From Broken Acorns, Broken Trees
There's a kind of radar we tend to possess. Something that allows us to spot and gravitate to other broken people. No matter how masterfully they hide their pain from the normals, it shines through the facade like a beacon. I haven't quite figured it out, but there's a sort of focused attentiveness that seems to be at the center of it. Some combination of the ability to read a few pages ahead on a person's face, to become scarce just ahead of trouble, or to lash out viciously and disproportionately when cornered -- and a lingering fear of discovery. It manifests differently in different people, but we tend to see it. Maybe it's just because we carry that same focused attentiveness forward through our lives.
This radar fuels my own dysfunction, because at my core I am driven to heal some small part of that hurt, and in turn to release some part of my own isolation. If saying that sounds self-aggrandizing white-knight moral posturing, please try to understand that my desire to help has no bearing on my ability to help. Historically I've been just as likely to make things worse. Because the core of my dysfunction is an unquenchable need for validation and love, the only way for this self-sharing to be of value, is for me to poison this well -- to lay bare my own deeply flawed nature with sufficient honesty to leave no cause for sympathy. Before the end of this series, some number of posts from now, you should hate me just a little.
I've earned it.
Before I can explore that, I need to explain my origins -- which in turn are dependent on an understanding of my parents' origins. In other words, before I set my parent's actions and inactions to the page, there's a cause and effect that needs to be explored as their behaviors presented out of context might be unfairly demonizing.
There's not much I can explain about my father. He was raised in a wholesome utah farm life sort of environment. My paternal grandfather was not an abusive sort, and when tasked with punishing the children (by my grandmother), would take them into a room and tell them "if you don't cry and scream like this hurts, or I'll have to spank you for real" and spank his own leg with the belt for the sound effect. My grandfather is the sort that can walk up to wild animals like squirrels or deer and just pet them. He serves as my archetype of what a man should be. Stronger in deed than in word. Humble, without being self-effacing. Never shirked in his duty to work, family, and country. He would walk 20 miles out of his way to do the right thing, when the wrong thing was at his fingertips. My father had mental issues that went unaddressed. A product of the '50s, there were a lot of gaps in our understanding of the mind, so he went untreated. He was diagnosed in the 70's as being schizophrenic, but through observation, I suspect that he has some kind of highly functioning autism -- a series of disorders which were not well understood by clinicians until fairly recently. I suspect the schizophrenia diagnosis was the result of my father's 'outside the box' perceptions of the world. Something clinicians of the time would not likely have been able to follow. The drugs may have nudged the diagnosis a bit, as well.
Despite his advanced intellect, and his endless litany of knowledges, skills, and talents, the one thing my father lacked was the ability to process human emotion -- From himself or from others.
As I alluded before, my mother was raised by the cookie cutter archetype of an abusive mother. As an example, Once when my mother did the dishes wrong, my maternal grandmother threw a glass at her face, which shattered, leaving a scar by her eye that left glass in her face for the rest of her life. My mother was 10 at the time. Because of the constant rage, my mother's father left my grandmother. It was a simple fact of the time that the child would stay with her mother -- though I wonder if this isn't what she told herself to absolve him from the responsibility he abandoned. Without his influence, things only got worse. My mother was physically abused by her mother, sexually abused by her mother's new husband, and physically abused by her mother for whatever she did to cause that sexual abuse. There was no subtlety or relent in the verbal abuse wielded by my grandmother and her husband. If there has ever been a pure emotion experienced by any human, it was the furious wrath my grandmother carried with her, every moment of every day.
I have observed no figure of past or present, in history or in fiction, whose ferocity and intensity of hate could rival my grandmother's. To her, my mother was property. Any care she showered upon my mother was to ensure that she would be well reflected upon in public. This was not a time when a child could ask the police for help. For a time, my mother clung to the hope that her father would come back for her.
When my mother was 16, her father committed suicide. It was July 4, 1974. Hope dashed on the rocks, she fled her home.
Up to this point, my mother's entire knowledge of life was crisis, powerlessness, and abandonment. It's a no wonder that this was the lens through which she would observe the rest of her life. My mother was diagnosed with Histrionic Personality Disorder by the state. There's a bit more to it than that, it was a 34 page diagnosis.
