About Me

My photo
Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
"No, really!"

My Favorite Bit of Paper Cup Philosophy

The Way I See It #76

The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating - in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Technical Difficulties and Yet One More Thing I Didn't Know How to Do

An esteemed sister blogger inspired me to write a post on a topic that pleases me. Oh, I had no difficulty finding the words and sharing the experiences. It was the illustrations that kicked up some trouble. I'm having an extremely difficult time capturing a decent replication of certain images, sort of like when I tried to take pictures of the extremely black cat, Virginia Woolf, and got only silvery glare with each exposure. No, there is no earthly substitute for what I am trying to photograph. Yes, I've tweaked lighting, exposure, distance from subject and more. So am I angry? I worked awhile at writing my piece, to no immediate avail. No, probably not angry this time. A little short-term disappointment. I can seek out advice. It will happen. Probably not worth derailing today over this. Sister Blogger, you will see that post, and soon!

Among the very long list of things I didn't know how to deal with was anger. Oh, the reader may believe that by the age of 3 or 4, I was utterly filled with it, but I'd witnessed few expressions of such an emotion, likely none of them very healthy. My parents finally separated for the final time when I was 13 years old. They divorced when I was 15. Theirs was a tragicomic pairing that included some of the deepest lows a married couple might suffer. I don't think either of them had any tools in their personal makeup to handle their troubles effectively. I don't know if either of them would admit to any highs in their relationship. It probably depends on when we asked them that.

For decades, we have referred to my father as Donald Duck because he sputters and spits, snarls and snaps about anything that pisses him off right now. Inconsiderate drivers, basketball games that seem to be favorably tipped toward the Celtics instead of the Lakers, people who laugh at other people who slip on the ice, mean people who take advantage of others ~ oh, my dad can go off. He spews for a short time, takes steps to remedy what made him angry if that's in his power, and moves on. He'd verbally spar with a much-larger neighbor - hey, he'd been a boxer, he'd be OK in a dust-up if one ensued. He had no trouble picking off the nun who whacked my hand with a ruler because I couldn't manage that pesky Palmer Method of handwriting. "If the Morgan kid needs to be whacked, you call us and we'll whack her, but don't you ever think of whacking her again!" I don't think he is a person with a huge well of anger left unapproached.

About my mother's anger, I'll have to use a bandolier full of educated guesses. I don't think I'll be far off the target. Otherwise, we'd have to ask her, and we're not going to do that. She was really bright and was not only her family's first high school graduate, she managed a scholarship to a good Catholic womens college. Before she could start there, she became pregnant. With me. Much high drama ensued - this was in 1951, for crying out loud - and it seems every member of that huge extended family had something to say. Granny wanted to adopt the baby (me) and raise it. Grandpa felt they were too old (aged 50 and 52). Grandpa thought one of his other daughters might know how to pursue a Mexican abortion and said so, thereby infuriating both daughters. Ruth didn't know how to obtain an abortion anywhere and my mother hadn't asked for one. My father's parents screamed from the midwest, "It couldn't be him. He had a terrible fall on a tricycle when he was 3 and can't father children." My parents wanted to marry and have their child. They did so. Later, my mother would suffer terribly after the birth of my profoundly retarded brother, and other assaults she wasn't prepared to endure. I believe my mother's fall from grace at age 17 broke her. I don't believe she has ever looked at my face without seeing missed opportunity, though she is well-evolved enough to now feel some guilt for that. I don't think she was ever fully whole again, and I know life continued to chip away small pieces from her. She morphed as addicts do. Anger, self-pity, codependency, resentments. The tiny lioness did not audibly roar for many, many years, but when she did, it was remarkable and terrifying. She is, today, an admirable recovering alcoholic of more than 25 years. I am not violating her anonymity with that statement. She announces it to anyone who will listen to her.

Through all of their tribulations, I never saw or heard my parents express anger at one another verbally. Never a shout, a curse, even a mildly angry statement. Neither of them nightowls, I imagine they only stayed up a few hours after I retired each night. Never once was my slumber disturbed by sounds of a wrangle. I have rarely heard either of them express a negative statement about the other. In 58 years. I know and understand both personalities - I possess some qualities taken from each of those personalities - and I just don't understand it. They had to have made one another insane! Not annoying. Crazy! Batshit. What did they do with it?

