins, his wife and young son have gone 12,000 miles away to Australia. In 1981, seven years after Truda surfaced, he receives a phone call. The speaker is a woman named Margaret, who informs him that his mother is dead. She is, it turns out, Leitch's elusive sister. The siblings meet, joyously ransack memories and make the most astonishing discovery of all: there is yet a younger sister, Linda Elizabeth. She has been adopted, but she is untraceable. It is for her that Family Secrets is written...