Category Archives: book of irv

Anger is a mask for feelings even more threatening

It hit me last night during a walk, after a day sadly considering the ongoing righteous anger of people I’ve known for years, that anger is a powerful emotion that often masks even more painful emotions.   It is unbearable to sit with the pain of feeling unloved, rejected, abandoned, ignored, powerless, harshly judged, vilified, unfairly punished.   Shame, of course, is a famous goad to violence, a cycle observed in every prison, in every slum, where people kill each other for the capital crime of disrespect. 

The easy fix for terribly painful feelings is a nice surge of anger at the perpetrators, or those you focus your anger on, which works just as well.  In the clean, harsh, black and white light of anger, all becomes clear.  These merciless fucking fucks deserve no less than the full force of my manly wrath!

Anger is an automatic reflex to being hurt. Easy as kicking when the doctor expertly hits your kneecap with that little rubber hammer. It also has the great advantage of closing off any conversation that might make you feel uncomfortable, possibly force you to confront whatever terrifying personal demons you are trying to hold at bay. Anger is far superior, and feels much more empowering, than crying in pain about something beyond your control or ability to heal from. It also has the inherent advantage of making you the victim of the person who made you mad. Being the victim is very important for a feeling of righteousness and personal integrity since it lets you off the hook for doing anything you’d be at fault for if you had not been the victim of the person you’re rightfully getting back at with your anger.

On a mass level, which is the aggregate of millions of individuals, anger works exactly the same way.  You have middle class citizens who work hard and play by the rules, losing ground every day in a world where your savings are constantly losing value and only the casino of the stock market offers the kind of interest banks used to pay depositors, although you can lose it all when you place your small nest egg on the Wall Street roulette wheel.   The job you work hasn’t seen a raise in decades, the union is gone, the plant is about to close so the corporation can make a bundle for the shareholders by moving production to a country with no regulations at all about anything.   You look around and more and more “minorities” are getting ahead, they’re on TV, in the movies, winning awards, championships, these rich, spoiled bastards complaining about being mistreated, the victims of systemic prejudice.   The so-called party of the working class is openly owned by billionaire corporate donors, just like the other party has always been, and has done little to protect what is being taken from you every day.  It’s a billionaire’s world now, and you don’t stand a fart’s chance in a hurricane of getting out of this in the comfort your parents enjoyed at the end. We all know who’s to blame. Time to get some payback!

Make America (insert any country’s name here) Great Again!   Like it was in the good days, when everybody was prosperous and before a bunch of activist commie dupes on the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the longstanding protections we all enjoyed during perfectly legal racial segregation.  Women knew their place in those days too, did their duty and gave birth to whatever was in their womb, as God intended.   And the so-called gays kept their perversions to themselves, on pain of a nice ass whupping, or worse.  We put Jesus Christ into the Pledge of Allegiance, for fuck sake, and still the godless communists keep coming, for our God, for our guns, for our children.

Much easier to feel rage toward all these hyped up perceived enemies than to realize you’ve been suckered, divided, conquered, force fed a gallon of stinking bullshit, down the old gullet with a funnel and hose.  The problem was never a vast cabal of powerful pedophiles, no such cabal exists (except in fevered fascist propaganda, it’s a favorite charge of Putin) these destructive creatures are universally hated (even when protected and hidden in hierarchies, or by their great wealth and political connections) and don’t last ten minutes in prison.  The problem was never most of what you are constantly told it is.  Believe it or not, it’s not even a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and I would know. if it was

The problem in the US and elsewhere is that the super-wealthy 0.01% have finally taken over the political system. Here they’ve orchestrated the appointment of a hand-picked Christian corporatist majority on the Supreme Court, installed by them, that decides what’s constitutional and what must be struck down as contrary to our democratic values. These super wealthy include the eternal vampire psychopaths, created by our courts, known as corporations.   Endowed by federal judges with feelings and rights, and even personhood, equivalent to an innocent embryo, these artificial persons are entitled to do whatever they feel necessary, legally spend unlimited amounts of secret money to make the laws, and have the government, that protect themselves, and their profits, the best.

The thought that anger is just a mask, much of the time, for more threatening emotions, struck me as a good starting point to think about a lot of things related to non-harm and kindness.   The easiest thing, and it is part of basic survival, is to simply get mad when you feel mistreated.   Fuck the fucking consequences, I don’t have to take this kind of treatment from an actual piece of shit!   I will rage, and feel righteous, and the unbearable pain and life-sapping fear that lurks inside when I start to consider the harms that were inflicted on me personally will be replaced by a surge of being 100% in the right to smash your fucking face, asshole.

