“With all respect for you, Elie, you really have no idea what it’s like being a parent unless you’ve tried to raise kids,” said the skeleton of my father from his soft, shady grave at the top of the hill.   “You will never truly feel how much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have your child tell you to go fuck yourself.  I understand that it’s easy to dismiss some of the things I told you over the years– that you stared at me accusingly from your crib when we brought you home from the hospital, that you had a full blown, irrational temper tantrum at ten weeks — but, at the same time, there is some truth in those things.  

“It’s well-known that children are born with recognizable temperaments, there are easy babies and difficult babies.  Some kids are very fidgety, and fussy about food, and cry all the time.  You were like that.  Some kids are more relaxed, more placid by nature, and eat well and go to sleep easily and they are much easier to get along with.  Your sister was a much easier baby than you were.”  

All true.  And there are some kids who are quiet, eat well, go to sleep easily and are whipped in the face by their mothers for reasons unrelated to their otherwise easy-going little baby personalities.   There are parents who simply have no ability to resist whipping their kids in the face.  What happened to these people to make them so vicious?  We’d have to study the individual cases, but you’re aware that something horrible happened to them to make them that way.  

“Well, there’s no doubt about that.  But, unless you’ve actually tried to raise children, you don’t get it on a visceral level, which is the hardest part about being a parent,” said the skeleton.  

On some visceral level my experience being raised by two parents who were often angry, and clueless, and, shall we be delicate about it and say, sometimes a little strained in the empathy department, factored into my decision not to have children.  

“With the beautiful side effect that you can now pass judgment, from your theoretical high chair, on everybody who has done the difficult thing and raised kids.  I don’t think you and your sister turned out too badly, and I like to think your mother and I had something to do with that,” said the skeleton.  

No doubt.  I think we turned out pretty well too.  Look, that’s part of my exercise in writing this book.  An inventory of all the humanistic values you instilled so deeply in us both, while being, in many ways, beyond humane consideration much of the time when dealing with your wife and children.

 “You should let your mother speak for herself,” said the skeleton.  

Well, that’s true, but there’s a problem.  She was cremated.  

“What?!  When did this happen?!” said the skeleton.  

Keep your shroud on, dad.  It was after she died.  She told me several times that she wanted to be cremated.  I kept telling her she’d have to wait until after she died.  Not long before she died she told me she was worried about being eaten by bugs and worms after she died.  I told her not to worry, I promised her I wouldn’t let the worms eat her in a grave, and so my sister and I had her cremated.  

“So what are you saying?  That only a fucking skeleton can speak from the grave?”  

Look, dad, we both know this whole thing is bullshit.  My mother will have to speak for herself later.  I’m not running a haunted on-line journal here.   You and I are having the conversations we should have had decades ago, while you were still alive and vital and could have done something about the terrible regrets you died with.  

“Yeah, and if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.  The thing you don’t get about being a parent is that it is about the hardest job there is in the world. Your odds of getting it right?   A crap shoot, Elie, truly.  You think you know what you will do the first time your kid starts screaming at you in rage.  You have no idea what you will do.  All the issues from your own childhood are sitting right there at the table with you and your child.   I thought I did a great thing, not beating you and your sister when I was angry.”  

I think so too, nobody would have blamed you for smacking us, though I’d have called Child Protective Services, as I sometimes threatened to do.  

“Look, do you think Child Protective Services would have intervened in our house?  You were well-fed and well-clothed.  The house was safe, clean and comfortable.  Neither of your parents drank or took drugs.  Neither of your parents hit you.   What do you think the city worker would have said, after listening to your complaints about a father with two jobs who called you a fucking cobra, a rattlesnake, told you that your face, twisted and contorted with hate, was oozing hatred in the form of your teenaged acne?”

She would have smirked and told me to stop fucking whining and wasting the city’s time and resources on my piddling, chicken-shit complaints.  

“Right, which is not to say she would have been correct to do this, the point is that verbal abuse, in an otherwise unimpeachably wholesome home setting, does as much damage as a belt or a fist.   We’ve been over this many times, how subtle my ass-whupping techniques were.   Your sister, how old was she when she realized how much I’d tortured and damaged the two of you?”  

She told me she was forty before she saw it with any clarity at all.

“Well, that was a long free ride for me then, wasn’t it?  I blamed you two for everything.  I made you feel like you were an ingrate and a whiner when you complained about being emotionally roughed up.  To this day, you will have a hard time really convincing anyone that I’d been much of a monster.  ‘Ooooh, your father was mean to you…. oooh, he called you names…. ooooohhh….’  The fact is, as you and I both know, I was a monster.  But I was a smart monster, a clever monster, a persuasive monster well able to defend everything I did on high moral grounds.  It wasn’t me at all, it was my adversarial little asshole of a first born baby, a difficult baby, an angry and implacable baby…”

Well, I’ll give you that.  I was an angry and implacable new-born.  I recall, actually, before I could even see clearly, that I recognized you as the enemy and was determined to somehow destroy you.  

“Sure, make a joke, why not?  I’m dead, what the hell can I do about it?”

Same as when you were alive, I suppose.  We’ll pick this up later, I’m going to eat a pertater.

“Hasta la vista, Angry Baby!”