Documentary filmmaker Doug Block turns the spotlight on his own family and the psychic jolts his parents doled out to their three grown children. When Mina Block died suddenly, Mike Block quickly married a woman who had been his employee, decades before. The kids had varying degrees of difficulty in dealing with it.
Mina left behind voluminous writings, including several cubic feet of very frank journals. How shocked the children were to find out their parents smoked pot and had sex lives!
The part that strikes me most is when one daughter says, if you didn’t know their mother, and only read her poems, “You wouldn’t know anything about her, you would only know a little bit about the inner workings of her mind.” Huh? Seems to me, that’s a lot. Just about everything, in fact. What she means of course is, if all you knew of Mina was her poetry, you might never even guess that she was a mother.
Nobody likes to realize that she or he was not the most important thing in a parent’s life. And there is an almost overwhelming societal bias, in almost every time and place, in favor of the concept that blood is all. But to some parents, children are quite peripheral. Occasionally, you’ll find a person who simply isn’t that interested in either ancestors or progeny. Mina Block may have been one of them.
Even so, the Block kids couldn’t have suffered much harm, since they grew to adulthood believing that their parents’ marriage was an exemplary one. Whereas Mina, in her journal, reflected that if their marriage was supposed to be so great, she didn’t even want to imagine what would constitute a bad one.
Just for grins, compare and contrast the revelation process described here with the story of Guillermo Sebastian Morales Pagan, and what his mom and dad were up to. Lights… Camera… Freedom? at Earthblog.net
Movies are Only a Life 
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