This mechanism, I realize now, was the emotional engine that drove my father, from his shameful childhood to his deathbed regrets.  A man, particularly in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, could not give in to the need to have a good cry about the painful betrayal he experienced in his earliest life.  Feeling humiliation is unbecoming, unhealthy, crippling, weak.  Fuck that, a man takes action! 

Sometimes, sadly, that action needs to be righteously bellowing at your children.  It’s your right, you feed the ungrateful little provocative bastards, and clothe them, house them, bust your ass working two jobs to give them a life a hundred times better than the horror show you experienced.  I understand the anger itself, I saw it regularly, daily, for almost the entire time I knew my father.  It was only once, not long before he breathed his last breath, that he had his first inkling that maybe there was a better way to be a human being than raging at his children, keeping his wife on a short leash.

Lack of imagination is a crippling handicap, and a very common one.   Without it, you cannot imagine better options than variations on the old standard you inherited from your own fucked up parents. It’s like the corporate insistence that it’s either unregulated worldwide capitalism (freedom) or totalitarian communism. Limited in your seeming choices, you are bound to justify everything you do as the only real choice. Real choice, of course, being limited by what you can imagine your choices to be.

If you do something, and feel totally justified doing it, it must be universal, otherwise, shit… it could be abnormal. The thought of not being normal was one of the most terrifying things my father, who never forgave any hurt, was ever confronted by. When I told him once that he was weird, his brain almost short circuited. The odd expressions that played on his face as he repeated the word “weird” with incredulous inflections made a big impression on teen-aged me. Luckily, for him, everyone in the family knew how fucked up and abnormal I was.

Sitting with corrosive emotions

This has got to be one of the hardest things humans have to do.   A feeling that causes pain, and is left unaddressed by the people involved in causing it, leads to anger or depression (anger turned against the self, in an apt description I read), after an increasing bitterness that becomes impossible to ignore.  The reflex in most will be to turn anger on the person causing the pain, simply blame them, or to quietly take the pain on yourself as confirmation that you deserve no better, somehow.  Hard to sit with corrosive emotions, though sit with them you must, sometimes.   

There are a few reasons a loved one will not hear you when you ask them to, few of them are very promising for the relationship.  Particularly if they, understandably, demand to be heard at once when they are in pain and then tell you just to wait a few more months to talk about what’s bothering you.   

Parents, for example, may feel supremely challenged by a very smart child.  The kid will have to learn to navigate around the insecurity of the parents, find his or her own way forward, without the help of the parents.  Sometimes just a difficult question about something that perplexes the kid will set the parents off.   How do we explain something that gives us so much pain to think about?  Nobody knows the answer to human evil!   Why do you ask such goddamned questions all the time!?   Jesus, can’t you just be quiet?!  The kid derives various lessons from this consistent feedback, adjusts the best they can.

Some people cannot be wrong.  If you point out something they did thoughtlessly, or unfairly, you are pointing to something intolerable, something inhuman, unthinkable to them.   “You don’t seem to understand, I cannot be wrong.  It’s not that I don’t like being wrong, I can’t be wrong.   How do you not know this about me after all these years?  I will not be wrong, I will not be challenged to defend my actions, you have the problem, not me!  I am loved by everyone, you’re the only one with a problem, look at your own life!” 

My dear old dad had this feature, an inability to admit fault for anything.  It endured through almost fifty years of constant war with his children, two provocative little shit snots who constantly challenged him, and lasted until the last night of his life, when he realized how much of a horse’s ass (his phrase, only time I ever heard him use it) he’d been to see the world as black and white.   He wistfully imagined the world he could have been living in instead, full of nuance and color, rather than the bleak high contrast warscape he inhabited and imposed on his young children.  He apologized for forcing my sister and me to grow up in the grim shadow of his irrationally limited emotional worldview.  I appreciated the apology.  He died a few hours later.

Once, two years before he died (two years of the meaningless fake small talk he demanded at the end) he told me I had to respect his right not to respond to concerns I raised. For once I was there with a reply I couldn’t later improve on. I told him I understood that he was choosing not to talk about a difficult subject but that I certainly did not have to respect that choice. He then demanded we keep our conversations politely superficial, talk only about sports, health, politics, and so we did, until that last night of his life, when he admitted he’d felt me reaching out to make peace with him many, many times over the years. He regretted, that last night, that he hadn’t been mature enough to reach back, even once. He’d been too afraid, he told me. And so, to avoid pain he could not bear, we’d had to pretend to be a loving father and son, on his strict, limiting terms, until I was there to support him as he died.

