Ghosts, or ghostus, as my younger son calls them when asking if they're real, inhabit our old house. My friend who lives there now tells me she sees them, and her husband backs her up.
When I was growing up, my mother had various palm readers over at the house, and I remember this one woman standing in the foyer saying, "Yup, he's here." She meant my father, and she said it mystically, not nearly as colloquially as I've made it seem. She transcended mere mortals and lent appropriate gravity to such a disclosure. Pretty much universal skepticism greeted that disclosure, since he didn't hang around there while alive.
Maybe his posthumous presence signified an attempt to atone for his sins. My mother, while overtly skeptical, probably believed that he could have been there as a result of some divine poetic justice that wouldn't allow him to have peace, though I'm sure she didn't let him have any peace while he lived. Like a capital-gains tax: You make the money and get taxed on it, then you invest and pay taxes on those earnings. I will hound you while you live, and then some kind of spiritual prosecutor of justice will hound you after you're dead. I wonder if some kind of 12-step after-life program exists, one in which you get the opportunity to make amends to those you have wronged. If so, how the fuck can you do it when you're a ghost?
TV has provided a venue for numerous ghost shows. One show bears the "Ghost Hunters" moniker. These people go to allegedly haunted places, with electronic equipment in tow, where they attempt to find evidence of the supernatural. I'm not sure who manufactures this ghost-hunting equipment, but ghost hunters often seem to possess such gear. A Google search, however, yields no shortage of opportunities to procure ghost-hunting equipment, including a starter kit. I guess ghost-hunting neophytes need to use the start-up kit, lest they conjure up something with which they don't know how to deal. You shouldn't entrust ghost-hunting equipment to just anyone. Anyway, the atmosphere on this show is tense, man, tense, and someone invariably asks, in an anxious whisper, "What was that?" in response to something only they saw or heard.
In our household, my cousin and mother used to play a game called Ziriya, like a Ouija board. http://www.museumoftalkingboards.com/ziriya.html
That board told me, while my mother and cousin were guiding the pointer, that it wouldn't answer my questions because I wasn't a believer. Stupid fucking board. And never once did I feel the gravitational pull while making circles on the board with the pointer. And I was ready to believe, I wanted it to tell me I was going to have a black Trans-Am like in Smokey & The Bandit and be a big-league pitcher. So God and ghosts and communicative cardboard all had a place in my formative years.
My mother also moved furniture around frequently or, rather, had me do it. These exercises amounted to the equivalent of digging holes and refilling them. Maybe she was trying to confuse the ghosts. We once were carrying a heavy mirror down the cellar stairs, I on the top and she on the side. She criticized my approach, at which point I informed her that I was the load bearer. She said I wasn't and pretty much taunted me to release my grip. I knew I shouldn't have, but I did, and the mirror slid down the stairs and shattered on the concrete floor below, leaving us to stare down at our fragmented, sharp-edged reflections.
I've occupied plenty of altered states, but the only ghosts I've ever seen are the ones that long ago planted roots inside me. I've lived through times during which I thought I heard noises and had to rely on whether the dog reacted or not; If the dog failed to react, I figured I hadn't heard anything external. I wish I could see a ghost, other than the ones who look back at me from the mirror.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The Circle of Life
My family may have moved out of the house in which I grew up, the scene of some of our greatest transgressions, but we haven't completely relinquished our right to create a spectacle there.
I never suspected my mother's stay in assisted living would be uneventful, but when she skipped out of there in the rain two Sundays ago, distress set in for some people. Then I got a phone call from the current resident of our former house telling me that my mother was there, and since the police already were involved, I told the officer where she had landed. A short time later, according to another phone call, there were four police officers and two emergency medical technicians there. The police had visited that house before, but I don't think they had been there in more than 10 years. Nevertheless, just like the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh, I bet a cop car could make its own way to that address.
Partly as a result of that escapade, and partly because Mom's 30-day trial in assisted living will end in a few days, my siblings and I convened at the facility to confer with the staff. They think she should stay there, as do I, since the alternative of returning to live with my brother probably would precipitate her demise. The staff members said they can redirect her easily when her rancor surfaces, which brought to mind puppy training and the concept of providing the dog with an appropriate object on which to chew when she nips at the kids' heels. But the situation presents a dilemma: When a parent isn't thinking clearly some of the time, at what point do the adult children step in and try to impose what they consider the optimal solution on the parent?
When the children were young, the parents assumed responsibility for making decisions and ensuring health and safety. Even if said parent made numerous suspect decisions while rearing children, how much weight should the child lend to the parent's often-delusional perspective now? For kids to become parents to their parents appears unnatural. Two of my brothers refuse to make a call; they have abdicated. My other brother lacks the capacity to comprehend the gravity of my mother's condition and the potential ramifications for him. My sister insists that assisted living provides the most suitable environment for our mother.
An unjustifiable anger, therefore, has settled over my mother. She apparently believes her kids have poisoned their relationships with her by having her involuntarily incarcerated and through inept decision making. She still talks to us like we're retards. I guess old habits die hard. That might be one of the reasons she has lived with my brother for so may years, because she has her resident retard around. She always has known best and still knows best. I asked the assisted-living people what they would do when my brother showed up if my mother ends up staying there. I told them they had no chance to fix 50 years of dysfunction. They said she sure was right when she informed them that her son "Tom doesn't beat around the bush." But they "like that." They seemed to like it in the same way people like looking at cobras through the glass in the zoo, wondering about the adequacy of the containment.
Would she be happier dying at home, and does she have the right to make that decision?
She broke down crying in our gathering because she hasn't seen my children in months, her "little grandkids." Despite my latent and sometimes-not-so-latent resentment arising from growing up with my mother, the sight of her lamenting her estrangement from my children weighs heavily. I told her that my responsibility involved assuring my children's well-being. My older son came away from a previous conversation with her disturbed and has said he doesn't want to see her in this condition. My sister asked my mother what my son would think if his grandmother told him about the two men coming in her room, for she told us that in fact had transpired, and she chased them down the hallway while informing them that their presence wasn't welcome and that they should make themselves scarce, lest she call the police. During another incident, she brandished a flashlight to threaten an intruder. I won't sacrifice me children the way she sacrificed me. I have school pictures of myself from about third or fourth grade, and in them a greenish film covers my teeth. Peer pressure made me clean up, not parental guidance. On some days now, my own emotional weather vane already points south and conspires with the weight of circumstances to exact a toll and sometimes leave me about two seconds from tears.
Through my mind courses a continuous series of short movies. As a 3-year-old, I stand in my parents bedroom and watch as my father pushes my mother backwards over the footboard of the bed. One night, I huddle on the bed with my siblings in the master bedroom and listen to the doorbell, doorbell, doorbell. I hear my father screaming at my mother and coins clinking off the flagstone as he throws them. And my sister lies to me, but my precocity gives me a window through which I can see the truth. My brother on more than once occasion pumping as shotgun, threatening another brother and a combatant with whom a fight started in the street. My cousin riding me down the alley behind my grandparents' house on a bike, and my other cousin swinging a baseball bat over our heads as we passed, thoroughly convincing me that he would hit me. Some people. Sometimes I only get the audio, and I hear talk about how Dad pushed Mom down in the middle of the street and the police were there. Mom telling me how Dad told her she would never change as long as she had a hole in her ass. Rings true...not sure why she graced me with that nugget.
As kids, we hit lightning bugs, a.k.a. fireflies, with Whiffle bats as their intermittent flashes began to pierce dusk's veil and they hung suspended in momentary relief against the darkening backdrop. When we made contact, they would remain illuminated as they traced funereal arches in the night and settled on the grass. Or we captured them and committed them to live out their days confined in a jar, hobbled by the sticky residue of summer-heated mayonnaise. Oh, to be a lightning bug.
I never suspected my mother's stay in assisted living would be uneventful, but when she skipped out of there in the rain two Sundays ago, distress set in for some people. Then I got a phone call from the current resident of our former house telling me that my mother was there, and since the police already were involved, I told the officer where she had landed. A short time later, according to another phone call, there were four police officers and two emergency medical technicians there. The police had visited that house before, but I don't think they had been there in more than 10 years. Nevertheless, just like the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh, I bet a cop car could make its own way to that address.
Partly as a result of that escapade, and partly because Mom's 30-day trial in assisted living will end in a few days, my siblings and I convened at the facility to confer with the staff. They think she should stay there, as do I, since the alternative of returning to live with my brother probably would precipitate her demise. The staff members said they can redirect her easily when her rancor surfaces, which brought to mind puppy training and the concept of providing the dog with an appropriate object on which to chew when she nips at the kids' heels. But the situation presents a dilemma: When a parent isn't thinking clearly some of the time, at what point do the adult children step in and try to impose what they consider the optimal solution on the parent?
When the children were young, the parents assumed responsibility for making decisions and ensuring health and safety. Even if said parent made numerous suspect decisions while rearing children, how much weight should the child lend to the parent's often-delusional perspective now? For kids to become parents to their parents appears unnatural. Two of my brothers refuse to make a call; they have abdicated. My other brother lacks the capacity to comprehend the gravity of my mother's condition and the potential ramifications for him. My sister insists that assisted living provides the most suitable environment for our mother.
An unjustifiable anger, therefore, has settled over my mother. She apparently believes her kids have poisoned their relationships with her by having her involuntarily incarcerated and through inept decision making. She still talks to us like we're retards. I guess old habits die hard. That might be one of the reasons she has lived with my brother for so may years, because she has her resident retard around. She always has known best and still knows best. I asked the assisted-living people what they would do when my brother showed up if my mother ends up staying there. I told them they had no chance to fix 50 years of dysfunction. They said she sure was right when she informed them that her son "Tom doesn't beat around the bush." But they "like that." They seemed to like it in the same way people like looking at cobras through the glass in the zoo, wondering about the adequacy of the containment.
