Writing Marathon - Day 7
I was intending to take the day off from writing on account of going to therapy and just lacking time. But I'm at a pretty good place in Warcraft right now with the end of the expansion and most of my goals having been met. So I've got a few weeks with no strong imperative pushing me into game. So I can take a bit of time to keep my streak going. I'll try and keep this entry on the shorter side.
A few months ago I began jotting down particular phrases my parents liked to say. They're really just snapshots, little details of my parents' personalities.
"You'll get over it." This one was one of my mother's favorites. It was delivered in a dismissive yet gruff tone and was there to "console" me when I was upset over something she'd done. Obviously this is more along the lines of, I can't be bothered dealing with your feelings as they are inconvenient and implicate me. Unfortunately this rationale became internalized to where it was in my mind whenever I was abusive towards people when I got older. Whatever damage I'd inflict, they would heal from in time, so I didn't need to pull my punches or be delicate with their emotions. This also applied if I wanted to help them in a tough love sort of way - help not being used ironically there and tough love is more of an understatement.
"This too shall pass." One of my father's favorites, I guess his own version of the line above. Don't bother getting upset about it, your emotions/feelings aren't permanent. It was this odd hybrid of dismissive couched in the wisdom that time blankets and heals all wounds.
"...and then I'll be forced to break your face." A delightful gem from my mother, the tail end of a warning not to break something I shouldn't be touching. You'd think this one wouldn't come up too often, but it came up often enough. It stands out for its sheer brutality really. My mother's physical punishment was never so severe. It always came down to slapping motions, very rarely across the face, usually on the thigh or buttocks where you can go ham and not leave a mark. My mother used to break wooden spoons for cooking on me and my sister often. Decades later she'd still lament how easily the spoons broke. To be clear, these aren't thick-handled spoons, these are the thin ones you'd imagine traditionally used in an Italian kitchen. Still, my mother was hitting us full force.
"Someone needs..." My mother kinda dominates this list of awful sayings, which makes sense as my father was rarely around because of working long hours. Completions of this sentence might include a nap or something to that effect. Makes sense to say this about a young child, but starts being really insulting and passive-aggressive when you're saying this to a 10 year old. I'm not sure when it stopped, I just recall it infuriating me, and I have to imagine I was too old for it. One of the sticking points for me is that it was said to me, not about me.
"You need an attitude adjustment." My mother's way of saying she didn't like me being angry. There were some subtle variations on this, like a hybridization with the line above. It always gave off this feel like I was a malfunctioning robot who needed some dials adjusted to make me more docile and pleasent. Given how my parents talked to me, it wouldn't be out of line to say they sort of viewed me this way.
'"Good Job." My mother, and this is the sarcastic use of good job. It's there to applaud and highlight the mistake you made. Bonus points if you were warned about or told not to make that very mistake. Sometimes there faux clapping involved. It wasn't uncommon for another member of the family to be present and join in.
"Doesn't matter." This one is actually all me, but felt like an easy inclusion since I'm doing quotes. There's a defeatist sentiment to this, a sense of hopelessness. This was and sometimes still is my response when people trying to console me by telling me I got something but not the thing I actually wanted. The idea behind this being that I did not abide half-measures. Secondly, consolation prizes I didn't want, especially irrelevant ones, were not important to me. What does matter is if it changes something. A concrete example of how this might come into play, take for instance the attempts to talk to Andrea. I would be upset she was refusing to talk to me. Someone might tell me, yeah, but she doesn't hate you. To which I'd reply, it doesn't matter because she still won't talk to me. If she hated me, it'd have the same effect on her behavior. So, what difference does it make to me whether she hates me or not. what can I do with that? If the answer is nothing, then it doesn't matter. The key idea here is that what's beneath the surface only matters if it effects the outcome.