Sometimes, I have to say, I am the last one to understand the full scope of a situation.  Sometimes it feels like I’m the last to realize that something I’ve long cherished is already dead.  My efforts to not react with anger, to fully process what needs to be said so I can speak without the anger, must make me some kind of aggravating holier-than-thou freak to loved ones who get anger off their chest and move on, without the need to understand anything about what set off their anger (since, after all, they know who to blame).    By the time I put my thoughts together, particularly after a couple of follow-up challenges (threats like “I’ve dropped people from my life for doing less to me than what you did”) the subject is ancient history, being dredged up needlessly by a troubled person, and nobody in their right mind cares about that stuff.

My best advice is to somehow make peace with the bitterness that churns up when your needs are dismissed.  That bitterness is to be expected when you are stonewalled in your need to be heard.  Forgive yourself for being unable to stop feeling it. I find that setting things out clearly on a page provides some temporary relief.

You will have to leave the embittering situation in the end, if you can’t find a way to make it better, it is Survival 101 for anyone but the hardcore masochist. Remember that making peace requires goodwill and openness on both sides, you can’t do it alone. In the meantime, finding the patience you will need is a great challenge, a mind-fucking challenge some days, as is maintaining a posture of peace, when the sides seem to have been drawn in black and white, the final irrefutable victim story irrevocably arrived at, all details agreed to, and the terms of any possible peace treaty have already been carved in stone.

Picturing the familiar festive table without you is a little foretaste of death, the place we all must go in the end.  If you’d been hit by a truck, or died suddenly of a heart attack, the effect would be the same.  A chair you used to sit in, occupied by someone else, as life goes on, as it must.

Note on the Book of Irv

As I suggested yesterday, I’d like to get back to rewriting the story of my father into a readable 250 pages (the first draft, which you can see here as it emerged, is about 1,200 pages) but I’ve been unaccountably distracted by the worldwide resurgence of the kind of fascism that always leads to mass murder, after years of brutal repression.   The world’s getting a little appetizer in the deliberate war crimes Trumpie’s pal Putin is committing in a war of unprovoked aggression against the civilians of Ukraine [1].   

The movement we have here has been on the move for decades, pretty much since the New Deal programs began, funding their dozens or hundreds of powerful octopus arms with billions in hereditary wealth, determined to destroy the administrative state, all social programs, and reserve government coercion for poor people who don’t have shit to say about it.  These are the same supremely entitled motherfuckers who are always upset when “entitlements” like Social Security, child labor laws, anti-pollution laws, unemployment insurance, pro-labor and pro-environmental enforcement agencies, government–subsidized private health insurance for the old, the poor, a century- belated ruling that segregation is unconstitutional, anti-lynching laws and so forth become the normal expectations of ordinary American citizens.

Globalist is usually right-wing code for “nefarious fucking socialist Jews” (which, as a nefarious fucking socialist Jew, I am allowed to say, happy Passover, y’all) but it applies much more accurately to the global coordination between extreme right wing parties.   When it comes to the international fascist movement, Sloppy Steve Bannon is right there, 100% gung ho, ready to be a muscular martyr for the cause.  Ditto angry Trump confidante Stephen Miller, racist Jeff Sessions’s protege and loyal Trumpist in the bunker with the mad former president.  Furrow-browed Tucker Carlson, TV dinner fortune heir (and the political party Carlson propagandizes for), loves Victor Orban, the Hungarian fascist, and hosted his FOX show in Hungary, a model society for his ilk — why do gays need rights?   Why should I be against Putin, he never called me a bad name?   Why do George Soros and the Clintons hate our freedom so much?   How do we actually know Trump wasn’t cheated, along with the rest of us, in a cleverly rigged election?  Why are Blacks always angrily complaining about unarmed family members being killed by cops when whites never do?    Why do I always pose these hateful things as questions?   Do you want to get sued for directly defamatory, or prosecuted for treasonous, behavior? Do you actually believe my viewers want nuanced answers? Do I not give them answers they already know every night, in the form of leading questions? 

So, yeah, I’m distracted, I don’t know why, keeping one eye on the 50/50 chance we will have our own one party state, bound by a Fuhrer’s Oath of personal loyalty to a compulsive liar and vindictive king of open corruption, where a timid but comparatively decent party bows to the will of violent mobs and submits peacefully to their own public executions.   C’est la vie, I suppose.

[1]

Not to say the US didn’t do virtually the identical thing under the aptly named Dick Cheney when it launched a preemptive war, based on lies told over and over to the citizens of the US and the world, against Iraq a few decades back.  How many Iraqi children and old people did we kill, maim, turn into homeless refugees?   We will never have an accurate count of the many thousands our smart and stupid bombs killed or crippled, though the number of brown refugees who fled the brutal “liberation” of Iraq was in the millions.

Book of Irv, anyone?