Would she be happier dying at home, and does she have the right to make that decision?
She broke down crying in our gathering because she hasn't seen my children in months, her "little grandkids." Despite my latent and sometimes-not-so-latent resentment arising from growing up with my mother, the sight of her lamenting her estrangement from my children weighs heavily. I told her that my responsibility involved assuring my children's well-being. My older son came away from a previous conversation with her disturbed and has said he doesn't want to see her in this condition. My sister asked my mother what my son would think if his grandmother told him about the two men coming in her room, for she told us that in fact had transpired, and she chased them down the hallway while informing them that their presence wasn't welcome and that they should make themselves scarce, lest she call the police. During another incident, she brandished a flashlight to threaten an intruder. I won't sacrifice me children the way she sacrificed me. I have school pictures of myself from about third or fourth grade, and in them a greenish film covers my teeth. Peer pressure made me clean up, not parental guidance. On some days now, my own emotional weather vane already points south and conspires with the weight of circumstances to exact a toll and sometimes leave me about two seconds from tears.
Through my mind courses a continuous series of short movies. As a 3-year-old, I stand in my parents bedroom and watch as my father pushes my mother backwards over the footboard of the bed. One night, I huddle on the bed with my siblings in the master bedroom and listen to the doorbell, doorbell, doorbell. I hear my father screaming at my mother and coins clinking off the flagstone as he throws them. And my sister lies to me, but my precocity gives me a window through which I can see the truth. My brother on more than once occasion pumping as shotgun, threatening another brother and a combatant with whom a fight started in the street. My cousin riding me down the alley behind my grandparents' house on a bike, and my other cousin swinging a baseball bat over our heads as we passed, thoroughly convincing me that he would hit me. Some people. Sometimes I only get the audio, and I hear talk about how Dad pushed Mom down in the middle of the street and the police were there. Mom telling me how Dad told her she would never change as long as she had a hole in her ass. Rings true...not sure why she graced me with that nugget.
As kids, we hit lightning bugs, a.k.a. fireflies, with Whiffle bats as their intermittent flashes began to pierce dusk's veil and they hung suspended in momentary relief against the darkening backdrop. When we made contact, they would remain illuminated as they traced funereal arches in the night and settled on the grass. Or we captured them and committed them to live out their days confined in a jar, hobbled by the sticky residue of summer-heated mayonnaise. Oh, to be a lightning bug.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Rebel
The first significant crack in my facade surfaced in February 1993 when I put my dog to sleep after nearly 13 years. That golden retriever's death bore down upon me with the weight of 27 years in tow, eventually causing the foundation to crumble and sending me spiraling into the void. Until then, I had retained a veneer of composure, to the point where people's perceptions of me differed from the reality, but I began to succumb to the accumulation of damage from the daily paper cuts to my brain and the harsher, blunt traumas. When I had attempted to persuade people that something was awry, they responded with denial, thereby creating further expectations for how I was supposed to behave. They considered it unacceptable for me to be different from how they perceived me. Responsibility lay with me also, for I believed that the failure to meet their expectations compounded my deficiencies. We lied to ourselves and one another.
Now, I don't anthropomorphize. A dog is a dog. But I could tell that dog I was fucked up, and he'd just wag and lick and not make me feel as if I should be doing anything differently. He accepted it. After long days at a high school where I felt out of place and angst-ridden, looking forward to being out with him at night helped to sustain me.
He and I came together at the end of eighth grade, when he, out of the nine or so puppies, liberated from their enclosure, seemed to take to me more readily than the rest. My selection criteria likely epitomized an unscientific approach to puppy selection, and his weak constitution when confronted with thunderstorms haunted me for years to come and provided for many sleep-interrupted nights. My mother's ulterior motive for purchasing this puppy likely involved assuaging her guilt for abandoning my previous dog in a strange (but respectable) neighborhood and offering me a carrot to relinquish my resistance to matriculating at a particular school. This was not absent a concession on my part: I wanted a Doberman but got a golden. Anyway, I took him swimming and for walks and, naturally, attended the high school. He slept under my bed and dug grooves down the bedroom door with his nails in an effort to escape thunder or fireworks. He must have heard me coming once when I walked through the family room, and he started to get off the couch but didn't do so quickly enough; when I walked in on him, he froze in the middle of leaving the couch, two front paws on the floor, one rear leg in the air and another on the couch, as if I wouldn't notice an 80-pound canine tripod.
I lived close enough during college to still see him. He stayed with my mother and brother, and they all possessed roughly the same intellectual capabilities, which proved fortunate for the dog, because living with them really could have fucked him up otherwise.
I viewed him as a constant amid the tumult, fearing not that he would abandon me. He came to live with me when I moved out and got married, and we spooked whitetail deer as we ran through the park enveloped by dusk us in late spring. When I run at that same park now, with a different dog, I can still feel the same sense of anticipation I felt then, after emancipation from my mother, the misconception that relief from persecution, self-inflicted or perpetrated by others, would accompany a change in venue.
The false allure of milestones enabled me to persuade myself that I would evolve once certain changes occurred, that I would feel better, but perhaps that perspective served as a contrivance that allowed me to persevere. The solution always lay around the next corner, until I reached that corner, only to be confronted with another corner. I would feel better once I got out of high school. I would feel better once I had sex. I would feel better once I got out of college. I would feel better once I got a job. I would feel better once I got a different job. I would feel better on the next medicine. False promises, all. John Hiatt has a song, "The Nagging Dark," about depression. In it, he says:
How fast you gonna run? Away from this one.
Anywhere but here, you wanna disappear.
Into the next daylight, where everything's right.
It's always somewhere else, you're gonna fix yourself.
Once shame and guilt had made their mark.
Well you can't run away from the nagging dark.
You carry it everywhere in your heart.
It finishes everything that you start.
And, you can't run away from the nagging dark.
How much you gonna cost? When everything's lost.
What a price you'd pay, just to feel some way.
Cause your heart has stone, round down to the bone.
How your flesh and blood, is just ashes and mud.
Feels like your soul's been blown apart.
Anyway, we got by on our own for a while, and then came a wife and eventually a cat. That cat was a bitch, but she used to sleep curled up against the dog and would lick his head constantly. By this time, he had lost an eye to a cataract, although the eyeball hadn't been removed, so he saw out of one eye and had a milky orb in the other. His hearing had deteriorated a bit, and so did his sensitivity to thunder, further endearing him to me. His ears had filled with blood years earlier, what the vet called hematomas, though before we took him to the vet my mother the nurse had drained the blood from those ears with a syringe. They of course refilled with blood, and she grew angry when I insisted that the vet tend to the dog and it cost $120. Age, though, likely caused his later hearing difficulties. Another health scare arose when he hit nine years old and the vet removed a suspected malignant mass from his side. Neutering didn't occur until later in life, when a prostate problem left me with little choice. In the run-up to that operation, I had to collect urine samples from the dog, and so could be seen trailing him around the side yard and ultimately holding a mayonnaise jar under his penis.
The lump that developed in his throat, though, when he had nearly reached 13 caused particular concern. The doctor pointed to cancer as the probable culprit, and we were to monitor his condition in the ensuing weeks. The dog became a palliative patient, with rectal temperature taking part of the routine. I went to my mother's house during this stretch and dug his grave. My brother, who professed to have a stake in this dog, watched from the kitchen window as I chipped away at the hard dirt in the cold light of January.
Sleep eluded me most nights, and I would lie awake, contracting my muscles like a colicky baby in fruitless attempts to purge the pain. At 4 a.m. on a February Sunday morning, I left my bed and took my dog, who had grown incontinent, to the all-night animal hospital. As we wheeled the gurney on which he lay into the hospital, we hit the lip of a driveway apron and his head sprang up, like he had again become that dog who chased a red-tail fox for miles in the park, and caused my stomach to flutter with the momentary delusion that what I was about to do might not be real. But just a few minutes later, I looked in his eyes and stroked his head as the injection put him to rest. I laid him in his grave with his blanket, in the spot where he and I had played when he was a pup, as those within my mother's household slept.
My wife departed for good shortly thereafter, and suddenly I found myself without two fixtures in my life from the previous decade or so, a confluence of events that strained my resilience nearly to the breaking point and foretold of further challenges.
Now, I don't anthropomorphize. A dog is a dog. But I could tell that dog I was fucked up, and he'd just wag and lick and not make me feel as if I should be doing anything differently. He accepted it. After long days at a high school where I felt out of place and angst-ridden, looking forward to being out with him at night helped to sustain me.
He and I came together at the end of eighth grade, when he, out of the nine or so puppies, liberated from their enclosure, seemed to take to me more readily than the rest. My selection criteria likely epitomized an unscientific approach to puppy selection, and his weak constitution when confronted with thunderstorms haunted me for years to come and provided for many sleep-interrupted nights. My mother's ulterior motive for purchasing this puppy likely involved assuaging her guilt for abandoning my previous dog in a strange (but respectable) neighborhood and offering me a carrot to relinquish my resistance to matriculating at a particular school. This was not absent a concession on my part: I wanted a Doberman but got a golden. Anyway, I took him swimming and for walks and, naturally, attended the high school. He slept under my bed and dug grooves down the bedroom door with his nails in an effort to escape thunder or fireworks. He must have heard me coming once when I walked through the family room, and he started to get off the couch but didn't do so quickly enough; when I walked in on him, he froze in the middle of leaving the couch, two front paws on the floor, one rear leg in the air and another on the couch, as if I wouldn't notice an 80-pound canine tripod.