*
I think I was in 5th, maybe 6th, grade when my parents bought me a desk for my room. It was for me to do my homework at. Prior to that I used a kitchen or dining room table. This desk was large, a full-size desk for an adult. It was a dark wood. I hated it the moment I got it and came to hate it even more over time. I didn't want or feel I needed it. The lighting in my bedroom felt too dim, coupled with the darkness of my desk, it set this oppressive atmosphere in my room that was dim and bleak. I still struggled as a student at that age (this was only a year after the head-punching incidents), so there were too many hours spent at that desk - staring off into space because I couldn't focus, staring at a blank homework page when I didn't know what to write, staring blankly at reading homework I couldn't focus on. My mother still had to sign off on my homework, so the hours spent toiling away to approach my mother and ask her approval for my work, to have her angrily scratch out what disappointed her before returning to my desk to try again. It was not uncommon at that age for me to still be doing homework after dinner. For reference, I was required to do my homework as soon as I got home and it was a bad sign if I wasn't done by 5pm. The chair I had was too low and so looking down at the desk, my head hovered too close to it. I have too vivid a memory of looking down at my written homework as I wrote, feeling sad, bogged down and like the feeling would never end. It was such a common position I lost count of the number of times I got deja vu being in that position. God I hate that fucking desk. There's something sisyphean about it.
It's come up before that part of what fuels my anxiety is this sense of "I don't know." I'm not allowed to not know the answers to things. "I don't know," is a personal hell for me. This desk is part of why that is. Design can threaten to bring me to that point. When I'm not in a good place, it's why I need to work with a partner, it's like having a safety blanket to protect me, it keeps me from going to that bad place when I don't have a good answer. Because it's we who don't have the answer, but we can bounce ideas back and forth and tag-team our way out, or come back and try again later - the pressure isn't all on me. And it's why I can't run the company itself. There's too many "I don't knows" for running a business for me. I've come to understand in the past 2 years that the vertigo was the result of anxiety from trying to subject myself to this again. It's likely a trauma and a good candidate for an EMDR session, but I honestly don't know what external resource I could call upon to dispell these memories, so I'm hesitant to attempt this one.
*
Last Christmas my mother sent me a Christmas card. I dislike that she has my home address and can feel free to mail me whenever she wants. It feels like a violation, unwanted contact on an unapproved channel. It didn't have any message to it beyond a signed name and holiday wishes. But it came as part of a box of candy from one of my favorite stores. Not all candy, there were nuts and granola etc. I couldn't return them, but I did give some to my roommates to enjoy. It also came with a check. My parents have only sent me money twice before ever. The first time, I only cashed it because I was willing to talk to them. I wasn't comfortable taking their money and simply using them. That didn't go well. The second time it was after my father died, and it was my share of a settlement from the government as my mother blamed my father's cancer on exposure to one agent compound or another back in Vietnam. I accepted it as a token of gratitude for my agreeing to meet my father before his death, but also as it I know my sister would've receieved an equal share, sort of right of blood/birth sort of thing, not relationship dependent. This time, I had nothing I was willing to give in return, and even though I could always use the extra money, I tore up the check and I was a bit angry about having receieved it. My mother goes years without speaking to me, and then it's a check. My parents never lifted a finger to help me anytime I moved out and got my own place. The most I ever got was a handful of worn thin towels. I know friends whose parents have helped them get a leg up in life, and continue to, sometimes just gift them entire vacations for fun. I try not to be too bitter about that, because my uncle's help is supposed to be a stand-in for their support.
I had a dream once or twice afterwards that my sister was trying to mail me a check as well. It wasn't a happy dream, but it wasn't a nightmare. The money represented unwanted contact and gifts with strings attached. They weren't happy dreams.
*
My uncle still tries to play devil's advocate for my father on occasions. It's interesting in his silence that he does not do the same for my mother, his sister. My uncle definitely respected my father. My parents didn't really respect my uncle though. I wrote a day or two ago about how my uncle was more like a father figure to me in my teenage years. He's technically my godfather and was my sponsor at my confirmation (forced religious ritual where I was supposed to voluntarily choose my faith, I remained silent for most of the vows to at least be honest with myself). He's never said it, but I know he feels a responsibility towards me because of those relationships and he does have a genuine desire to shepherd me. Writing that out, I do feel a bit bad for him because of his inability to understand my emotional damage, he's uniquely incapable of comprehending it because of how he chose to deal with such things. On the other hand, I can't help but feel it's a cosmic joke and find the humor in it.