I struggle, more than most, against lifelong impediments installed in my childhood.  My parents were generally united in their theories, rationales and accusations, but most of the hostility I faced was generated by my brilliant father, a perplexing contradiction of a man to be raised by.  There is nothing more difficult for a child to make sense of than sentimental tenderness expressed with humor alternating with sudden rage, particularly when the anger is defended in a unified front by both parents. 

For example, it was beyond debate, according to them both, that I had been born a very angry baby.  After all, they’d say, I’d displayed red-faced rage and challenged my parents on everything from the time I was a few days old.  My father referred to the accusing way I stared at him from my crib, with huge, unblinking black eyes,  from the day I returned from the hospital, a newborn.  This creeped him out so much they moved my crib to my mother’s side of the bed after a couple of days.  

It always seemed crazy to me, this insistence that I was born angry, stared “accusingly” at my father from the second or third day of my life, and that there was no concievable explanation for my natural born intransigence as an infant, and my constant anger, but that was always their position, at least until the last night of my father’s life. 

I struggle against the damage done to me by insistent, unlikely theories about my character in several ways.   One is a determination to avoid any echoes of the unfair, opinionated, sometimes insane, beliefs about me that I was expected to accept as true.  I am attuned to the sometimes subtle machinations of angry self-defense and how it often becomes intent on blaming others for sudden outbursts of anger.   Such displaced anger is a common thing most people encounter and sometimes practice, the assigning of unfair blame for grievous acts a loved one never committed.  It is commonly done by people close to each other, because that is the safest place to prosecute such anger.  Or maybe not, most murders, we’re told, happen between people who know each other, often within families.

Another way I struggle is by researching and pondering, often while tapping these keys. It took me years to discover the source of my father’s frequent rage and how that rage shaped my view of the world.  I sat down finally, in 2016, at sixty, to write out everything I knew about my father’s life, to write his biography as best I could.  I found myself putting together a puzzle with thousands of missing pieces, working in almost total darkness.   I wrote daily for two years.  Much of it was like searching history for a trace of the muddy hamlet my father’s mother came from, a place wiped off the map in 1942 along with everyone in it, like literally thousands of other little Jewish hamlets and towns in those years.    

Initially I was looking for a scene to dramatically convey the severe damage my father inflicted on my sister and me.  This was devilishly hard work because his techniques were frequently very subtle, the withholding of an encouraging word, a glare, often just silence applied, by reflex, to strategically cruel effect.  I couldn’t point to a busted nose or a broken arm, a tearful midnight trip to the emergency room.   The damage that can be done with words alone, backed by an implacable will, is impressive.  It is also often fiendishly subtle.   We all get hurt by words sometimes, and we can all say, together “boo hoo!”, though the pain hurtful words can inflict is as sharp as the entry of an arrow into our flesh.  

I struggle against a ready temper, every day.   I overcompensate sometimes in my efforts to remain mild.  This has sometimes driven others to rage, that I try not to react with anger when provoked, goadingly clinging to the high road, like a superior fucking prig.  This is maddening to people who want a good fight.  I don’t want a good fight.  I never wanted a good fight, though I was forced to fight daily for the first few decades of my life.  Like most experienced fighters, I’m aware that facial expression, tone of voice and body language are potent weapons of war.   Part of my struggle against my temper is against an inability to keep these reflexes under control. A look on the old face, no more than a telltale micro-expression, a tone saying otherwise polite words just so, a tensing of the body are still fairly automatic when the heat is being turned up. Mastering that shit, my friends, may well be beyond my powers.

I’m aware that many people may view these struggles of mine as a kind of vanity, if not also folly.   My father, for one, put forth a lifelong argument that people cannot change anything fundamental about themselves.   He denounced as deluded the belief that a skilled psychiatrist or other therapist can help us gain insights and change anything about our innate natures.   As proof he’d point to the reflex to become angry.  Some are born with a hair trigger temper and some are born with a more placid disposition, no amount of work is going to change the reflex in a born-angry person to get mad easily.   As if in proof of this theory, as much as I consciously try to remain mild, I fly into a rage instantly when a computer or smart phone bends me over, even momentarily.  I wax Tourretic when forced into a corporate or bureaucratic cul du sac, or encounter idiocy built into their help line, like having to navigate five menus to learn the help line is currently closed (easy enough to post hours of operation next to the number, no?). I have also provoked a couple of people in recent years, at times by not showing I was hurt by getting angry, as any normal person would.

I can say this with certainty — had I not gone through a painful course of psychotherapy toward the end of my father’s life, I’d have never been able to be calm and supportive the last night of my father’s life as the poor devil was expressing his sincere regrets, and for the first and last time in his life, his apologies.   Without the twice weekly wrestling matches with my demons I’d have never realized that letting go of much of my anger toward my father, rightful as most of it undoubtedly was, was a necessity for my own life, growth, ability to evolve into a more insightful, hopefully kinder person than my father was.  If we can’t make 100% progress in such changes, I’d say, 50%, or 30%, is still pretty good. At the very end, even my father had to agree.  