I lived close enough during college to still see him. He stayed with my mother and brother, and they all possessed roughly the same intellectual capabilities, which proved fortunate for the dog, because living with them really could have fucked him up otherwise.
I viewed him as a constant amid the tumult, fearing not that he would abandon me. He came to live with me when I moved out and got married, and we spooked whitetail deer as we ran through the park enveloped by dusk us in late spring. When I run at that same park now, with a different dog, I can still feel the same sense of anticipation I felt then, after emancipation from my mother, the misconception that relief from persecution, self-inflicted or perpetrated by others, would accompany a change in venue.
The false allure of milestones enabled me to persuade myself that I would evolve once certain changes occurred, that I would feel better, but perhaps that perspective served as a contrivance that allowed me to persevere. The solution always lay around the next corner, until I reached that corner, only to be confronted with another corner. I would feel better once I got out of high school. I would feel better once I had sex. I would feel better once I got out of college. I would feel better once I got a job. I would feel better once I got a different job. I would feel better on the next medicine. False promises, all. John Hiatt has a song, "The Nagging Dark," about depression. In it, he says:
How fast you gonna run? Away from this one.
Anywhere but here, you wanna disappear.
Into the next daylight, where everything's right.
It's always somewhere else, you're gonna fix yourself.
Once shame and guilt had made their mark.
Well you can't run away from the nagging dark.
You carry it everywhere in your heart.
It finishes everything that you start.
And, you can't run away from the nagging dark.
How much you gonna cost? When everything's lost.
What a price you'd pay, just to feel some way.
Cause your heart has stone, round down to the bone.
How your flesh and blood, is just ashes and mud.
Feels like your soul's been blown apart.
Anyway, we got by on our own for a while, and then came a wife and eventually a cat. That cat was a bitch, but she used to sleep curled up against the dog and would lick his head constantly. By this time, he had lost an eye to a cataract, although the eyeball hadn't been removed, so he saw out of one eye and had a milky orb in the other. His hearing had deteriorated a bit, and so did his sensitivity to thunder, further endearing him to me. His ears had filled with blood years earlier, what the vet called hematomas, though before we took him to the vet my mother the nurse had drained the blood from those ears with a syringe. They of course refilled with blood, and she grew angry when I insisted that the vet tend to the dog and it cost $120. Age, though, likely caused his later hearing difficulties. Another health scare arose when he hit nine years old and the vet removed a suspected malignant mass from his side. Neutering didn't occur until later in life, when a prostate problem left me with little choice. In the run-up to that operation, I had to collect urine samples from the dog, and so could be seen trailing him around the side yard and ultimately holding a mayonnaise jar under his penis.
The lump that developed in his throat, though, when he had nearly reached 13 caused particular concern. The doctor pointed to cancer as the probable culprit, and we were to monitor his condition in the ensuing weeks. The dog became a palliative patient, with rectal temperature taking part of the routine. I went to my mother's house during this stretch and dug his grave. My brother, who professed to have a stake in this dog, watched from the kitchen window as I chipped away at the hard dirt in the cold light of January.
Sleep eluded me most nights, and I would lie awake, contracting my muscles like a colicky baby in fruitless attempts to purge the pain. At 4 a.m. on a February Sunday morning, I left my bed and took my dog, who had grown incontinent, to the all-night animal hospital. As we wheeled the gurney on which he lay into the hospital, we hit the lip of a driveway apron and his head sprang up, like he had again become that dog who chased a red-tail fox for miles in the park, and caused my stomach to flutter with the momentary delusion that what I was about to do might not be real. But just a few minutes later, I looked in his eyes and stroked his head as the injection put him to rest. I laid him in his grave with his blanket, in the spot where he and I had played when he was a pup, as those within my mother's household slept.
My wife departed for good shortly thereafter, and suddenly I found myself without two fixtures in my life from the previous decade or so, a confluence of events that strained my resilience nearly to the breaking point and foretold of further challenges.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Halcyon Days
Since my mother's stroke, I've had occasion to correspond more frequently with my siblings. In doing so, I have sometimes taken advantage of the opportunity to enlighten them about some of the issues with which I had to contend growing up. Since my sister and two older brothers were largely out of the house when I was in grade school, my mother, other brother and I shared the house, or at least the first floor.
A succession of tenants occupied the upper floor, which my mother had converted into an apartment, but not with a separate entrance, in her bid to shoulder the financial burdens associated with retaining the house. There was my late cousin, Joanie, and her daughter Beth, who more or less ended up being a little sister to me. We used to make popcorn and watch "The Six Million Dollar Man" on Sunday nights. Joanie aspired to be a writer, but nothing much came of it. She smoked and died of cancer.
Then a guy named Steve lived there. He and I played some basketball in the backyard. Then a woman, Judy, occupied the apartment. I used to feed her nasty Siamese cat when she went on vacation. Somewhere in there, my brothers also occupied that apartment. I used to go up there and drink with them when I was in seventh and eighth grade. My oldest brother and I damaged the ceiling of the front room on the first floor by jumping off the back of the couch in the room above in between shots of gin. I think I was 13.
Since my two older brothers were intermittent residents, segregated in the apartment when they were there, and my sister was gone, they didn't witness much of the interaction between my mother, other brother and I. I'll call this brother David, since that's his name. He and my mother often worked as a team, conspiratorially, with me as the object of their collusion. When I was gone on a soccer trip, they rearranged my room to their specifications and were dumbfounded when I objected. When I was a lad of about 10, I once had the audacity to interrupt our dinner to confer with a friend on our front porch; they eventually came out together to hustle me back in, she brandishing a wooden spoon with which to whack me. Another time, when I was in the bathroom, he wanted to get in. It must not have dawned on them that I was using the restroom, for in he burst, with her blessing. They respected no boundaries and didn't consider my privacy.
As a 12-year-old, I intervened when he, 20 and under the influence of barbiturates and alcohol, grabbed my mother by the wrists and threatened physical harm in the entryway to our house. My naivete hadn't yet capitulated, and chivalry hadn't relinquished its hold and surrendered to cynicism, so the notion that my mother was more fallible than I ever suspected and that the two of them fed off one another's dysfunction had yet to take root. Another night, he drove up and down our street in his girlfriend's orange Camaro beeping the horn in an apparent effort to entice one of our other brothers out of the house for a fight. Somewhere around my 18th year, an angry detective who lived in the neighborhood banged on our front door, after my brother had slinked into the house and sought refuge in the basement with my dog. That Golden retriever wasn't going to bite no cop. The detective started to push his way in, but I stood my ground, and he came to his senses. I should have let him in, for my drunken brother had sideswiped his parked car.
We shared a bedroom for a while, and I recall his late-night entries. When I once told him he had fallen down the night before, he later recounted this to his friend and thought it was hysterical. He told me on another occasion that he had a dream about hitting a guardrail, and when he went to the spot the next day, there stood a guardrail with a dent. I've lost track of the arrests, but the earliest I remember was when I was five or six years old and my mother dragged me out of bed to retrieve him from the police station in a neighboring township. They had picked him up walking drunk down the road. When we got home, she threw him in the shower and in bed, and her screaming prompted me to get out of bed once again and witness her slapping him. The state police once arrested him in the middle of the night for driving the wrong way on the interstate.
Yet none of this seems to have dented his psyche. He hasn't worked in years and questions why he should work when there are other people out there who live off welfare. He's above accepting wages along the lines of those earned by Wal-Mart workers. He won't take antidepressants because he doesn't want to be a drug addict, though he smoked and sold a lot of weed from the room next to mine. On one of my birthdays, I drove him to the motor-vehicle office and sat there with him for about eight hours as he attempted to straighten out one mess or another. I don't recall a thank-you. When I was in grade school, he used to kneel on my arms while I was on my back and drag his hair across my stomach to tickle me. In an effort to motivate me to extricate myself from that position, he used to say, "Pretend I'm a nigger." Once when we passed someone collecting for the NAACP, he told me that the person wanted us to "give money to niggers."
Other times he took me fishing. We bowled together for a while. And the highly unusual occasion when my father was minding me and wouldn't let me out of the house when my brother tried to dupe him into allowing me to attend a nonexistent parade. The old man let me go, but surely he didn't fall for it. A rare display of humanity from both of them.
My mother told my brother many times that our father wasn't gone, that he lived on in my brother. I suppose she meant it, for she long ago seemed to have entered into a virtual conjugal relationship with him. She once sent me out of the room so she could discuss my Christmas present with him. I listened, and heard about the bike I was getting, and I grew angry at her for not having more discretion. The bike displeased me, since it fulfilled few of my requirements, though once again they portrayed me as the dimwit. They both have talked to me like that for as long as I can remember. I wonder why he showed me the dog stake in the back of her light-blue Chevy Nova hatchback. The twisting stake equaled the evidence that incriminated her in my pet's disappearance, when she had told me and apparently was willing to perpetuate the lie that he had run away. David has fancied himself a tough guy and on occasion has held forth with tales of his virility, although such a perspective was in absence when a fellow bar patron knocked him out one night.
My mother has a bottomless well of excuses for him. Just recently she chalked up his calls to her assisted-living facility to his loneliness, notwithstanding his alleged verbal abuse of the staff in the middle of the night. Growing up, she attributed his poor academic performance to dyslexia; he broke his arm when he was younger and then became confused about which arm to use, hence the dyslexia, according to her. Our father poked him with a fork if he had his elbow on the dinner table. His girlfriend aborted two fetuses, and he lamented that he could have had two children but didn't. Our cousin played with his pee-pee. The fallacy that his constitution rises to the level of "a good guy" when he abstains from drinking. Meanwhile, she has criticized people who don't work while simultaneously living with her jobless, middle-aged son.