When I was in college, I quickly rebelled against my father's lackluster cooking and took over the responsibility. My father was now retired, so he was home for dinner. My uncle continued to work crazy long hours, still does. My grandmother used to cook for him, and would dutifully wait to have dinner ready until he got home each night. But now he'd been a bachelor for years, essentially snacking for dinner. When I began cooking the meals, I would set aside plates of food for him. My parents didn't stop me but they quietly came to resent it. They didn't like I was giving him food for free. Imagine this, family, living together in the same house...my parents owned the house outright, were now looking at retirement, really comfy and secure finances, monthly vacations because they had money to burn...and they are bothered by the cost of 15 plates of home cooked food a month. That boggles my mind to this day. It's so petty, it's just such a trivial amount of money. My family shopped thirfty for food and homecooked is cheap. They finally made an issue of it and insisted my uncle pay an extra $50 a month in rent for the food I was giving him - he agreed without hesitation. I miss being able to do that for him.
Sometime after that I tried to tell my uncle how my parents talked about him, how little respect they showed him. He didn't want to hear it. It broke the veneer of decorum he lived in a bubble of. He'd rather pretend it wasn't real and just everyone get along. I have to wonder if what came next was my way of circumventing this system and turning the screws. See, when I'd set aside those plates, if it was a weekend and my uncle was home, I'd invite him down to join us when we ate. I started making more of a habit of it, even prodding my uncle to come home earlier so he could join us for dinner. My parents were only disrespectful behind his back, and secretly found his company annoying - but for him it was a reprieve from his loneliness upstairs. I have to wonder if this was my way of sticking it to my parents, but I don't remember how the timing of these events played out. My uncle enjoyed the conversations he got to have and my father was more ready to engage him, my mother not so much. Bonus for me, it changed up the dynamics with my parents and me and probably helped avoid rocky ground in our relationship during the dinner hour.
Dinner hour has a long and messy history for my family. Growing up, my father worked late, so my mother, sister and I ate together. One of my earliest memories was my mother and sister having another fight over dinner. It was not uncommon for my sister to storm off and lock herself in the bathroom...which only prompted my family to mock her for being too thin-skinned when this happened. I say family because it came up a few times at family gatherings, and sometimes when my father was home. But if it was just the 3 of us, my mother didn't mock her. Instead, there'd be a dismissive wave of the hand as my mother wrote the whole thing off and went back to eating. Anyway, one of these fights, I just couldn't take the two of them yelling at each other, me sitting in the middle, and i just stopped and covered my ears and shut my eyes. And it was like my mother's targetting software switched targets to me like I'd done something wrong. She began to demandingly question what was wrong, but my sister stepped right back into the fray and pulled my mother's attention back to her, but my sister explained what was plainly obvious, that their constant fighting was upsetting me.
It wasn't discussed, and this didn't become more obvious until years later, but we began to eat dinner in the living room and watch tv while we ate. Conversation was limited to commercial breaks. When my sister got into college and did a stint doing some...I think child psychology classes...though god knows you'd never know she studied the subject from all of the 1 times she's ever referenced it. That one time was to suggest that family dinners should be more about bonding time and the tv was getting in the way. I knew this was a terrible idea and i was not in favor of it, but damit my sister wanted us to be more like a family. At this point in time my father was home in time for dinner sometimes. So we began to eat dinner at a table together. The dysfunction was back in full force...who knew the secret to us getting along was that we only spoke in 2 minute increments during commercial breaks. It was maybe a year or two of this before the living room with the tv became the norm again. And yet somehow the whole dinner table thing came up again when I hit college, this time after my sister had moved out, and surprise, things weren't any better. By this point it was me and my father having problems, and my father walked away from the table on more then one occasion...which would prompt exasperated and inquisitive looks from me to my mother who would close her eyes and shake her head signaling me to leave it alone, my father was being moody. It's nice to know my mother didn't respect anyone having emotions, it wasn't just me. So, another year of this and we're back to tv dinner, which lasted until the end of my time at home.
This entire section is one tangential digression after another.
My parents used to view my uncle as someone who needed to be handled. My uncle has never dealt well with change, among other things. When I was younger, my mother took a perverse pleasure in making drastic changes that would upset my uncle and of course not acepting any guilt for it. One example was after my grandmother died, there came the task of cleaning out her things. My mother took care of this herself, but didn't bother to tell my uncle before doing it. Mind you, the house I grew up in was a 2-family house, my uncle and grandparents had lived in the upstairs apartment. So, when my mother is throwing out my grandmother's belongings, she's rummaging around in my uncle's apartment, so there's some invasion of privacy, sense of home going on. Yes this obviously needed to be done, but it was not done gently. Meanwhile, my mother would also resent my uncle for having to do it herself. This a decent blueprint for how my own abusive behavior worked at times.