I can also say this with certainty, virtually any of us is capable of acting like a fucking tyrant, given the right context.   And we almost always believe we acted that way with perfect justification.   

In the end, the story of the Book of Irv is about anger, insight and the power of repentance and forgiveness.  I believe the story of the long, senseless, ugly war between my father and me, and its unexpected peaceful conclusion on the last night of the old man’s life, could be useful to many readers.   It is a story of persistence, and the durability of love even under brutal conditions.   If I can tell it properly it will evoke the power of learning to forgive, ourselves and others, though the lesson came too late to do my father much good, though my own struggles are lifelong.  

My father’s life was an example of a very smart, funny, likeable man, a friend of the underdog and lover of animals, often trapped in the emotions of a two year-old viciously assaulted by an insane mother, a life he told me, hours before his death at 80, had been pretty much over by the time he was two. He said this, in the passive voice, after a lifetime of angrily denying that childhood has anything to do with the adult, that only whiners complain to shrinks about how mean their parents were and snivelingly try to blame their parents for their own problems.

I am a fairly old man myself now. The clock is ticking on my time to put everything I learned in those two years of daily writing into a coherent book that others can read and consider.   Much of the first draft is a conversation with the skeleton of my father, the skeleton applying a dead man’s too late insights to much of the discussion, somehow providing me with details it was impossible for me to know from the scant record.  The skeleton showed up one day early on in my writing, seemingly of his own accord, and I came to look forward to sitting down each day to talk to the spirit of my dead father, much wiser than when he was alive and struggling in the world, between the beating he took as an infant and his deathbed realizations.   

Think about this too, just because serious damage can be inflicted in subtle, deniable ways doesn’t mean we have to accept it and move on.  My father’s life, and mine, demonstrate the impossibility of just accepting it and moving on. The price of accepting what is unacceptable, without understanding it and learning lessons from it, is a price nobody should have to pay.    To my mind, it is a merciless fucking price to demand someone pay.

The tragedy of my old man

My father, a bright, funny, friend of the underdog, was a pessimist who conceded the last night of his life that his life had been effectively over by the time he was two years old. He did not believe people could actually change anything meaningful about themselves and lived accordingly.

More and less acceptable ways to express hurt and anger

On a scale, from most obviously harmful to most subtle, we have violent murder to quiet, implacable disapproval.  In between we have, in random order, punching, kicking, slapping, shoving, handling roughly, verbally abusing, threatening, glaring at, mocking, humiliating, ignoring, demeaning, belittling, emotionally and physically withdrawing and many other techniques.  Sarcasm and silence can both be deployed effectively to express displeasure, as can an uncompromising refusal to engage with the other person’s feelings, including the ever popular dead fish expression in response to the other person’s attempts to be funny. Silence might be the king of all of them, with its wonderful feature of complete deniability (as compared to, say, bashing somebody in the face in public no matter how much they may have seemed to deserve it).

My father, in most ways a wonderful human being, had been repeatedly physically abused and emotionally brutalized as a young child, by his own mother.   He was a master at showing anger, employing numerous techniques from the in-your-face to the demonically subtle. As he was dying, literally on the last night of his life, he lamented, for the first time (after a lifetime of denying that childhood has anything to do with your adult life) that his life was effectively “over” by the time he was two years old.   The next seventy-eight years was a determined exercise never again to experience the trauma of being humiliated, powerless, viciously treated.   In his case a tiny, violent, ill-tempered religious fanatic mother had convinced herself, somehow, that whipping her first born in the face from the time he could stand was what God wanted.  We all know that the Old Testament God is a vengeful diety, He told us so Himself, but fuck…

Anything that awakens a childhood trauma hurts well beyond the event that activated it.  It is unsettling to find yourself, as an adult of many years’ experience, suddenly as vulnerable as a baby about to be mistreated again by an insane caretaker.  It makes us feel coldly abandoned, particularly if done to us by somebody we love and trust.   There is no end to the cycle of hurt and anger this provokes in us, unless we constantly strive to do the goddamned difficult work not to become enraged, intransigent, capable of doing things to others that we ourselves would suffer terribly if done to us.

On the other hand, of course, much easier to simply join an angry mob, under incoherent banners, to scream, pump your fist in unison, and let the fucking chips fucking fall where they may.

Easier is not always better, though. 

The supremacy of a story

As illustrated by the NY Times framing of the rash of Omicron in Puerto Rico (see previous two posts) the way you tell a story makes all the difference in what the people who hear your story believe and what they take away from it.