Sympathy for someone with an affliction would be easier to summon if that person displayed the slightest humility or concern for others or an interest in listening to someone's opinion aside from his own. My mother years ago asked me to be the steward of David's inheritance upon her death, and I refused. With her not thinking clearly in the wake of her stroke, he now calls me for money. The unbridled gall stupefies me, but I suppose it shouldn't at this juncture. What will become of him when she dies remains unclear. A few shelters have evicted him, once for a racial epithet. His inheritance money should last him for a year or so. At one of my high-school soccer games, a prominent player on the other team was a mulatto. Another spectator later spoke to me about my brother, on the sidelines, calling this opposing player a "spic." When I confronted my brother about it, he said he didn't mean that the guy was a spic, just that he was playing like a spic. Oh.
My other siblings either are keeping their distance or ignoring or trying to come to terms with the state of affairs, the full perversity perhaps finally registering, but there is now no making order out of chaos.
A succession of tenants occupied the upper floor, which my mother had converted into an apartment, but not with a separate entrance, in her bid to shoulder the financial burdens associated with retaining the house. There was my late cousin, Joanie, and her daughter Beth, who more or less ended up being a little sister to me. We used to make popcorn and watch "The Six Million Dollar Man" on Sunday nights. Joanie aspired to be a writer, but nothing much came of it. She smoked and died of cancer.
Then a guy named Steve lived there. He and I played some basketball in the backyard. Then a woman, Judy, occupied the apartment. I used to feed her nasty Siamese cat when she went on vacation. Somewhere in there, my brothers also occupied that apartment. I used to go up there and drink with them when I was in seventh and eighth grade. My oldest brother and I damaged the ceiling of the front room on the first floor by jumping off the back of the couch in the room above in between shots of gin. I think I was 13.
Since my two older brothers were intermittent residents, segregated in the apartment when they were there, and my sister was gone, they didn't witness much of the interaction between my mother, other brother and I. I'll call this brother David, since that's his name. He and my mother often worked as a team, conspiratorially, with me as the object of their collusion. When I was gone on a soccer trip, they rearranged my room to their specifications and were dumbfounded when I objected. When I was a lad of about 10, I once had the audacity to interrupt our dinner to confer with a friend on our front porch; they eventually came out together to hustle me back in, she brandishing a wooden spoon with which to whack me. Another time, when I was in the bathroom, he wanted to get in. It must not have dawned on them that I was using the restroom, for in he burst, with her blessing. They respected no boundaries and didn't consider my privacy.
As a 12-year-old, I intervened when he, 20 and under the influence of barbiturates and alcohol, grabbed my mother by the wrists and threatened physical harm in the entryway to our house. My naivete hadn't yet capitulated, and chivalry hadn't relinquished its hold and surrendered to cynicism, so the notion that my mother was more fallible than I ever suspected and that the two of them fed off one another's dysfunction had yet to take root. Another night, he drove up and down our street in his girlfriend's orange Camaro beeping the horn in an apparent effort to entice one of our other brothers out of the house for a fight. Somewhere around my 18th year, an angry detective who lived in the neighborhood banged on our front door, after my brother had slinked into the house and sought refuge in the basement with my dog. That Golden retriever wasn't going to bite no cop. The detective started to push his way in, but I stood my ground, and he came to his senses. I should have let him in, for my drunken brother had sideswiped his parked car.
We shared a bedroom for a while, and I recall his late-night entries. When I once told him he had fallen down the night before, he later recounted this to his friend and thought it was hysterical. He told me on another occasion that he had a dream about hitting a guardrail, and when he went to the spot the next day, there stood a guardrail with a dent. I've lost track of the arrests, but the earliest I remember was when I was five or six years old and my mother dragged me out of bed to retrieve him from the police station in a neighboring township. They had picked him up walking drunk down the road. When we got home, she threw him in the shower and in bed, and her screaming prompted me to get out of bed once again and witness her slapping him. The state police once arrested him in the middle of the night for driving the wrong way on the interstate.
Yet none of this seems to have dented his psyche. He hasn't worked in years and questions why he should work when there are other people out there who live off welfare. He's above accepting wages along the lines of those earned by Wal-Mart workers. He won't take antidepressants because he doesn't want to be a drug addict, though he smoked and sold a lot of weed from the room next to mine. On one of my birthdays, I drove him to the motor-vehicle office and sat there with him for about eight hours as he attempted to straighten out one mess or another. I don't recall a thank-you. When I was in grade school, he used to kneel on my arms while I was on my back and drag his hair across my stomach to tickle me. In an effort to motivate me to extricate myself from that position, he used to say, "Pretend I'm a nigger." Once when we passed someone collecting for the NAACP, he told me that the person wanted us to "give money to niggers."
Other times he took me fishing. We bowled together for a while. And the highly unusual occasion when my father was minding me and wouldn't let me out of the house when my brother tried to dupe him into allowing me to attend a nonexistent parade. The old man let me go, but surely he didn't fall for it. A rare display of humanity from both of them.
My mother told my brother many times that our father wasn't gone, that he lived on in my brother. I suppose she meant it, for she long ago seemed to have entered into a virtual conjugal relationship with him. She once sent me out of the room so she could discuss my Christmas present with him. I listened, and heard about the bike I was getting, and I grew angry at her for not having more discretion. The bike displeased me, since it fulfilled few of my requirements, though once again they portrayed me as the dimwit. They both have talked to me like that for as long as I can remember. I wonder why he showed me the dog stake in the back of her light-blue Chevy Nova hatchback. The twisting stake equaled the evidence that incriminated her in my pet's disappearance, when she had told me and apparently was willing to perpetuate the lie that he had run away. David has fancied himself a tough guy and on occasion has held forth with tales of his virility, although such a perspective was in absence when a fellow bar patron knocked him out one night.
My mother has a bottomless well of excuses for him. Just recently she chalked up his calls to her assisted-living facility to his loneliness, notwithstanding his alleged verbal abuse of the staff in the middle of the night. Growing up, she attributed his poor academic performance to dyslexia; he broke his arm when he was younger and then became confused about which arm to use, hence the dyslexia, according to her. Our father poked him with a fork if he had his elbow on the dinner table. His girlfriend aborted two fetuses, and he lamented that he could have had two children but didn't. Our cousin played with his pee-pee. The fallacy that his constitution rises to the level of "a good guy" when he abstains from drinking. Meanwhile, she has criticized people who don't work while simultaneously living with her jobless, middle-aged son.
Sympathy for someone with an affliction would be easier to summon if that person displayed the slightest humility or concern for others or an interest in listening to someone's opinion aside from his own. My mother years ago asked me to be the steward of David's inheritance upon her death, and I refused. With her not thinking clearly in the wake of her stroke, he now calls me for money. The unbridled gall stupefies me, but I suppose it shouldn't at this juncture. What will become of him when she dies remains unclear. A few shelters have evicted him, once for a racial epithet. His inheritance money should last him for a year or so. At one of my high-school soccer games, a prominent player on the other team was a mulatto. Another spectator later spoke to me about my brother, on the sidelines, calling this opposing player a "spic." When I confronted my brother about it, he said he didn't mean that the guy was a spic, just that he was playing like a spic. Oh.
My other siblings either are keeping their distance or ignoring or trying to come to terms with the state of affairs, the full perversity perhaps finally registering, but there is now no making order out of chaos.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Son, the Sequel
Son No. 2 came to us about three years after his older brother, this time by way of Cesarean section. He was breech, hence the C-section, which provided an interesting spectacle in and of itself.
His mother remained awake during the procedure, though she had an obstructed-view position, since there was a raised sheet that screened her from seeing the proceedings. I was standing by her head, so I had what amounted to a front-row seat. She was talking to me and the anesthesiologist, which was strange, considering the doctor made an incision across her abdomen and proceeded to scoop out something. She asked me what was happening at one point, and I said, "There's something on your stomach, but I don't know what it is."
"That's her uterus, Tom," the doctor said. I wasn't exactly accustomed to the whole uterus-on-the-stomach thing, and combined with the lighting and the antiseptic smell, they conspired to make me feel a bit queasy. I soldiered on, however, and eventually they removed a little boy and returned the uterus to its rightful place.
As a baby, son No. 2 behaved differently from his older sibling, meaning that he slept. And he was so disarmingly pleasant that he caught us off guard. We had proceeded to have another child despite the experience with the first, and we thought we were reaping the rewards of our persistence. Who knew it could be that way?
As this kid grew, he started to scamper around on all fours like a chimpanzee, and he could motor. He didn't begin to speak as early as his brother, whose accelerated abilities skewed my expectations in that respect. I wondered what was wrong with the younger one, but he was actually developmentally ahead of schedule. He was just so much smaller and wasn't talking that I had to question whether something had gone awry.
He talks now. Sometimes we can get in the car and ride around doing errands for two hours, with nary a moment of silence. He'll order you to turn up the radio and then ask a question. When you say you can't hear him, he screams with an irritation unbefitting someone who still needs a car seat.
He's a physical marvel, a naked, sinewy four-year-old with a natural fuck-you expression cutting a swath through our lives. He once entertained the cable guy by parading naked down the hallway while shaking a pom-pom and chanting, "Gimme a 'Y' sound" in imitation of one of his educational videos.
He asked me about a year ago if we die when we get old. I told him yes. He said then it would just be his mother and brother. I told him his mother and I would die first, and then it would be him and his brother but that it wouldn't be for a while. He said that they would have to take care of themselves then, and I said they would have houses and families of their own. He asked if they could go wherever they wanted, and I told him yes. He told me he didn't know where I, his father, would die. I said I didn't know, either, and he said, "maybe at gym-nat-sticks," for he had a gymnastics class that very night.