Eventually my parents stopped mocking my uncle for not adjusting to sudden or drastic changes well and decided to try and be diplomatic...I was in college when this change occured. And I have to suspect it was my father's doing ultimately, but dam, really, it took like 30 years of knowing each other to stop being so mean spirited? They began to intentionally mention things 3-6 months in advance and periodically mention things again so he'd have time to get used to the idea, the reminders were there for when his selective memory would try to pretend he could bury his head in the sand and avoid any oncoming change. It worked well. This is where I drew from when I stopped handling change well. For me, it's not so much a fear of change, as not having control of my environment. Being warned in advance gives me time to be ok with something.
Having my uncle come down for dinner though, my father slowly warmed up to him more...again, odd after so many years. There was even a point I didn't need to invite my uncle down, my father would think to include him. In a way, my father wanted to shepherd my uncle. He made sure to include him on vacations once in awhile. They had more talks together. This continued after I moved out, and my father was the one who invited my uncle down to visit when they moved to NJ. It should also be mentioned, after my father's death, those invitations largely stopped coming, but also, my uncle stopped accepting them. He hasn't been down to visit my mother and sister in years now, and I've tried encouraging him to go. He begs off with lame excuses, but it'd be silly at this point not to read into it that he's not comfortable with their relationship.
I started off this story by saying my uncle likes to play devil's advocate for my father, and the digression were there to explain how they got to be close but weren't always...as I said, many digressions, but it paints a full picture. The period after my parent's moved and my uncle visiting, it seems that's when my father began to confide things in my uncle. My uncle would tell me often how my father had relaxed, how he'd changed since he moved. And perhaps he did, but I don't believe it was change, but rather a change of setting. That my father was still the same man, just some changes in environment gave him freedom to show a different side of himself. Move him back to whatever made him unhappy and he'd be the father I knew growing up. Rather then this being a genuine change, a transformative experience where his outside environment would not really effect. It's something I've had a to give a lot of thought about myself, how many changes in the past 7 years are real changes, and how many are the result of keeping myself in a different environment. That's the doubt i have about how good a person I really am vs what's just buried.
This is how my uncle came to be my benefactor. My father knew I wouldn't accept help from him directly, so he asked my uncle to do it in his stead. Because my uncle was not so inclined to help me as he has. That bothers me. It's always made me want to trust my uncle less, knowing that left to his own devices, he'd've been fine watching me suffer and likely would've died by suicide if not for his intervention. It's not comforting to be in the hands of someone who didn't really want to help you.
According to my uncle, my father spoke highly of me during this period. My uncle tries to stress that my father was proud of me, he's insistent on it in fact. It's not thatI have any reason to believe my uncle is lying, but I also can't square this with other things I saw. In the big argument where my father told me to move out, he raised multiple resentments about decisions I'd made about how I lived my life. He was trying to throw them in my face as if somehow I was in agreement with him about them being bad decisions. He felt I'd gotten my way for years and look where it had gotten me, which clearly it was implied that was not a good place. But I was happy with the decisions I'd made up until that point and was glad I got to make them. That seems to me the opposite of pride. At New Years this year, Josh was telling me how he used to see the disappointment in my parents' faces. He described it as, it looked like they felt I was wasting my potential and that I could have a normal life if I wanted. To explain that, my parents did not understand or approve of my gaming habits or friends - they felt there was something dysfunctional about it. During that big argument, my father basically accused me of dressing up like a Columbine shooter, when I stopped wearing a trenchcoat years before, and also wore one years before Columbine. The idea was that I was associating with odd people, people who didn't fit in to normal society, and they couldn't understand why I was self-sabotaging by doing so. What they never understood was that I didn't belong in normal society, but they really had very little idea about the depths of my mental illness despite lviing with me. At most, they suspected depression, but certainly didn't think it was severe.
This sort of disappointment and pride mix is not unheard of for my father though. Once more, my uncle told me years earlier that my father was ok with my leaving home at 18, that despite the fighting and inability to get along, he thought I was right. Being right may not be the right way to put it. My father saw the whole thing as a generational fight, child needing to rebel against their parents because that's what children do. Whenever my father tried to talk to me about that it would infuriate me though. He was so blinded to the whole dimension of us being a dysfunctional family. His trying to classify things as normal child/parent struggles was offensive to me, but also dismissive of how I felt as he tried to label without listening or understanding.