One frame on the spike in covid cases in PR might focus on the poverty and lack of humane and efficient health care for millions of American citizens, including, conspicuously, natives of Puerto Rico. One frame might, as my doctor friend does, stress that Omicron is rarely a serious health threat to vaccinated people and that breakthrough infections are to be expected with a strain so infectious. There are multiple ways to tell the same story. Which version of the story you believe will determine how you feel about the things described by the storyteller.

Nothing humans do is done without a convincing story behind it. We have a strong need to believe in our good intentions, pure motives, righteousness, that we are doing things for a good and sometimes even noble reason. Only a sociopath acts without the need to justify himself. For the rest of us, a story we believe in is necessary for any action or inaction we take. Some stories speak to our best impulses, others to our worst, but any story we truly believe can motivate us, for better or worse.

People who storm the Capitol, battle the police, chant about hanging the Vice President, shooting the Speaker of the House in the head, defecate in the halls of Congress, do it because they truly believe the intolerable story that they’ve had their legitimate presidential choice stolen from them. The supremely infuriating story of a stolen election, a rigged system in state after state riddled with widespread systemic fraud, massively fraudulent results — a stolen landslide victory — hidden even by corrupt, smelly, traitorous RINOs, is told to them over and over by everyone they trust.

It is not even a matter for them of suspending disbelief, or asking how so many Republicans won in 2020 on the same ballots Joe Biden and his co-conspirators rigged to steal only the presidency from the rightful winner. They will never ask why Republican state officials and federal officials appointed by Trump confirmed that the election with the largest turnout in American history was also one of the most secure, that the incidence of voter fraud was, as always, infinitesimal.

The story you believe as you gather with fellow faithful patriots, watching a blood curdling betrayal video on a giant screen and getting fired up to storm the Capitol and Stop the Steal, covers all of that. The lack of actual evidence for your point of view, or that it may appear illogical in light of the facts, is only the final proof of how cunning and vicious the evil, inhuman, traitorous enemy is!!!

We humans are simply this way, and we are probably the only creatures who act based on a story that tells us how to see things and what our duties are. Few other species march off in long columns to kill and die based on a fervent belief in the story that Jesus died on the cross to cleanse the world of sin and violence.

I’m reading a fascinating book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, by a psychiatrist of mysterious origins who wrote as Alice Miller. It is in part about the stories told to justify all sorts of harmful things done to children, often by generally well-meaning parents. Depending on who’s point of view you look at things from, you will emerge with very different stories about a family dynamic. This framing inevitably reminds me of my father’s story about me. Here’s a snapshot, told to me from my father’s pre-deathbed point of view:

You are a very angry person with an explosive fucking temper and a mouth like a fucking toilet bowl. You’ve always been troubled and challenging and had an irrational hatred of authority. From the time you came home from the hospital as a newborn you stared at me with those big, unblinking, black, accusing eyes, you judged me harshly from the very beginning. Nothing I ever did was right, no sacrifice I made was ever appreciated, you always just angrily attacked me. You were “born with a hard-on against the world”, and since people can’t change their essential nature, no matter how much they delude themselves that they can, it was preordained that you and I should have been lifelong adversaries engaged in an existential war that could never end.

A hard story to swallow for me. It always was and always will be. It leaves out many important parts of my character and personality, any progress I’ve made in my life, any valuable lesson I’ve ever learned, reduces me to one intolerable trait justifying an angry reaction in turn. More ridiculous still is the self-prophecy aspect of this story, the more forcefully the story is told the more it comes true. Anger is predictable for a child insistently told that even as a newborn baby he was simply an angry, challenging little bastard and will always be treated as such.

Telling me variations on this story over and over did nothing to help my father, outside of making him always feel justified in fighting me on everything. The simplistic story did nothing to help me. It only hurt us both, and it hurt my mother and my sister. But there it was, preferable, by a million miles, to the awful story my father finally told me as he was dying:

My life was basically over by the time I was two. I never experienced love as a child, only brutal punishment for things I didn’t do and fear. I grew up in terror, hungry all the time, for food and for things I didn’t even know what they were. I finally exceeded the low expectations placed on me as a stupid boy and started a family of my own. The anger I expressed toward you, you have to understand, it was really nothing personal. I’d have done the same to any child of mine. Nothing you could have done would have changed the story I believed, and I am so sorry to have put that burden on you and your sister, the burden of having an immature, angry horse’s ass as a father.

Imagine how painful and threatening that would have been for any father to feel and try to work through prior to having a few final days to consider his life as he was dying.

On the other hand, and contradicting my father’s undisturbed fifty year story about me, I was a peaceful and supportive listener as my father was speaking his last few hours of thoughts. As he catalogued his regrets I told him that he should have no regrets, that he’d done the best he could, that if he could have done better he would have.