According to Wikipedia:
"People with Histrionic Personality Disorder have a high need for attention, make loud and inappropriate appearances, exaggerate their behaviors and emotions, and crave stimulation. They may exhibit sexually provocative behavior, express strong emotions with an impressionistic style, and can be easily influenced by others. Associated features include egocentrism, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, and persistent manipulative behavior to achieve their own needs.
...Psychoanalytic theories incriminate authoritarian or distant attitudes by one (mainly the mother) or both parents, along with conditional love based on expectations the child can never fully meet. Using psychoanalysis, Freud believed that lustfulness was a projection of the patient's lack of ability to love unconditionally and develop cognitively to maturity, and that such patients were overall emotionally shallow. He believed the reason for being unable to love could have resulted from a traumatic experience, such as the death of a close relative during childhood or divorce of one's parents, which gave the wrong impression of committed relationships. Exposure to one or multiple traumatic occurrences of a close friend or family member's leaving (via abandonment or mortality) would make the person unable to form true and affectionate attachments towards other people."
It goes on to mention that there is some overlap with antisocial personality disorder:
"A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following (with the relevant symptoms in bold):
- Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
- Deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
- Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
- Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
- Reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
- Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
- Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."
That's all right on the mark, more or less, but it doesn't really capture what I grew up with.
Before I proceed, it is critical to explain that whatever mistakes, missteps, or misdeeds were a part of my upbringing, my mother made every effort to ensure that she was never the monster that her mother was -- and while that's a pretty low bar to set, she accomplished it. The forward cycle of physical abuse ended with her, and I'm grateful for that. Whatever poison flowed through to me was only an echo of what she went through.
After fleeing one of her unofficial foster homes, my mother met my father and moved into his 1970s teenage flop-house immediately.
If my father was completely unable to process human emotion, my mother was perfectly equipped to take advantage of this weakness. She could provide him with the obvious affections so often shared by teenagers, along with the added thrill of being a frail and mistreated damsel in distress to fuel his ego. The bait taken, she could control him through emotional swings and manipulations -- all while allowing him the illusion of being in control. My dad may have been a genius, but my mother was an emotional black belt. He was an unarmed combatant in a fight that he had no clue he was a part of. She became pregnant with me, as yet another mechanism of control. They were soon married.
When the first two decades of your life has been defined by navigating from one crisis to the next, it must be difficult to try to deal with life on any other terms. Imagine a world where every action performed by every person you know carries some secret meaning. A world where everyone you know is secretly plotting against you -- and in which you must be plotting in return. Imagine living in a bad soap opera. That's my mother. Once, she threw a fit because someone brought potatoes to a family Thanksgiving dinner, because SHE brought mashed potatoes to the dinner. Rather than being grateful that there was twice as much of the most popular dish at an Irish family's Thanksgiving, she was convinced that this person brought potatoes specifically to spite her. There's no hidden meaning here. This is a literal event, as it happened. Potatoes at Thanksgiving were an act of war to make her look useless.
This wasn't a one-off. This was the world she lived in. She could make mountains out of potatoes.
Devoting all of your time inventing crises to navigate leaves little room for handling real life. Economically, we were the 1%. Not the one you're thinking. The bad one. My father clung to a 1960's International Travelall that he would never fix. Fixing it would have required income. As long as we were in the housing projects and on the dole, he could get by without an income. Nothing maintains poverty like not having wheels.
It wasn't long before my mother's emotional manipulations had wore my father out. He started spending his time away, for 'extracurricular activities'. Something simple and satisfying. I should be angry about this, or so my mother said, but I really can't blame him. The ultimate irony is that she played the damsel in distress to his lancelot in order to keep him; But in refusing to 'be saved' at some point -- in persisting in the constant manufactured crisis and manipulation and intrigue which was designed to hold him down, she only managed to push him away. This was a recurring theme in her life.
With her chosen source of validation out of the home, it fell to me as the eldest son to be the center of her emotional cyclone. I was about 10 when my parents divorced, and I was put in the position to be her divorce counsellor. I had to listen to her badmouth my father, without judgement. Whether he deserved it or not, and I'm sure he played his role, this is an inappropriate avenue of redress. I was able to compartmentalize, understanding that her experience with my father had nothing to do with my experience with my father. What I wasn't allowed to do was process the divorce for myself. There were more important things to take care of.
I also had to be her closest confidante for a number of other things. She would speak with me at length about her sexual partners, their conversations, their sexual techniques, shortcomings, and proficiencies. She would speak with me about their wives and how she was going to supplant this one or that one because "this is a good man".