"No fool like an old fool." This is a good note to end things on. This was one of my father's sayings to mock his peers for their mistakes. It seems fitting that he was talking about himself as well.
A few months ago I began jotting down particular phrases my parents liked to say. They're really just snapshots, little details of my parents' personalities.
"You'll get over it." This one was one of my mother's favorites. It was delivered in a dismissive yet gruff tone and was there to "console" me when I was upset over something she'd done. Obviously this is more along the lines of, I can't be bothered dealing with your feelings as they are inconvenient and implicate me. Unfortunately this rationale became internalized to where it was in my mind whenever I was abusive towards people when I got older. Whatever damage I'd inflict, they would heal from in time, so I didn't need to pull my punches or be delicate with their emotions. This also applied if I wanted to help them in a tough love sort of way - help not being used ironically there and tough love is more of an understatement.
"This too shall pass." One of my father's favorites, I guess his own version of the line above. Don't bother getting upset about it, your emotions/feelings aren't permanent. It was this odd hybrid of dismissive couched in the wisdom that time blankets and heals all wounds.
"...and then I'll be forced to break your face." A delightful gem from my mother, the tail end of a warning not to break something I shouldn't be touching. You'd think this one wouldn't come up too often, but it came up often enough. It stands out for its sheer brutality really. My mother's physical punishment was never so severe. It always came down to slapping motions, very rarely across the face, usually on the thigh or buttocks where you can go ham and not leave a mark. My mother used to break wooden spoons for cooking on me and my sister often. Decades later she'd still lament how easily the spoons broke. To be clear, these aren't thick-handled spoons, these are the thin ones you'd imagine traditionally used in an Italian kitchen. Still, my mother was hitting us full force.
"Someone needs..." My mother kinda dominates this list of awful sayings, which makes sense as my father was rarely around because of working long hours. Completions of this sentence might include a nap or something to that effect. Makes sense to say this about a young child, but starts being really insulting and passive-aggressive when you're saying this to a 10 year old. I'm not sure when it stopped, I just recall it infuriating me, and I have to imagine I was too old for it. One of the sticking points for me is that it was said to me, not about me.
"You need an attitude adjustment." My mother's way of saying she didn't like me being angry. There were some subtle variations on this, like a hybridization with the line above. It always gave off this feel like I was a malfunctioning robot who needed some dials adjusted to make me more docile and pleasent. Given how my parents talked to me, it wouldn't be out of line to say they sort of viewed me this way.
'"Good Job." My mother, and this is the sarcastic use of good job. It's there to applaud and highlight the mistake you made. Bonus points if you were warned about or told not to make that very mistake. Sometimes there faux clapping involved. It wasn't uncommon for another member of the family to be present and join in.
"Doesn't matter." This one is actually all me, but felt like an easy inclusion since I'm doing quotes. There's a defeatist sentiment to this, a sense of hopelessness. This was and sometimes still is my response when people trying to console me by telling me I got something but not the thing I actually wanted. The idea behind this being that I did not abide half-measures. Secondly, consolation prizes I didn't want, especially irrelevant ones, were not important to me. What does matter is if it changes something. A concrete example of how this might come into play, take for instance the attempts to talk to Andrea. I would be upset she was refusing to talk to me. Someone might tell me, yeah, but she doesn't hate you. To which I'd reply, it doesn't matter because she still won't talk to me. If she hated me, it'd have the same effect on her behavior. So, what difference does it make to me whether she hates me or not. what can I do with that? If the answer is nothing, then it doesn't matter. The key idea here is that what's beneath the surface only matters if it effects the outcome.
*
I think I was in 5th, maybe 6th, grade when my parents bought me a desk for my room. It was for me to do my homework at. Prior to that I used a kitchen or dining room table. This desk was large, a full-size desk for an adult. It was a dark wood. I hated it the moment I got it and came to hate it even more over time. I didn't want or feel I needed it. The lighting in my bedroom felt too dim, coupled with the darkness of my desk, it set this oppressive atmosphere in my room that was dim and bleak. I still struggled as a student at that age (this was only a year after the head-punching incidents), so there were too many hours spent at that desk - staring off into space because I couldn't focus, staring at a blank homework page when I didn't know what to write, staring blankly at reading homework I couldn't focus on. My mother still had to sign off on my homework, so the hours spent toiling away to approach my mother and ask her approval for my work, to have her angrily scratch out what disappointed her before returning to my desk to try again. It was not uncommon at that age for me to still be doing homework after dinner. For reference, I was required to do my homework as soon as I got home and it was a bad sign if I wasn't done by 5pm. The chair I had was too low and so looking down at the desk, my head hovered too close to it. I have too vivid a memory of looking down at my written homework as I wrote, feeling sad, bogged down and like the feeling would never end. It was such a common position I lost count of the number of times I got deja vu being in that position. God I hate that fucking desk. There's something sisyphean about it.