My calmness was possible only because I’d gone through a course of sometimes excruciating psychoanalysis that left me at times feeling like all my skin had been peeled off and I was only nerve endings. The only memorable benefit of this painful process was that, at a certain point, only months before my father discovered his death was less than a week away, I was able to concretely grasp that my father’s unyielding story about me had been told because he needed to tell it. He told it for his benefit, needed to believe it in order to live, that he could not change it and that if he was capable of doing any better he surely would have. This understanding allowed me to take a step away from my anger at my father, since I finally understood he couldn’t figure out how to do any better, pitiful as that also is, and that my understandable anger toward him was most painful to myself. I was able to let some of it go, and not a moment too soon.

I sometimes think of this calm ending of the long war with my father as a kind of mutual blessing. I thought so more at the time than I do now, fifteen years later. His admission, hours before he died, that he felt me reaching out many times over the years to try to make peace (I had), but that his emotional immaturity had prevented him from taking a step toward me, gave me valuable validation that I had not been the belligerent cartoon he always insisted I was. He saw his inability to ever compromise or admit fault as the mark of an unforgivable asshole, but he hoped for forgiveness anyway. Easing his suffering however I could, short of lying, helping make his death as gentle as possible, was my main thought as I listened, so it was easy to make him feel forgiven, for whatever help that might have been to him at the end.

Knowing all this about myself, and having lived how an insane story can be pressed quite rationally and reasonably, stated as fact and embraced by others with cult-like fealty, I accept my own strong, uncomfortable feelings when someone unfairly blames me entirely for something that is only, in small part, my fault.

Here’s my story now: I take the burden of things I do wrong and do my best to make amends, but I don’t carry the burden of a story that paints me as the entire problem, to make someone else feel better about their story. That shit, you understand, is for the birds. I simply can’t do it. Neither should anyone else.

Parent and child 2

How does a child recover from repeated violent betrayal by its mother? That is a question I don’t have an answer to. The harm this brutal mistreatment would do to a person is very easy to see, the science and art of brain and soul plasticity, and the ability to heal from trauma is a much more complicated story. I think of my father, from his earliest memory, experiencing the violent hatred of his mother. His father was afraid of his tiny wife’s rage and powerless to protect his young son, who found out early that he was on his own in a very cruel world. How does that kid ever trust anybody after that start in life?

That’s why my father told me, in the middle of the last night of his life, in that wavering dying man’s voice, that his life was basically over by the time he was two. He doesn’t remember being shaken, left cold, roughly changed, harshly wiped, ignored and the rest of what a helpless young baby must simply take. The first things he can consciously remember is the mother who gave him life, glaring at him with open hatred and slashing him in the face with a thick, rough length of cord.

It’s hard to imagine this kid growing up to have a sense of humor, and a certain charisma, and being an idealist and a friend of the underdog. He was also sometimes subject to spells of uncontrollable laughter, spells I am also subject to, every ten years or so. Or maybe that’s all predictable, I don’t know. These things lend themselves to discussion, not pronouncements. We don’t, any of us, know what would become of us if we had the start in life that someone like my father had. Any echo of that shit in our own lives is enough to stop us in our tracks.

My father’s droll advice one evening at dinner

When I was eleven I came back from the first day of Hebrew School and told my family that my new teacher was an Israeli woman named Miss Lipschitz. My family found her name as funny as I had. These unexpected moments of levity always came as a welcome relief from our ongoing wars at the dinner table. We all loved to laugh.

My father regarded me with a merry look for a second and said:

“Tell her, ‘if you’re lip shits, my ass chews gum.'”

This off-color deadpanned one-liner drew howls from my sister and me. My mother, though not managing to completely hide her amusement, made a show of reprimanding him for being such a bad example to his children.

If I’d repeated his crude army gag at Hebrew School (these off-color bits would usually be prefaced with ” a guy in the army would say…”), and got in trouble, of course, it would have been completely my problem, another illustration of my lack of common sense, in spite of my high intelligence. Both of my parents would have been on me without any mercy or sense of irony.

Which is funny too, in a way, looking back on it now.

Parent and child

I recently spent two years, every day, writing about my troubled, troubling father. Many of the sessions were spent in a kind of dialogue with the skeleton of my dead father. We had some excellent and revealing chats, picking up where he left off the last night of his life. Most days our talk seemed genuinely like an actual conversation with a wiser version of the droll, insightful person I’d been raised by, reflecting the realizations he’d had right before his death. The skeleton was humbled by his death, and looking for reconciliation.

I did this every day for two solid years, thinking about the project when I was not writing, imagining my father’s earlier life, trying to get to the bottom of how damaged my father was and the often subtle, but in many ways disabling, harm he inflicted on my sister and me. It was a great project and I actually learned a lot, whether or not I eventually rewrite the pages into a marketable book. The most amazing and unexpected outcome is that now I can see everything from his point of view, though I still disagree with most of the harmful things he did.