The fact that he was upside down in the womb should have tipped us off that he harbored at least somewhat of an uncooperative nature. He once cried for nearly the 12-hour duration of a car ride to South Carolina.
Friends and family say he's me, aside from the sinewy and talking-all-the-time aspects. He once summoned his brother over solely to kick him in the testicles. He used to beckon him for a kiss and the slap him in the face. He swings first and, well, doesn't even ask questions later. And somehow he turns any situation on its head, with him having been wronged. While we thought we were reaping the rewards of our persistence when he was a sleeping, happy infant, a serious awakening pierced our illusion when he started to grow. So, that was what terrible two's were like. And three's and four's. He can be bossy, sometimes bordering on tyrannical, and feigns screaming fits in an effort to wrest the advantage. A friend's mother declared him the devil upon first setting eyes on him. A friend who had visited recollects how the boy came prancing into the family room holding his diaper with a cat-that-ate-the-canary look. The same friend looked at his picture once and likened it to a mugshot. The kid's countenance suggests that he knows something the rest of us do not.
When I once characterized him as a disagreeable little something or other, another friend remarked that she didn't know where he got it from. Fortunately, he has moderated his profanity. He once remarked, upon leaving Target with his mother, that it was "fucking hot out here." He once opened the back door of our house, stark naked, to apologize to me: "I sorry I called you a asshole, Dad," he screamed across the yard. In Lake Placid, he took particular pleasure in the dining room as he thrust his arm out an declared "dick face" or "ass wipe." He likes to call his brother "koala crap." But like I said, that has moderated. Although he did tell his day-care teacher, matter of factly, that "China eats dogs." I don't think you can argue with that.
On the other hand, he can be effusive with his affection. He possesses a vivid imagination and can keep himself occupied. I don't recall him getting into our bed during the night ever. He can catch a ball and throw a ball and hit a ball and kick a ball with unusual facility for someone his age. He's also a natural comedian with an endearing, though unintentional, inclination toward the occasional malapropism. Not so endearingly, he sometimes feigns choking during meals because he knows it pushes our buttons.
Aimee Mann has a song called "Little Tornado," and that's what I call this kid, fully realizing that a small tornado once rendered me unconscious in Montana.
His mother remained awake during the procedure, though she had an obstructed-view position, since there was a raised sheet that screened her from seeing the proceedings. I was standing by her head, so I had what amounted to a front-row seat. She was talking to me and the anesthesiologist, which was strange, considering the doctor made an incision across her abdomen and proceeded to scoop out something. She asked me what was happening at one point, and I said, "There's something on your stomach, but I don't know what it is."
"That's her uterus, Tom," the doctor said. I wasn't exactly accustomed to the whole uterus-on-the-stomach thing, and combined with the lighting and the antiseptic smell, they conspired to make me feel a bit queasy. I soldiered on, however, and eventually they removed a little boy and returned the uterus to its rightful place.
As a baby, son No. 2 behaved differently from his older sibling, meaning that he slept. And he was so disarmingly pleasant that he caught us off guard. We had proceeded to have another child despite the experience with the first, and we thought we were reaping the rewards of our persistence. Who knew it could be that way?
As this kid grew, he started to scamper around on all fours like a chimpanzee, and he could motor. He didn't begin to speak as early as his brother, whose accelerated abilities skewed my expectations in that respect. I wondered what was wrong with the younger one, but he was actually developmentally ahead of schedule. He was just so much smaller and wasn't talking that I had to question whether something had gone awry.
He talks now. Sometimes we can get in the car and ride around doing errands for two hours, with nary a moment of silence. He'll order you to turn up the radio and then ask a question. When you say you can't hear him, he screams with an irritation unbefitting someone who still needs a car seat.
He's a physical marvel, a naked, sinewy four-year-old with a natural fuck-you expression cutting a swath through our lives. He once entertained the cable guy by parading naked down the hallway while shaking a pom-pom and chanting, "Gimme a 'Y' sound" in imitation of one of his educational videos.
He asked me about a year ago if we die when we get old. I told him yes. He said then it would just be his mother and brother. I told him his mother and I would die first, and then it would be him and his brother but that it wouldn't be for a while. He said that they would have to take care of themselves then, and I said they would have houses and families of their own. He asked if they could go wherever they wanted, and I told him yes. He told me he didn't know where I, his father, would die. I said I didn't know, either, and he said, "maybe at gym-nat-sticks," for he had a gymnastics class that very night.
The fact that he was upside down in the womb should have tipped us off that he harbored at least somewhat of an uncooperative nature. He once cried for nearly the 12-hour duration of a car ride to South Carolina.
Friends and family say he's me, aside from the sinewy and talking-all-the-time aspects. He once summoned his brother over solely to kick him in the testicles. He used to beckon him for a kiss and the slap him in the face. He swings first and, well, doesn't even ask questions later. And somehow he turns any situation on its head, with him having been wronged. While we thought we were reaping the rewards of our persistence when he was a sleeping, happy infant, a serious awakening pierced our illusion when he started to grow. So, that was what terrible two's were like. And three's and four's. He can be bossy, sometimes bordering on tyrannical, and feigns screaming fits in an effort to wrest the advantage. A friend's mother declared him the devil upon first setting eyes on him. A friend who had visited recollects how the boy came prancing into the family room holding his diaper with a cat-that-ate-the-canary look. The same friend looked at his picture once and likened it to a mugshot. The kid's countenance suggests that he knows something the rest of us do not.
When I once characterized him as a disagreeable little something or other, another friend remarked that she didn't know where he got it from. Fortunately, he has moderated his profanity. He once remarked, upon leaving Target with his mother, that it was "fucking hot out here." He once opened the back door of our house, stark naked, to apologize to me: "I sorry I called you a asshole, Dad," he screamed across the yard. In Lake Placid, he took particular pleasure in the dining room as he thrust his arm out an declared "dick face" or "ass wipe." He likes to call his brother "koala crap." But like I said, that has moderated. Although he did tell his day-care teacher, matter of factly, that "China eats dogs." I don't think you can argue with that.
On the other hand, he can be effusive with his affection. He possesses a vivid imagination and can keep himself occupied. I don't recall him getting into our bed during the night ever. He can catch a ball and throw a ball and hit a ball and kick a ball with unusual facility for someone his age. He's also a natural comedian with an endearing, though unintentional, inclination toward the occasional malapropism. Not so endearingly, he sometimes feigns choking during meals because he knows it pushes our buttons.
Aimee Mann has a song called "Little Tornado," and that's what I call this kid, fully realizing that a small tornado once rendered me unconscious in Montana.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Along Came a Son
My first son entered the world in 2001, less than a month after the planes hit the towers, an event that did nothing to quell the uncertainties already associated with having a child. Invariably that's what I think about when I see those smoking towers on TV, and the broadcasters never pass up an opportunity to replay that footage. I was about to have a kid and was working construction while in between corporate gigs, frustrated in my job search and unsure what parenthood would bring, against a backdrop of terrorism and war.
One question with which I wrestled before my son's conception was the rationale for having children. A school of thought holds that our wily DNA, concerned purely with its own survival, somehow compels us to procreate. There could be some merit to this argument. Lions and giraffes have babies, right? And they probably don't take exhaustive personal inventories beforehand. So there's something compelling them to sustain the gene pool. And if you've ever seen a video of lions fucking, I think it's doubtful that pleasure is their primary motivator. It looks awkward and fast and the female does some scary-looking biting and growling.
There's another school of thought that maintains that it's our duty to churn out productive little citizens and that a failure to do so would be equivalent to undermining the very fabric of our society. It's not only weird to be childless, especially if you're married, but immoral. The world, however, is replete with examples of human beings whose parents would have done well to ignore such reasoning. In other words, those fuckers should have used contraception.
So I questioned why I wanted to have children. Was I being selfish? I once spoke to a mother who said she had children solely for selfish reasons. While her candor was appreciated, her motives were less so. Not only did I not want to be selfish, but I had grave concerns about passing along some negative characteristics and reservations about the guilt I would suffer if I were to subject a child to even a fraction of the distress I had to endure. Depression can be frightening, and life-threatening, and I imagined the ramifications if my own child were to have similar experiences.
Imagining what that would be like didn't even reasonably approximate what I now know it would be like. Such imagination occurred in the abstract then, when I was childless, whereas now, given the extent to which my kids have hypnotized me, their suffering would be hardly bearable. But that recognition didn't come overnight. What came overnight was disruption, the likes of which my wife and I never imagined, and she bore that disruption more than I did. Over at least the first six months, and I think more, I wondered continuously what we had wrought. I initially abdicated the majority of the child-care responsibility, I think largely because I didn't know what to do with this...creature. I knew he had to eat, and he cried and needed bathing and changing. And he didn't sleep enough. He was a "he," but he hadn't yet graduated to human-being status in the sense with which I was familiar. He didn't take well to his formula. Each night when I got into bed, I lay there unable to sleep, muscles tensed, waiting for his coughing, with the regularity of Old Faithful, to begin. Night after night after night of just tension. And his mother was tired and trying to recover from childbirth itself.
Speaking of childbirth, I should have had an inkling from the get-go that this whole experience was something different. We arrived at the hospital at about 8 a.m. for induction on an unusually warm October day. So it was uncomfortable in the room to begin with, but the real discomfort for both of us wouldn't arrive until about 10 or so hours later. First there was the epidural, which seemed to do wonders for my wife but little to nothing for me. I was pretty fucking bored and could have used a pharmaceutical diversion myself, but I hung tough.