In the group of 40 cousins, and now their offspring so much time later, are wrapped up some of the angriest children I've ever known about. I can't say the aunts and uncles ever impressed me as angry. Granny henpecked (it's the perfect word) Grandpa, her voiced raised and her statements punctuated by a plume of Pall Mall smoke tossed over her shoulder. Gramps always, but always responded with a "Yes, Mary," and did whatever it was that she wanted. Fight over. No real anger exhibited. But then there were Uncle John's kids who tore into each other daily, drawing blood and not actually seeming to make up once the altercation was over. If we happened to be visiting when a fight began, I'd fade to wherever my father was located. I understand about young Sean who had multiple surgeries as an infant and was required to have his elbows splinted so he couldn't use his hands to disturb the surgical site. Yes, that would make someone angry, even a baby. But there was no one like Bill.

My cousin Bill's photo could have been used in a dictionary to depict "average, adorable, 1950s American boy". Blue eyes, red-blond hair, freckles by the bushel, and attitude. He was born scowling, I am sure. At the age of about 18 months, he was given a tiny pair of red leather cowboy boots by Granny and Grandpa. They were a struggle to put on him, but once he was placed upright, faster than a rattlesnake, he proceeded to kick Grandpa up and down the shins until Gramps bled. He once bit a (reasonable) dog and the dog bit Bill back before running off. The entire family collected to scour the neighborhood for this dog so it could be tested for rabies. Bill was so young that he gave positive identification to every dog encountered, from Chihuahua to German Shepherd. He had to be given the series of rabies shots which were apparently extremely unpleasant. But my favorite Bill story co-stars me. Their family was visiting at my home and Bill had been told repeatedly to leave the piano alone. He'd finally had enough and decided to take action, apparently. He flung himself to the floor where I was sitting, bit me on the rear end, and - my father swears this is literally true - came up spitting corduroy from my trousers. So you see, I saw plenty of anger from a short distance. I just wasn't sure how it applied to me. I didn't know to acknowledge I felt any of it, though I did. I had no siblings with whom to wrestle and fight. I surely wasn't about to bite dogs or humans. I kept stuffing my anger (which I hadn't yet named "anger") into my secret keeper compartment - rather emotional Tupperware. It was building up quite a head of steam by the time I was 8.

I was well attuned to sensing the emotional climate as soon as I awoke each morning so I could put on whichever self I was going to be for the day. By 8, I was figuring out anger between the parents, despite their quiet presentation. Or maybe because of it. Deadly quiet and no conversation was a pretty good indicator that I'd leave my bedroom and walk into rooms thick with palpable tension. I knew to lay low, not attract any negative attention, plan to play quietly. If the stereo played Ella Fitzgerald or Harry Belafonte and I could hear them speaking to one another, or hear Dad singing, I could let down my guard just a little. The first time it happened, I was 8. I woke up one morning. No Ella. No Harry. My mother seemed a little sniffly and red-eyed. My father was gone. Had the Merry Maids come in, they couldn't have eradicated his presence any more thoroughly. Not a sign of him, his possessions or that he'd ever existed. Between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. Damned quietly, too!

My mother said that Dad had gone to stay somewhere else. That's it. I must have been some embryonic form of interviewer, because all manner of questions popped into my head: "Where did he go?" "With whom?" "For how long?" "When will I see him?" "Can I call him?" "Why didn't he take me?" "How long will I have to stay here with you at the wheel alone?" I asked not one question. Her face let me know I shouldn't ask. It would be many, many years before I'd learn to ask questions in the face of any terror, thereby gaining some secure footing for myself. It is the first time I remember feeling abject trepidation, as in "What's going to happen now?" Very soon that was refined to "What's going to happen to me now?" It is the first incident I can recall wherein the fear overruled the delusion that things were OK. Things weren't OK. And I knew forever after I wasn't crazy to fear terrible, terrible events. After all, I'd lived through one. It happened.

He wasn't gone very long the first time. He called daily. He visited and took me out on weekends. A month later, he was suddenly home, just as quietly in the night as when he left. When I woke up for school, I heard Harry on the stereo. "Day-o, da-a-ay-o." No word of explanation about what had just happened here. Never. Future separations became longer and sometimes more difficult. There were many of them. Once he took me out of school for 2 weeks and we traveled together to visit his family in the midwest. It was a good, healthy, fun outing for us. During one of the last separations, I'd become a little shopworn. My hair was falling out at an alarming rate from the front of my head. To the extent my mother had to drag bangs from the crown of my head to cover my baldness. "Stress; nervousness," said the doctor who cared for all of our extended family. "You two need to start doing something differently," screamed the relatives. They would, but not for awhile, and not to an immediate positive result.