The other day I suddenly realized that some of the best men I’ve ever known have struggled (though much more successfully than my father) to be good fathers, some of the best women struggle with being unfailingly good mothers. Children who have wonderful parents and enviable childhoods sometimes grow up to be tormented, anxious, selfish, insecure, vain, perplexed. This point likely seems too obvious to make, perhaps, to anyone who has raised a child, who lives as a parent, but to me, having no children, it was a long time dawning on me what difficult, sometimes thankless work it is to always strive to be generous, to do one’s best, and still experience that sharper than a serpent’s tooth-inflicted pain that comes from an ungrateful, angry or oblivious child. We all have better days and worse days, and there is no real training on how to be a parent or how to be a child.

I knew a young mother, who’d been raised by difficult, immature parents, who decided to be the opposite of the way she saw her own mother. During her pregnancy she fell under the influence of a group of women called the La Leche League. According to her, their theory is that babies never manipulate a parent, they only ask for what they truly need. A child who is breast fed whenever they ask, and given every bit of affection and attention they seek, will grow up to be strong, confident and self-motivated. She breast fed her first child until the baby was three or so, then weaned her when the little brother arrived. He nursed until he was able to say things like “mom, I need to nurse now, if that’s OK with you.” It was a great bonding experience for the mother, and I have read that the oxytosin released during breast feeding can be quite addictive. What’s not to love about perfect love?

This young mother was fond of pointing to how wonderful her children were, the proof that she had learned mighty lessons from her own childhood and become the kind of 100% nurturing mother she never felt she’d had. “The proof is in the pudding,” she would say with a proud smile, pointing at her perfect children, who had never wanted for unconditional love and were clearly both amazing children as a result. I lost track of the family after a while, but the last I heard, the daughter is, according to the mother, a fearless genius and the son, also a genius, is a very insightful young man and something of a saint.

This young mother once spent the day with her husband and two year-old daughter, visiting old friends of mine. The next time I saw my friends I asked how they’d gotten along (I’d introduced them). They told me it had been an extremely long couple of hours, that they’d found the young parents’ zealous belief that they’d created the perfect child hard to bear. “Parents are one factor, one factor in dozens, as to how your child turns out, parenting doesn’t have that kind of one-on-one correlation with how the kid turns out in the end,” my friend told me. “To think otherwise is a kind of madness bordering on megalomania,” the other friend added.

I think of this now in connection to my own father, and his often problematic parenting. He was one factor among many in how I turned out, though he always loomed as a supremely difficult one. A parent who is often angry, and takes out their frustrations on their child, tends to be a large factor in how the kid grows up to see the world. Just as I am sometimes unable to disentangle myself from the abuse I suffered at his hands, in his life, and the reason he often lashed out at his own children like an injured two year-old, is that he had actually been a deeply injured two year-old.

One of the first things he told me when I returned to his hospital room around 1 a.m. that last night of his life, in that weak, croaking voice dying men often seem to have, was “my life was basically over by the time I was two.” I knew the bones of his story. I had learned them from a witness, an older first cousin, my father’s references to his harrowing childhood were always oblique, opaque.

His mother, a tiny, bitter, deeply religious woman with an unquenchable temper, living in a viscerally unhappy arranged marriage to a very poor man, used to whip her tiny son across the face, from the time he could stand. Picture that, and how much worse it is for a baby than verbal abuse, neglect, icy silence in the face of expressed concerns, or sarcastic dismissal.

Each of my father’s techniques for keeping his children, and his own demons, at bay were less atrocious than taking the rough, heavy cord of an old fashioned steam iron, and whipping your tender young child in the face, from his earliest memory. I finally concluded he did better than he’d experienced, though he admitted late in his life that verbal abuse is as damaging as physical abuse.

Over the years I sometimes thought beatings would have been preferable, since at age fifteen or so, skinny as I was, I would have started fighting back (he already showed fear of me by that age) and soon been able to kick the shit out of him if he lifted a hand against my sister or me. But that is a surmise I rarely think about.

What I think about more and more is how to take the lessons of my troubling childhood and lay them out clearly for others, in the name of becoming more forgiving, of oneself and the people you love who have hurt you. To explain simply, for the possible benefit of any reader who has been struck by the sharper than a serpent’s tooth cruelty of an unfairly angry parent, how I went from hardening my heart against an asshole father, to learning about and understanding the humiliating abuse he’d suffered in a truly hellish childhood, to opening myself, as he was dying, to simply listen to his deep regrets, and encourage him to say the things he felt it so important to say that he used his last breaths to say them.