Eventually, they let the epidural's effect wane, because you apparently need to know when to push after those contractions get closer together. That's when it seemed to get uncomfortable. There were no profane tirades launched at me, but there did seem to be an air of surrender to the pain. This went on for about two hours, if I remember correctly, before the kid started to make his way down the chute. He appeared to be a reluctant participant in this process, as he sometimes appears now, eight years later, to be a reluctant participant in getting out the door to go somewhere, for example. Anyway, this kid was big, about nine pounds, with a disproportionately large head. Hence the episiotomy. I recommend this to anyone: stand by and watch that patch of flesh between at the bottom of your wife's vagina get cut open with scissors like Christmas wrapping paper. At this point, anyway, we're making some progress, with the kid having a wider tunnel through which to pass. Not that there wasn't some prodding. And I was tired, too, having to help hold my wife's legs open and stuff. Standing the whole time, too. Eventually, the kid squirts out, in an eruption of bodily fluids, leaving me awash in such a placenta soup that I should have known right there I would never be the same. The miracle of childbirth created a disturbing spectacle. But he had all his fingers and toes, and they cleaned him up and put him on the hot plate, and we got to take our little bundle of joy home a few days later.
Relatively speaking, that would be short-lived, since we were back in the hospital four moths later after I can't remember how many visits to the the doctor and emergency room for his coughing and apparent respiratory difficulty. At the hospital, he stayed in and oxygen tent, basically a piece of plastic covering a crib into which a pump delivers oxygen. We monitored the oxygen content of his blood and jumped up to check displays every time an untoward beep sounded. A restless four-month-old, however, is bound to dislodge some of the equipment attached to him. The doctors diagnosed bronchialitis, or the constriction of an already pencil-thin airway. His mother slept there, and I went home and tended the dogs and went to my new job and then back to the hospital, never shaking the helpless feeling. After three or four or five days, I had a telephone conversation with the doctor, who asked me if I felt comfortable taking my son home. I didn't, not completely, but I figured that wasn't going to go away and that we had to get out of there. So we did, and we had our nebulizer and albuterol and blew that medicine in his face a few times a day, usually when he was eating, because he would stay still for that.
At this point, I'm still wondering what we had done. Of all the thoughts coursing through my mind at the time, I'm most mortified and ashamed about thinking what it would be like if he didn't come home. At the same time, I was petrified that he wouldn't be able to, a germ of parental concern appearing that would subsequently make me wonder how I could have entertained such notions and what I would do now were I to find myself without my children. First-time parents, however, are in a quandary. Parental instinct doesn't kick in, at least in my experience, like it does for the aforementioned lions. Instead, childbirth delivers overwhelming responsibilities. Other people assured me that they also had experienced emotions in the aftermath of their first child's arrival similar to those with which I was grappling. I assumed, incorrectly, that some knowledge of how to handle a newborn came more readily to females. I try to manage the traces of guilt and shame that remain by attempting to be a parent whom my kids will think of fondly when they are of an age where they recall their childhoods.
I spend the time with them. I play ball. I don't dismiss them when they ask the first question...or the 101st, all seemingly within half an hour. I try to listen to the latest Harry Potter update and be enthusiastic about the most recent level unlocked on the Star Wars videogame. I try not to be upset about the back seat of my car resembling a porcine feed trough, the cereal grains seemingly having become so embedded that they have created a new fabric patterns, with multihued lollipop residue and bottom-of-the-soccer-spike mud for accents. I read to the kids. I try to encourage them while offering constructive criticism, especially when it comes to sports, and therein lies a great challenge. I want them to become what they want to become, in contrast to me, who didn't receive encouragement to pursue a path that actually held interest. But it can be exhausting. I try to remind myself that each day presents a new opportunity to become more patient and a better listener, and sometimes I fail. On those days when my emotional reading is at such a level that I can barely tolerate myself, I have to look for a deeper reservoir to satisfy them. Someday I suspect they'll go through a phase where they hate me, and I want to take advantage now of their desire to include me.
As much as anything, we fish. When I first started taking my older son fishing, he was still in diapers, and I didn't know if I was doing it for him or me. "What's the difference?" my therapist asked. The difference was that I thought I should be doing it for him, but my derivation of collateral benefit made me question my motives. In retrospect, I think I was (and do) do it for us both. Fortunately, he has taken to it like, well, a fish to water. The time we have spent fishing, the time we have spent in our boat has been some of the most rewarding. On my favorite Father's Day to date, my son and I stood in a lake and fished for hours.
Having a son gave me, eventually, a sense of purpose. I don't know if it was selfish. I don't know if subconsciously I knew that having a child would help to ensure my own survival because I wouldn't shirk my responsibility to him, I wouldn't abandon him, as my father had done to me. As I watch my son now, I see him transforming. In some ways, he's unrecognizable from the toddler I knew, and when I look at the pictures from years past, the ambivalence settles upon me. I long for the boy who lay on my chest, yet I find particular satisfaction in his development and his intellectual grasp, in teaching him and the resultant progress. Along with his progress comes the realization that my peers and I inexorably are aging, approaching if not already having surpassed the inflection point, at which we're closer to death than birth. At times, I merely stare at my children, mesmerized by their beauty and confounded by their presence, unsure of my fitness to be their steward when I have difficulty handling myself.
The children have shattered my notion of love. While I once thought I knew what love was, I realize now my conception often was more of an intellectual formulation and that I failed to account for infatuation. I didn't really know what love was before, and while I considered myself chivalrous enough to push a damsel out of the way of a steaming locomotive, for example, there is no comparison to the lengths to which I would be willing to go to protect my children.
When my son was about three years old, we went to a fair. As the Ferris wheel lifted us, I held on to him as if clinging to life itself. Around and around we went, our metal bucket piercing the darkening sky with each successive revolution, the people on the ground becoming less vivid and then fleetingly coming back into focus as we passed. We ascended above the treetops as the distant stars shone in relief against the darkened horizon. And peace, however fleeting, descended upon me. He kicked and screamed about having to get off the ride, and I felt the same.
One question with which I wrestled before my son's conception was the rationale for having children. A school of thought holds that our wily DNA, concerned purely with its own survival, somehow compels us to procreate. There could be some merit to this argument. Lions and giraffes have babies, right? And they probably don't take exhaustive personal inventories beforehand. So there's something compelling them to sustain the gene pool. And if you've ever seen a video of lions fucking, I think it's doubtful that pleasure is their primary motivator. It looks awkward and fast and the female does some scary-looking biting and growling.
There's another school of thought that maintains that it's our duty to churn out productive little citizens and that a failure to do so would be equivalent to undermining the very fabric of our society. It's not only weird to be childless, especially if you're married, but immoral. The world, however, is replete with examples of human beings whose parents would have done well to ignore such reasoning. In other words, those fuckers should have used contraception.
So I questioned why I wanted to have children. Was I being selfish? I once spoke to a mother who said she had children solely for selfish reasons. While her candor was appreciated, her motives were less so. Not only did I not want to be selfish, but I had grave concerns about passing along some negative characteristics and reservations about the guilt I would suffer if I were to subject a child to even a fraction of the distress I had to endure. Depression can be frightening, and life-threatening, and I imagined the ramifications if my own child were to have similar experiences.
Imagining what that would be like didn't even reasonably approximate what I now know it would be like. Such imagination occurred in the abstract then, when I was childless, whereas now, given the extent to which my kids have hypnotized me, their suffering would be hardly bearable. But that recognition didn't come overnight. What came overnight was disruption, the likes of which my wife and I never imagined, and she bore that disruption more than I did. Over at least the first six months, and I think more, I wondered continuously what we had wrought. I initially abdicated the majority of the child-care responsibility, I think largely because I didn't know what to do with this...creature. I knew he had to eat, and he cried and needed bathing and changing. And he didn't sleep enough. He was a "he," but he hadn't yet graduated to human-being status in the sense with which I was familiar. He didn't take well to his formula. Each night when I got into bed, I lay there unable to sleep, muscles tensed, waiting for his coughing, with the regularity of Old Faithful, to begin. Night after night after night of just tension. And his mother was tired and trying to recover from childbirth itself.
Speaking of childbirth, I should have had an inkling from the get-go that this whole experience was something different. We arrived at the hospital at about 8 a.m. for induction on an unusually warm October day. So it was uncomfortable in the room to begin with, but the real discomfort for both of us wouldn't arrive until about 10 or so hours later. First there was the epidural, which seemed to do wonders for my wife but little to nothing for me. I was pretty fucking bored and could have used a pharmaceutical diversion myself, but I hung tough.
Eventually, they let the epidural's effect wane, because you apparently need to know when to push after those contractions get closer together. That's when it seemed to get uncomfortable. There were no profane tirades launched at me, but there did seem to be an air of surrender to the pain. This went on for about two hours, if I remember correctly, before the kid started to make his way down the chute. He appeared to be a reluctant participant in this process, as he sometimes appears now, eight years later, to be a reluctant participant in getting out the door to go somewhere, for example. Anyway, this kid was big, about nine pounds, with a disproportionately large head. Hence the episiotomy. I recommend this to anyone: stand by and watch that patch of flesh between at the bottom of your wife's vagina get cut open with scissors like Christmas wrapping paper. At this point, anyway, we're making some progress, with the kid having a wider tunnel through which to pass. Not that there wasn't some prodding. And I was tired, too, having to help hold my wife's legs open and stuff. Standing the whole time, too. Eventually, the kid squirts out, in an eruption of bodily fluids, leaving me awash in such a placenta soup that I should have known right there I would never be the same. The miracle of childbirth created a disturbing spectacle. But he had all his fingers and toes, and they cleaned him up and put him on the hot plate, and we got to take our little bundle of joy home a few days later.