Guess what? I'm still not all that adept at navigating the world. Sometimes I feel the need to apologize for myself and sometimes I don't. Today I do. I do not expect or wish for sympathy of any color for anything that has ever happened in my life. I have enjoyed many of the good things offered to the good, when I wasn't even particularly good. I haven't written as much about my heady, high spots, though there are many. But I feel compelled to tell the other stories first. When I write about what happened, it forms a clearer picture for me. I can see the seeds, germination and growth of all the maladaption and misery. If I can see the sprouts, I can pull them like weeds, or skirt them or spray them with some positive herbicide-like stuff. So I ask the reader's indulgence today. I'm not wallowing. I'm looking back upon the road to here.

If you smell something really malodorous and hear its grunting and roaring, it's that bear I've been wrestling. It has grown larger and stinkier as I've tried to ignore it, and it won't go away, so I'm going to have to look under the bed and in all the corners to stare it down, tame it, get engaged or feed it. I rather fibbed on e-mail to Girlfriend when I told her I was wrestling something I hadn't named yet. Well, almost fibbed. I was close to naming it. And now I can. It's anger. Again. Still making me feel lost and uncomfortable. No longer scaring me nearly catatonic.

Something that charmed me: It's chilly and rainy and I need to go out for awhile. I tend to be a shivery little old lady, so I'll bundle up. Spotted in my closet, and to be worn with a tip o' the hat to Cousin Bill ~ my red, leather Mae West cowgirl boots. And I intend to kick no one.


13 comments:

  1. "It can't be him. He had a terrible fall on a tricycle when he was 3 and can't father children!"

    I assuming the above was a joke and your grandparents didn't really say that. If so, it's a pretty funny joke. If not, and he really DID say that, with all due respect to your grandparents, that may make it even funnier.

    Very good post. I notice in your keywords it says "connecting with others". Hey, pain is one thing we all have in common, isn't it?

    By the way, that your tattoo in the top picture? If so, YOWZA!

    ReplyDelete
  2. @ Kirk ~ I appreciate you so much. Thank you for reminding me that the great equalizer is pain. We've all got it. Mine may not look like yours and vice-versa, but we're all scarred.

    The great tricycle fall is a true statement! Offered only after the other grandparents claimed they would have my dad busted out of the Air Force. Dad's parents actually are intelligent and wonderful people, but they were in "defense" mode. I understand that after they saw me for the first time, they shut up forever, because no human being ever looked more like her father than I do, from birth through today.

    That is not my tattoo, although once mine are appropriately photographed, you shall see them on the promised post. Visit my sister blogger CramCake and pay attention to her posts #21 and 26 in particular. Not only a great tattoo, a great story. I believe you might have passing knowledge of her bicycling, photographing father.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The trike remark gave me a titter, too. Anger can be put to good use, Leslie; it can pick you up and fling you out fighting with better things than fists. And the burn lessens when the fire is directed to a purpose. That said, kicking something is always good.

    And I don't pity you. I think you're a kinesthetic learner - you like to take the jigsaw out of your head and shuffle the pieces around on the table without the box picture. That's self-reliance.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Amazing post, Les.
    I read these accounts with such fascination.
    You see, I'm a "case history" voyeur in self help books.
    I read Sun magazine
    I even listened to dr. laura for years even though I despise her.
    So I feel an even more perverse (although I prefer to think it a healthy) fascination in people's stories as I had a rather ideal childhood myself. Probably if I tried just a bit I could pull up aspects of your experiences in my own life by not digging to deep. I think it's those aspects that resonate within me and make me connect and empathize with your experiences.
    I hope I made sense, I mean to say that hearing the personal stories of what shaped people I know helps me to face and connect with those aspects within myself.
    And you're a good and thorough storyteller!
    No sympathy here, just love to you
    Thanks for the bear stew.
    xoxo Kim

    ReplyDelete
  5. Awe and ouch.

    Experts say our memory of events is distinctly different than actuality. I say, as long as we're fudging on the retelling, can we write some healing things in there?

    I've been going through lots of 'stuff' from Mom's house and it brings back so many memories of my childhood. I always thought I was spunky, but I think I might have been angry. I remember gritting my teeth so hard, I would get a headache. While lying face down on my bed, I would and kick and scream, flailing all limbs.

    I think my sisters and I have demonstrated through dynamics worked out in our own marriages, all the unspoken grievances in our parent's.

    I don't know where my anger has gone. I think it's hanging from the ceiling, staring me down at night. No wonder I don't sleep.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @ Rachel ~ Agreed! The trike story is laughable. However, to put it in context, Dad was also a family star: escaped Emporia, Kansas and got into the Air Force. They were circling their wagons.

    You use the best words about me, Rachel. "Self-reliance". OK. Didn't know I had that, but I'll take some, thanks. Even if I have to get it for myself.

    Now, if I can just tame the anger and use that energy ...

