My sister, who does not have an easy life, was roughed up by our parents during the long battle that was our childhood.

“You had it much worse,” she told me once, “because you stood up to them, you always fought back.”

Whether I had it much worse, I’m not sure, but it was bad enough.  And it’s true I fought with them, all through my childhood and beyond.  My sister and I grew up in a war and it was everyone for themselves.  Violence and anger begat more of the same, as well as distrust, intense dislikes and other toxic biproducts.  

Eternal vigilance against bullies and exploiters was a theme in personal and professional life, and a detriment in both.   I never learned how to be direct and get what I need, the overarching moral component always cast a menacing cloud over those practical considerations, confrontation with the inevitable enraged, petty assholes life places everywhere was unavoidable to me.

Now I am committed to nonviolence, in word and deed.  It is  a hard, bumpy road in a rugged winners vs. losers society where sucker-punches are considered good sport.  You will notice quickly, if you announce your commitment to nonviolence, that people you meet, including those closest to you, will challenge you continually.  As soon as you slip, they’ll be ready to point and smirk.  You will not, like Gandhi, have a community of like-minded fellows to support and applaud your resolve, but an army of hooters, ready to restrain themselves or bust loose when your fist clenches in spite of itself.

I recently found a video of my parents as a young couple.  There was one amazing sequence where my father, an angry, quick-witted, supremely defended individual who believed, not without evidence, that the world is full of betrayal, turned in the sunshine and smiled at the camera as he walked.  Not a bad looking man in photographs, the man in the movie radiated optimism, intelligence, humor, warmth, and that nonchalant sense of his own power that the world calls ‘charisma’.  I watched it again, ran it back, watched the handsome, poised young man turn again to smile directly into the camera’s eye.  I described the sequence to my sister over the phone.

“What happened to them?” she asked, half laughing, half full of horror.

I didn’t know, but I described again how this good-looking young man radiated confidence and seemed ready to take a big bite out of a delicious looking world.  My sister and I never met this man, or even his reflection or shadow.

“I think it was us,” my sister said, “I think our being born did it to them, changed them for the worse.”

I didn’t think so, don’t think so.  But I recognized it was the scars in my sister’s brain that let her come so easily to that conclusion.  Our parents had seemed happy, were both good-looking, life was ahead of them, glittering.  Then, by the time we knew them they were both pretty unhappy campers.  She puts the evidence together, in the light most damning to herself, et, voila, a conclusion that can only lead to more pain.

My father’s soul was broken early, and I know some of the  terrible details of how it was done.  My mother, likewise, a child entering a lifetime of uneven combat with a cunning adult caregiver swinging a club.  It was waiting for them from the beginning, the fear, denial, anger, over-eating, lashing out in blame, the neuroses that came later. 

“I think it was us,” says my sister again.  It’s Occam’s Razor to her, the shortest explanation, everything else being equal, tending to be the right one.  They were happy, we were born, they were miserable.  Therefore, it must have been us.

I told her I didn’t think so, that it was waiting there all the time, the inevitable defeat they were set up for from the start.  But she remained convinced that it was our parents having my sister and me that destroyed their chances for happiness.

And I think of the scars that were inflicted during all those battles around the dinner table.  A parent who was not scarred that way would never think of inflicting it on their child, no matter how much of a trial or disappointment the kid was.  It takes a lifetime of conscious work to get some actual healing done, sometimes more.  And while you’re doing it, it’s best to deal mildly with the hecklers.