Relatively speaking, that would be short-lived, since we were back in the hospital four moths later after I can't remember how many visits to the the doctor and emergency room for his coughing and apparent respiratory difficulty. At the hospital, he stayed in and oxygen tent, basically a piece of plastic covering a crib into which a pump delivers oxygen. We monitored the oxygen content of his blood and jumped up to check displays every time an untoward beep sounded. A restless four-month-old, however, is bound to dislodge some of the equipment attached to him. The doctors diagnosed bronchialitis, or the constriction of an already pencil-thin airway. His mother slept there, and I went home and tended the dogs and went to my new job and then back to the hospital, never shaking the helpless feeling. After three or four or five days, I had a telephone conversation with the doctor, who asked me if I felt comfortable taking my son home. I didn't, not completely, but I figured that wasn't going to go away and that we had to get out of there. So we did, and we had our nebulizer and albuterol and blew that medicine in his face a few times a day, usually when he was eating, because he would stay still for that.
At this point, I'm still wondering what we had done. Of all the thoughts coursing through my mind at the time, I'm most mortified and ashamed about thinking what it would be like if he didn't come home. At the same time, I was petrified that he wouldn't be able to, a germ of parental concern appearing that would subsequently make me wonder how I could have entertained such notions and what I would do now were I to find myself without my children. First-time parents, however, are in a quandary. Parental instinct doesn't kick in, at least in my experience, like it does for the aforementioned lions. Instead, childbirth delivers overwhelming responsibilities. Other people assured me that they also had experienced emotions in the aftermath of their first child's arrival similar to those with which I was grappling. I assumed, incorrectly, that some knowledge of how to handle a newborn came more readily to females. I try to manage the traces of guilt and shame that remain by attempting to be a parent whom my kids will think of fondly when they are of an age where they recall their childhoods.
I spend the time with them. I play ball. I don't dismiss them when they ask the first question...or the 101st, all seemingly within half an hour. I try to listen to the latest Harry Potter update and be enthusiastic about the most recent level unlocked on the Star Wars videogame. I try not to be upset about the back seat of my car resembling a porcine feed trough, the cereal grains seemingly having become so embedded that they have created a new fabric patterns, with multihued lollipop residue and bottom-of-the-soccer-spike mud for accents. I read to the kids. I try to encourage them while offering constructive criticism, especially when it comes to sports, and therein lies a great challenge. I want them to become what they want to become, in contrast to me, who didn't receive encouragement to pursue a path that actually held interest. But it can be exhausting. I try to remind myself that each day presents a new opportunity to become more patient and a better listener, and sometimes I fail. On those days when my emotional reading is at such a level that I can barely tolerate myself, I have to look for a deeper reservoir to satisfy them. Someday I suspect they'll go through a phase where they hate me, and I want to take advantage now of their desire to include me.
As much as anything, we fish. When I first started taking my older son fishing, he was still in diapers, and I didn't know if I was doing it for him or me. "What's the difference?" my therapist asked. The difference was that I thought I should be doing it for him, but my derivation of collateral benefit made me question my motives. In retrospect, I think I was (and do) do it for us both. Fortunately, he has taken to it like, well, a fish to water. The time we have spent fishing, the time we have spent in our boat has been some of the most rewarding. On my favorite Father's Day to date, my son and I stood in a lake and fished for hours.
Having a son gave me, eventually, a sense of purpose. I don't know if it was selfish. I don't know if subconsciously I knew that having a child would help to ensure my own survival because I wouldn't shirk my responsibility to him, I wouldn't abandon him, as my father had done to me. As I watch my son now, I see him transforming. In some ways, he's unrecognizable from the toddler I knew, and when I look at the pictures from years past, the ambivalence settles upon me. I long for the boy who lay on my chest, yet I find particular satisfaction in his development and his intellectual grasp, in teaching him and the resultant progress. Along with his progress comes the realization that my peers and I inexorably are aging, approaching if not already having surpassed the inflection point, at which we're closer to death than birth. At times, I merely stare at my children, mesmerized by their beauty and confounded by their presence, unsure of my fitness to be their steward when I have difficulty handling myself.
The children have shattered my notion of love. While I once thought I knew what love was, I realize now my conception often was more of an intellectual formulation and that I failed to account for infatuation. I didn't really know what love was before, and while I considered myself chivalrous enough to push a damsel out of the way of a steaming locomotive, for example, there is no comparison to the lengths to which I would be willing to go to protect my children.
When my son was about three years old, we went to a fair. As the Ferris wheel lifted us, I held on to him as if clinging to life itself. Around and around we went, our metal bucket piercing the darkening sky with each successive revolution, the people on the ground becoming less vivid and then fleetingly coming back into focus as we passed. We ascended above the treetops as the distant stars shone in relief against the darkened horizon. And peace, however fleeting, descended upon me. He kicked and screamed about having to get off the ride, and I felt the same.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Father
My father's absence, perhaps, has affected me as acutely as the presence of some other fathers affects their children. Not in a good way.
Through the alcohol-burned hole he left in his wake crawled an assortment of characters who might not otherwise have gotten such passage. They were opportunists of a predatory nature, no doubt trying to satisfy some cravings of their own.
They are at fault, but it was at least partially my father's absence that made me vulnerable to such approaches. The passive-aggressive priest, the overly tactile teacher. I was receptive because, as I can see in retrospect, I was searching for a father figure. A cliche but nevertheless true. And they observed few boundaries.
Such vulnerability brings home the point that we live in a world in which the predators will prey and has shaped my perceptions. So, father leaves, teacher/priest step in and interaction indelibly influences kid's perception of human nature. In other words, the world is full of fuck-wads trying to satiate whatever it is that nourishes them.
Now, maybe they're just too stupid or lack the introspection necessary to recognize that what they were doing was inappropriate. When priest ignored me or took my friends on outings from which I was excluded, that hurt. And I didn't know why he was doing it. Was it because I quit the fucking altar boys? Sorry. Adults shouldn't be trying to satisfy some kind of emotional deficiency through relationships with children not their own. And no adult should be trying to mold a child into someone for their benefit, as opposed to the child's, except for rearing a productive member of society. Priest wanted to be a father, as evidenced by his subsequent desistance from the priesthood. He got married, sired progeny and then divorced. Unless he had an epiphany, surely he has fucked up his biological children.
Teacher should not be taking grammar-school kids to movies and on trips to Washington and Gettysburg. Those were educational, in ways some people might not suspect. These men sought validation from children, but I think the impact was less corrosive on the children who had fathers, probably because the perpetrators knew the fathers wouldn't tolerate certain behavior. We're supposed to believe that teachers and priests have our best interests at heart. I think that myth has been discredited.
Beyond them, there were my mother's boyfriends. Had she still been married, she may not have had boyfriends or, presumably, wouldn't have brought them around. Tony is the first one I remember. He hit me more than once. One time was on the butt, I think, but another time, while I was in the back seat of the car (not wearing a seat belt and leaning over the bench seat), he hit me in the face and caught me in the eye. I wish I could hit him now, but he's old or dead, so I suspect it wouldn't be especially gratifying .
I might be reinventing history with the chronological order, but I think Joe was next. And I pale in comparison to others when it comes to historical reinvention. Joe was a nice enough guy. Union man. Auto union. Helped me out when I had to prepare for a school debate in which I would be advocating for Jimmy Carter to be elected. Joe's proclamation that Mr. Carter was "for labor" is the one nugget I remember from that conversation. He also showed me how to test the life left in an automotive battery.
Russ was in there somewhere. Nice guy, also. Played the piano. Sent Christmas cards even when he didn't come around anymore. Then there was Dave. A steelworker. Told me if I went to the exclusive high school to which I was accepted, I'd be able to "write my own ticket." Not quite true. He told my mother they were going to get married, and she said they weren't. They didn't.
I liked George. Auto-insurance guy. We shared fishing as a common interest. He bought me a fishing book that I still have. He wrote a nice note inside. Once we went fishing down the shore, and we were driving on the beach, and my mother asked him why insurance was so expensive. "Because there are 26,000 niggers riding around without insurance," was his reply, meaning that those who paid the car insurance essentially subsidized those who didn't. At least I think that's what he meant.
She went out with Dr. Fasullo (don't know if I'm spelling that right) a few times. He pursued her, but she demurred. Probably had money--he was a medical doctor. Wasn't horrid-looking. Spoke with what I guess was an Italian accent. He was widowed or divorced. I don't know if this is apocryphal, but he apparently was driving home one night and saw the flashing lights from a police car or ambulance stopped at the scene of an accident. He stopped and went over to help out, and the victim was his own son, who had been struck by a car while riding his bicycle. The kid was 13, I think, and he either died on the spot or later as a result of his injuries. Probably nothing worse than that.
Soc was last, as far as I know. He used to own a small plane to which he still had access, and he and I flew. He told me how to bank the plane out over the ocean, and I stepped on the left petal as if it were a clutch, trying to depress it abruptly. If you ever find yourself trying to turn a plane around, don't do that. He righted the ship, so to speak, or we would have had to use that plane as a ship when we landed in the fucking ocean. My mother told me Soc's son moved him down to Florida last year, took his money, put him in a room and didn't allow him to have any contact with the outside world. Then Soc died, she said. Don't know if any of it is true.
Except for Tony, I think, they all had blue balls unless they were having sex with someone else. My mother told me she would end it with Soc if he tried to "put the moves" on her.
This rotating cast of characters didn't exactly foster stability or quell my insecurity. Father out, boyfriends in.
I got to know these guys relatively superficially. I remember being disappointed having nobody with whom to attend some kind of school-related father-son activity. He took me to a movie, I think, to compensate. It was one of the few things we ever did together. He told me in the car that he would always be my father, no matter what happened. I was 6 then, and it may have been the last time I saw him. He died when I was 12.