It's come up before that part of what fuels my anxiety is this sense of "I don't know." I'm not allowed to not know the answers to things. "I don't know," is a personal hell for me. This desk is part of why that is. Design can threaten to bring me to that point. When I'm not in a good place, it's why I need to work with a partner, it's like having a safety blanket to protect me, it keeps me from going to that bad place when I don't have a good answer. Because it's we who don't have the answer, but we can bounce ideas back and forth and tag-team our way out, or come back and try again later - the pressure isn't all on me. And it's why I can't run the company itself. There's too many "I don't knows" for running a business for me. I've come to understand in the past 2 years that the vertigo was the result of anxiety from trying to subject myself to this again. It's likely a trauma and a good candidate for an EMDR session, but I honestly don't know what external resource I could call upon to dispell these memories, so I'm hesitant to attempt this one.
*
Last Christmas my mother sent me a Christmas card. I dislike that she has my home address and can feel free to mail me whenever she wants. It feels like a violation, unwanted contact on an unapproved channel. It didn't have any message to it beyond a signed name and holiday wishes. But it came as part of a box of candy from one of my favorite stores. Not all candy, there were nuts and granola etc. I couldn't return them, but I did give some to my roommates to enjoy. It also came with a check. My parents have only sent me money twice before ever. The first time, I only cashed it because I was willing to talk to them. I wasn't comfortable taking their money and simply using them. That didn't go well. The second time it was after my father died, and it was my share of a settlement from the government as my mother blamed my father's cancer on exposure to one agent compound or another back in Vietnam. I accepted it as a token of gratitude for my agreeing to meet my father before his death, but also as it I know my sister would've receieved an equal share, sort of right of blood/birth sort of thing, not relationship dependent. This time, I had nothing I was willing to give in return, and even though I could always use the extra money, I tore up the check and I was a bit angry about having receieved it. My mother goes years without speaking to me, and then it's a check. My parents never lifted a finger to help me anytime I moved out and got my own place. The most I ever got was a handful of worn thin towels. I know friends whose parents have helped them get a leg up in life, and continue to, sometimes just gift them entire vacations for fun. I try not to be too bitter about that, because my uncle's help is supposed to be a stand-in for their support.
I had a dream once or twice afterwards that my sister was trying to mail me a check as well. It wasn't a happy dream, but it wasn't a nightmare. The money represented unwanted contact and gifts with strings attached. They weren't happy dreams.
*
My uncle still tries to play devil's advocate for my father on occasions. It's interesting in his silence that he does not do the same for my mother, his sister. My uncle definitely respected my father. My parents didn't really respect my uncle though. I wrote a day or two ago about how my uncle was more like a father figure to me in my teenage years. He's technically my godfather and was my sponsor at my confirmation (forced religious ritual where I was supposed to voluntarily choose my faith, I remained silent for most of the vows to at least be honest with myself). He's never said it, but I know he feels a responsibility towards me because of those relationships and he does have a genuine desire to shepherd me. Writing that out, I do feel a bit bad for him because of his inability to understand my emotional damage, he's uniquely incapable of comprehending it because of how he chose to deal with such things. On the other hand, I can't help but feel it's a cosmic joke and find the humor in it.
When I was in college, I quickly rebelled against my father's lackluster cooking and took over the responsibility. My father was now retired, so he was home for dinner. My uncle continued to work crazy long hours, still does. My grandmother used to cook for him, and would dutifully wait to have dinner ready until he got home each night. But now he'd been a bachelor for years, essentially snacking for dinner. When I began cooking the meals, I would set aside plates of food for him. My parents didn't stop me but they quietly came to resent it. They didn't like I was giving him food for free. Imagine this, family, living together in the same house...my parents owned the house outright, were now looking at retirement, really comfy and secure finances, monthly vacations because they had money to burn...and they are bothered by the cost of 15 plates of home cooked food a month. That boggles my mind to this day. It's so petty, it's just such a trivial amount of money. My family shopped thirfty for food and homecooked is cheap. They finally made an issue of it and insisted my uncle pay an extra $50 a month in rent for the food I was giving him - he agreed without hesitation. I miss being able to do that for him.