Obviously. That's why he's cheating on his wife.
These aren't things a kid wants to talk with his mother about. But I knew that I had to always be on her side, always unjudging, always unconditionally supportive. In turn, I was special. Ahead of my peers. I was the favorite -- of both parents. The problem, is that special isn't normal, or in this case, healthy.
Even before her father died, my mother had always longed for some magical influence to alter the course of her life. She clung to whatever bits of eastern philosophy, shamanism, wiccanism, spiritualism, drifted into her life. She started asking me to channel her dead grandmother.
To be clear, this is not an ability I possess.
But it was important to her, and it meant that I could stay up past bedtime. It meant that maybe I could give her some kind of closure. But it also meant that I was expected to commune with the dead on a fairly regular basis. I did my best to quiet my mind and listen for the answers. Of course those answers came from me. But I could leave enough room for doubt in my own mind. I could suspend disbelief and be the person she needed me to be. I was her fount for magical influence.
If I learned no other thing from my mother it is this: There is no magic. No benevolent force that evens the score. No angels or spirits who make the wishes of the deserving come true -- or who keep bad things from happening. Because if any of that existed, she would have found it somewhere in between her crystals and burning sage and i-ching, and numerology, and palmistry, and tarot cards, and sweetgrass and pendulums and 'psychic friends' and conversion to some northwestern tribe's faith. She would have one time hit the right combination of appeasement to have caught a break -- just once. No one ever tried harder to find that connection than she did. The world owed her a break.
Of course, I was raised in this. This was my normal. I understood that I couldn't talk about it in public, but it had to be true. It wasn't until later in my life that I ejected it with the rest of the baggage.
Entirely by accident she taught me that the only force for change in this world is the force of one's own will put into action. If there is a god, he has no concern for us. (That was the lesson I learned, but in the interest of cutting God a fair shake, let's just say his benevolence only shines on those who are willing to make some effort on their own behalf.)
By 12, I was largely responsible for raising my brothers - more than the regular amount of responsible. My schoolwork suffered because I was constantly working to maintain balance in the home. I would be left alone with my brothers for several days at a time, as my mother chased after some new man to fill the yawning void in her soul. I was raising 4 brothers, keeping meals going, and keeping my mother on an even keel. In the 9th grade, I dropped out of high school. In what would have been the 11th grade, I started attending vocational school. When I was 16, after the birth of my 4th brother, my mother attempted to kill herself. She had taken a bunch of pills, written a note, and was foaming at the mouth under the table. I walked to the payphone and called 911. Her boyfriend came out complaining that she was "being inconsiderate to do this right now". I permanently ejected him from my home by reminding him that he had warrants and I had already called 911. 16 years old and I kicked a grown man out of my house. My mother never quite forgave me for that.
The ambulance picked her up. I made breakfast for each of my three younger brothers, cooked myself a roast beef sandwich, handed the baby off to the neighbor, walked 5.2 miles to school, walked home early, picked up the baby, picked up my brothers from their busses, and cooked dinner. I kept this up for two weeks before my mother returned from the hospital.
By 17, I knew that I had to leave. I couldn't gain traction on my own life while keeping the wheels on the bus at home. Had I not left for the Job Corps, I might never have left the nest. I certainly would never have found time for a personal life -- up to my 18th year, I'd never had a girlfriend. I felt guilty to leave, because I knew that the home would fall apart without me. This wasn't an exaggerated evaluation of my role in the household. Within 2 years, the state had attempted to take the children from my mother. She pulled a geographical to Alaska. A year later, Alaska took the kids.
It wasn't until I was out of the house that I started to realize how artificial my entire life had been. It was a foregone conclusion in my head that every action taken by every person had some sinister motive. Everything was some kind of play or ploy or maneuver. Crisis to crisis, my entire life. Every action from every person laced with intrigue. The difference is that I became very adept at solving a crisis, using only the resources on hand. It's a skill that's helped me in my professional life.
In a single day, all of the drama was gone. The people around me weren't plotting or scheming. They were just people. I've spent the decades since weeding out the mental detritus left over from my mother's manipulations. There were slips, where I operated under the faulty assumptions of my past. but in time I've weeded those out. What I didn't know until I removed myself from the situation (my childhood 'normal' mind you), was how much of my life was consumed in bailing water out of a constantly sinking ship.
I suppose that's why I never had time to figure out how to be a person.
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