    ReplyDelete
  7. @ Numinosity ~ Kim, your voyeuristic tendencies will get their fill at my place. I mean, truly, I haven't told any of the hair raising stuff yet. And I keep needing to reiterate, "And we LOOKED so good!" So young and clean and 50s/60s idyllic. Handsome young professional and his lovely bride, etc. Pianos and vacations. No mammals as pets. Never. Not one. Thank you for being such a good friend. For just taking it in and not judging. If we could create a village, I'd apply for the position of storyteller!

    ReplyDelete
  8. @ Kass ~ I know. I don't mean to pinch anyone else just for the pleasure of bruising them. But I do have to tell my stuff. If I don't tell it, then I'm still the secret keeper, working against my own interests.

    A word about memories and retelling. Literally the truth. I remember events vividly and I have told them to limited audiences over the years virtually verbatim. I don't believe I am too far off the mark, and I'm not off the mark at all in terms of how things felt to me. In my teens, I learned something about my parents. I'd retell an event and one or the other of them would say "That never happened." NOW, had they been in unison about ONE story that "never happened", I may have paused and thought, "Hell's bells, maybe that never happened." But each of them says "That never happened" only to stories that make him or her look shaky. Selective recall, but not mine I think. And, p.s., I do not hate my parents. No, I really do not.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The image of one's anger hanging like a bat above their bed at night is terrifying - because it's so easy to see.
    And it is always comforting (amongst other emotions) to hear someone say they understand how you feel. It's validating. It may not make it "OK", but at least you're not alone, hanging upside-down from the ceiling.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I didn't mean to suggest your memories aren't accurate. It was just something I read recently. I'm projecting again. You know my history with my first husband, at least I think I told you. There's a very accurate legal term that describes what he did to me, but in his memory and retelling, it has been reduced to, "Well, she might have thought I...."

    Have you seen or heard in the news the story of the 5 Browns and what their father did to the girls as children? Perhaps I should be writing this in an email, but CramCakes comment made me take my daughter's suggestion quite seriously today. Mary Ann thinks I would benefit from some counseling. She sees the stress of what my sister is putting me through and thinks there are deeper issues. YA THINK?

    The sentence that keeps circling in my mind is from one of the Brown girls: "We just want him to take responsibility for his actions."

    In both of our cases, I guess this is never going to happen. Your parents have selective memory and will admit to nothing. My situation is the same. There is no law to protect me. I wasn't a child at the time.

    ReplyDelete
  11. @ My dear Kass ~ No, dear one. I wasn't suggesting that you suggested my memories were inaccurate. You see, I'd already considered that by about age 10, when I began to hear "That never happened." WTF? I was insomniac, deaf, blind? "Dammit, it happened! To me! And YOU (parents) didn't do anything to help me against it." Projecting is OK. That's how humans say "Here's how it went for me." And as CramCake says (my translation), "At least you learn you're not the only one." I might suggest it's worse for only children. She is one, I am one. "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do . . "

    You'd benefit from counseling, Kassie. Believe us, those who love you. You'll do it or not, but you'd benefit. Irony: in my longest and best paid career, I advocated heartily for other people in a way I could never (not even today) advocate for myself. I was GOOD at it. I won more cases than I lost. I did it for my little child, too. Won more instances than I lost. Still can't fully advocate for myself - I'm not worth all those miles and efforts. Not yet.

    I went to the library Sunday and took out a bookb I had not intended to find. It fits my circumstances nearly perfectly. It suggests "the person who ever met your needs and still doesn't" which meshes pretty well with what you told me (and I tattooed upon my soul): ".. those who are addicted to deception . . ".Yep. They are. It hurts, to the honest. but we go on.

    ReplyDelete
  12. @ Everyone ~ Clarification: as if anyone is still reading this. Last paragraph in the comment above from me to Kass. That would be a "book" I took away from the library, not a "bookb". And the quote from the book would be ". . the person who Never met your needs and still doesn't" not "ever met your needs". If they had "ever" met my needs, I wouldn't be here bleeding, right?

    ReplyDelete
  13. @ CramCake ~ Thank you, I had to chew on your comment just a little before replying, and I can see both here and on Kass' blog you struck a nerve with her. So, a couple of days in between, how does this fit? I am scared to death of my anger. When it blows, it is almost always out of proportion. Like a chain of anger bombs released by one small event (the last straw, maybe?). I'm not sure which is bigger, louder, smellier, the anger or the fear. Oh, yes, today I stumble around wrestling with all the things that are me and I attempt not to let anger or fear lead. Sometimes I am successful, and I call that a good day.

    If your bat feet began to slip, I'd extend to you my wing in support of friendship.

    ReplyDelete