Sometime after that I tried to tell my uncle how my parents talked about him, how little respect they showed him. He didn't want to hear it. It broke the veneer of decorum he lived in a bubble of. He'd rather pretend it wasn't real and just everyone get along. I have to wonder if what came next was my way of circumventing this system and turning the screws. See, when I'd set aside those plates, if it was a weekend and my uncle was home, I'd invite him down to join us when we ate. I started making more of a habit of it, even prodding my uncle to come home earlier so he could join us for dinner. My parents were only disrespectful behind his back, and secretly found his company annoying - but for him it was a reprieve from his loneliness upstairs. I have to wonder if this was my way of sticking it to my parents, but I don't remember how the timing of these events played out. My uncle enjoyed the conversations he got to have and my father was more ready to engage him, my mother not so much. Bonus for me, it changed up the dynamics with my parents and me and probably helped avoid rocky ground in our relationship during the dinner hour.
Dinner hour has a long and messy history for my family. Growing up, my father worked late, so my mother, sister and I ate together. One of my earliest memories was my mother and sister having another fight over dinner. It was not uncommon for my sister to storm off and lock herself in the bathroom...which only prompted my family to mock her for being too thin-skinned when this happened. I say family because it came up a few times at family gatherings, and sometimes when my father was home. But if it was just the 3 of us, my mother didn't mock her. Instead, there'd be a dismissive wave of the hand as my mother wrote the whole thing off and went back to eating. Anyway, one of these fights, I just couldn't take the two of them yelling at each other, me sitting in the middle, and i just stopped and covered my ears and shut my eyes. And it was like my mother's targetting software switched targets to me like I'd done something wrong. She began to demandingly question what was wrong, but my sister stepped right back into the fray and pulled my mother's attention back to her, but my sister explained what was plainly obvious, that their constant fighting was upsetting me.
It wasn't discussed, and this didn't become more obvious until years later, but we began to eat dinner in the living room and watch tv while we ate. Conversation was limited to commercial breaks. When my sister got into college and did a stint doing some...I think child psychology classes...though god knows you'd never know she studied the subject from all of the 1 times she's ever referenced it. That one time was to suggest that family dinners should be more about bonding time and the tv was getting in the way. I knew this was a terrible idea and i was not in favor of it, but damit my sister wanted us to be more like a family. At this point in time my father was home in time for dinner sometimes. So we began to eat dinner at a table together. The dysfunction was back in full force...who knew the secret to us getting along was that we only spoke in 2 minute increments during commercial breaks. It was maybe a year or two of this before the living room with the tv became the norm again. And yet somehow the whole dinner table thing came up again when I hit college, this time after my sister had moved out, and surprise, things weren't any better. By this point it was me and my father having problems, and my father walked away from the table on more then one occasion...which would prompt exasperated and inquisitive looks from me to my mother who would close her eyes and shake her head signaling me to leave it alone, my father was being moody. It's nice to know my mother didn't respect anyone having emotions, it wasn't just me. So, another year of this and we're back to tv dinner, which lasted until the end of my time at home.
This entire section is one tangential digression after another.
My parents used to view my uncle as someone who needed to be handled. My uncle has never dealt well with change, among other things. When I was younger, my mother took a perverse pleasure in making drastic changes that would upset my uncle and of course not acepting any guilt for it. One example was after my grandmother died, there came the task of cleaning out her things. My mother took care of this herself, but didn't bother to tell my uncle before doing it. Mind you, the house I grew up in was a 2-family house, my uncle and grandparents had lived in the upstairs apartment. So, when my mother is throwing out my grandmother's belongings, she's rummaging around in my uncle's apartment, so there's some invasion of privacy, sense of home going on. Yes this obviously needed to be done, but it was not done gently. Meanwhile, my mother would also resent my uncle for having to do it herself. This a decent blueprint for how my own abusive behavior worked at times.
Eventually my parents stopped mocking my uncle for not adjusting to sudden or drastic changes well and decided to try and be diplomatic...I was in college when this change occured. And I have to suspect it was my father's doing ultimately, but dam, really, it took like 30 years of knowing each other to stop being so mean spirited? They began to intentionally mention things 3-6 months in advance and periodically mention things again so he'd have time to get used to the idea, the reminders were there for when his selective memory would try to pretend he could bury his head in the sand and avoid any oncoming change. It worked well. This is where I drew from when I stopped handling change well. For me, it's not so much a fear of change, as not having control of my environment. Being warned in advance gives me time to be ok with something.
Having my uncle come down for dinner though, my father slowly warmed up to him more...again, odd after so many years. There was even a point I didn't need to invite my uncle down, my father would think to include him. In a way, my father wanted to shepherd my uncle. He made sure to include him on vacations once in awhile. They had more talks together. This continued after I moved out, and my father was the one who invited my uncle down to visit when they moved to NJ. It should also be mentioned, after my father's death, those invitations largely stopped coming, but also, my uncle stopped accepting them. He hasn't been down to visit my mother and sister in years now, and I've tried encouraging him to go. He begs off with lame excuses, but it'd be silly at this point not to read into it that he's not comfortable with their relationship.
I started off this story by saying my uncle likes to play devil's advocate for my father, and the digression were there to explain how they got to be close but weren't always...as I said, many digressions, but it paints a full picture. The period after my parent's moved and my uncle visiting, it seems that's when my father began to confide things in my uncle. My uncle would tell me often how my father had relaxed, how he'd changed since he moved. And perhaps he did, but I don't believe it was change, but rather a change of setting. That my father was still the same man, just some changes in environment gave him freedom to show a different side of himself. Move him back to whatever made him unhappy and he'd be the father I knew growing up. Rather then this being a genuine change, a transformative experience where his outside environment would not really effect. It's something I've had a to give a lot of thought about myself, how many changes in the past 7 years are real changes, and how many are the result of keeping myself in a different environment. That's the doubt i have about how good a person I really am vs what's just buried.
This is how my uncle came to be my benefactor. My father knew I wouldn't accept help from him directly, so he asked my uncle to do it in his stead. Because my uncle was not so inclined to help me as he has. That bothers me. It's always made me want to trust my uncle less, knowing that left to his own devices, he'd've been fine watching me suffer and likely would've died by suicide if not for his intervention. It's not comforting to be in the hands of someone who didn't really want to help you.
According to my uncle, my father spoke highly of me during this period. My uncle tries to stress that my father was proud of me, he's insistent on it in fact. It's not thatI have any reason to believe my uncle is lying, but I also can't square this with other things I saw. In the big argument where my father told me to move out, he raised multiple resentments about decisions I'd made about how I lived my life. He was trying to throw them in my face as if somehow I was in agreement with him about them being bad decisions. He felt I'd gotten my way for years and look where it had gotten me, which clearly it was implied that was not a good place. But I was happy with the decisions I'd made up until that point and was glad I got to make them. That seems to me the opposite of pride. At New Years this year, Josh was telling me how he used to see the disappointment in my parents' faces. He described it as, it looked like they felt I was wasting my potential and that I could have a normal life if I wanted. To explain that, my parents did not understand or approve of my gaming habits or friends - they felt there was something dysfunctional about it. During that big argument, my father basically accused me of dressing up like a Columbine shooter, when I stopped wearing a trenchcoat years before, and also wore one years before Columbine. The idea was that I was associating with odd people, people who didn't fit in to normal society, and they couldn't understand why I was self-sabotaging by doing so. What they never understood was that I didn't belong in normal society, but they really had very little idea about the depths of my mental illness despite lviing with me. At most, they suspected depression, but certainly didn't think it was severe.
This sort of disappointment and pride mix is not unheard of for my father though. Once more, my uncle told me years earlier that my father was ok with my leaving home at 18, that despite the fighting and inability to get along, he thought I was right. Being right may not be the right way to put it. My father saw the whole thing as a generational fight, child needing to rebel against their parents because that's what children do. Whenever my father tried to talk to me about that it would infuriate me though. He was so blinded to the whole dimension of us being a dysfunctional family. His trying to classify things as normal child/parent struggles was offensive to me, but also dismissive of how I felt as he tried to label without listening or understanding.
"No fool like an old fool." This is a good note to end things on. This was one of my father's sayings to mock his peers for their mistakes. It seems fitting that he was talking about himself as well.