My father's absence also caused some role confusion; my mother doing what a father should have been; my oldest brother assuming some of those responsibilities and then relinquishing them, leaving me to wonder what I had done to cause his pullback; eventually my workload around the home mirrored that of a husband. These experiences helped build the foundation upon which my abandonment fears rested.
Another aspect of the turn of events is that I didn't really know my father. What I do know about him has gone through other people's filters. Here is what seems indisputable: He was an alcoholic who drank himself to death at age 49; he left his wife and five children. These actions raise some questions. How could he have skipped out on the kids? Perhaps it was the alcoholism that made him relinquish all responsibility for us. I've had doctors tell me that alcoholism is a disease, and here's how the dictionary defines disease: a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment.
This makes me wonder what the incorrectly functioning parts are that incubate alcoholism. I agree that there's a genetic predisposition to drink more (and more) after having taken the first drink. But is there a malfunction that makes a person take that first drink? Maybe I'm missing the point; perhaps alcoholism is a latent disease that you manage by abstaining.
So, for the sake of argument, I'll say it's a disease, and my father had it, and so do at least some of his kids. Can I then fault him for abandoning his children, considering he had a disease? There seem to be few other diseases that prompt that kind of behavior. Cancer is a disease, the manifestation of which appears to be vastly different from alcoholism. But my father's disease was particularly severe, so much so that he's dead as a result. My mother probably refused to use birth control, because of the Catholic thing, and he was probably like, "What the fuck? Five kids? Get me a drink."
Anyway, a pivotal difference between alcohol and, say, cancer is that cancer patients appear to have less control over their convalescence. With alcohol, if you stop drinking, you can reverse the effects of the disease unless you've gone so far overboard that it's too late. The alcoholism helps to explain his departure but doesn't excuse it. Did he not love his kids? Was the alcoholism too overwhelming? I can't fathom leaving your kids no matter what other issues there are. But everybody is different, and I don't have the answers. I won't get them, since he's gone. Maybe if he had been able to provide some of the answers personally, I wouldn't have found myself fruitlessly groping. I wouldn't have been as vulnerable. My mother discouraged me from going to his funeral, but she later denied having done so. When I was able, I tracked down his grave. Standing there among the markers, and his being modest, chilled by the wind, was part of the process through which I was seeking answers,. They didn't come, and the confusion didn't surrender its grip.
Through the alcohol-burned hole he left in his wake crawled an assortment of characters who might not otherwise have gotten such passage. They were opportunists of a predatory nature, no doubt trying to satisfy some cravings of their own.
They are at fault, but it was at least partially my father's absence that made me vulnerable to such approaches. The passive-aggressive priest, the overly tactile teacher. I was receptive because, as I can see in retrospect, I was searching for a father figure. A cliche but nevertheless true. And they observed few boundaries.
Such vulnerability brings home the point that we live in a world in which the predators will prey and has shaped my perceptions. So, father leaves, teacher/priest step in and interaction indelibly influences kid's perception of human nature. In other words, the world is full of fuck-wads trying to satiate whatever it is that nourishes them.
Now, maybe they're just too stupid or lack the introspection necessary to recognize that what they were doing was inappropriate. When priest ignored me or took my friends on outings from which I was excluded, that hurt. And I didn't know why he was doing it. Was it because I quit the fucking altar boys? Sorry. Adults shouldn't be trying to satisfy some kind of emotional deficiency through relationships with children not their own. And no adult should be trying to mold a child into someone for their benefit, as opposed to the child's, except for rearing a productive member of society. Priest wanted to be a father, as evidenced by his subsequent desistance from the priesthood. He got married, sired progeny and then divorced. Unless he had an epiphany, surely he has fucked up his biological children.
Teacher should not be taking grammar-school kids to movies and on trips to Washington and Gettysburg. Those were educational, in ways some people might not suspect. These men sought validation from children, but I think the impact was less corrosive on the children who had fathers, probably because the perpetrators knew the fathers wouldn't tolerate certain behavior. We're supposed to believe that teachers and priests have our best interests at heart. I think that myth has been discredited.
Beyond them, there were my mother's boyfriends. Had she still been married, she may not have had boyfriends or, presumably, wouldn't have brought them around. Tony is the first one I remember. He hit me more than once. One time was on the butt, I think, but another time, while I was in the back seat of the car (not wearing a seat belt and leaning over the bench seat), he hit me in the face and caught me in the eye. I wish I could hit him now, but he's old or dead, so I suspect it wouldn't be especially gratifying .
I might be reinventing history with the chronological order, but I think Joe was next. And I pale in comparison to others when it comes to historical reinvention. Joe was a nice enough guy. Union man. Auto union. Helped me out when I had to prepare for a school debate in which I would be advocating for Jimmy Carter to be elected. Joe's proclamation that Mr. Carter was "for labor" is the one nugget I remember from that conversation. He also showed me how to test the life left in an automotive battery.
Russ was in there somewhere. Nice guy, also. Played the piano. Sent Christmas cards even when he didn't come around anymore. Then there was Dave. A steelworker. Told me if I went to the exclusive high school to which I was accepted, I'd be able to "write my own ticket." Not quite true. He told my mother they were going to get married, and she said they weren't. They didn't.
I liked George. Auto-insurance guy. We shared fishing as a common interest. He bought me a fishing book that I still have. He wrote a nice note inside. Once we went fishing down the shore, and we were driving on the beach, and my mother asked him why insurance was so expensive. "Because there are 26,000 niggers riding around without insurance," was his reply, meaning that those who paid the car insurance essentially subsidized those who didn't. At least I think that's what he meant.
She went out with Dr. Fasullo (don't know if I'm spelling that right) a few times. He pursued her, but she demurred. Probably had money--he was a medical doctor. Wasn't horrid-looking. Spoke with what I guess was an Italian accent. He was widowed or divorced. I don't know if this is apocryphal, but he apparently was driving home one night and saw the flashing lights from a police car or ambulance stopped at the scene of an accident. He stopped and went over to help out, and the victim was his own son, who had been struck by a car while riding his bicycle. The kid was 13, I think, and he either died on the spot or later as a result of his injuries. Probably nothing worse than that.
Soc was last, as far as I know. He used to own a small plane to which he still had access, and he and I flew. He told me how to bank the plane out over the ocean, and I stepped on the left petal as if it were a clutch, trying to depress it abruptly. If you ever find yourself trying to turn a plane around, don't do that. He righted the ship, so to speak, or we would have had to use that plane as a ship when we landed in the fucking ocean. My mother told me Soc's son moved him down to Florida last year, took his money, put him in a room and didn't allow him to have any contact with the outside world. Then Soc died, she said. Don't know if any of it is true.
Except for Tony, I think, they all had blue balls unless they were having sex with someone else. My mother told me she would end it with Soc if he tried to "put the moves" on her.
This rotating cast of characters didn't exactly foster stability or quell my insecurity. Father out, boyfriends in.
I got to know these guys relatively superficially. I remember being disappointed having nobody with whom to attend some kind of school-related father-son activity. He took me to a movie, I think, to compensate. It was one of the few things we ever did together. He told me in the car that he would always be my father, no matter what happened. I was 6 then, and it may have been the last time I saw him. He died when I was 12.
My father's absence also caused some role confusion; my mother doing what a father should have been; my oldest brother assuming some of those responsibilities and then relinquishing them, leaving me to wonder what I had done to cause his pullback; eventually my workload around the home mirrored that of a husband. These experiences helped build the foundation upon which my abandonment fears rested.
Another aspect of the turn of events is that I didn't really know my father. What I do know about him has gone through other people's filters. Here is what seems indisputable: He was an alcoholic who drank himself to death at age 49; he left his wife and five children. These actions raise some questions. How could he have skipped out on the kids? Perhaps it was the alcoholism that made him relinquish all responsibility for us. I've had doctors tell me that alcoholism is a disease, and here's how the dictionary defines disease: a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment.
This makes me wonder what the incorrectly functioning parts are that incubate alcoholism. I agree that there's a genetic predisposition to drink more (and more) after having taken the first drink. But is there a malfunction that makes a person take that first drink? Maybe I'm missing the point; perhaps alcoholism is a latent disease that you manage by abstaining.
So, for the sake of argument, I'll say it's a disease, and my father had it, and so do at least some of his kids. Can I then fault him for abandoning his children, considering he had a disease? There seem to be few other diseases that prompt that kind of behavior. Cancer is a disease, the manifestation of which appears to be vastly different from alcoholism. But my father's disease was particularly severe, so much so that he's dead as a result. My mother probably refused to use birth control, because of the Catholic thing, and he was probably like, "What the fuck? Five kids? Get me a drink."
Anyway, a pivotal difference between alcohol and, say, cancer is that cancer patients appear to have less control over their convalescence. With alcohol, if you stop drinking, you can reverse the effects of the disease unless you've gone so far overboard that it's too late. The alcoholism helps to explain his departure but doesn't excuse it. Did he not love his kids? Was the alcoholism too overwhelming? I can't fathom leaving your kids no matter what other issues there are. But everybody is different, and I don't have the answers. I won't get them, since he's gone. Maybe if he had been able to provide some of the answers personally, I wouldn't have found myself fruitlessly groping. I wouldn't have been as vulnerable. My mother discouraged me from going to his funeral, but she later denied having done so. When I was able, I tracked down his grave. Standing there among the markers, and his being modest, chilled by the wind, was part of the process through which I was seeking answers,. They didn't come, and the confusion didn't surrender its grip.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Night at the Nursing Home
Scene: the nursing home into which I walked two nights ago. Three people seated in the hallway in wheelchairs, Claire (my mother), Marge and unknown man.
Claire: Did you talk to Michael?
Me: My brother?
Claire: Yeah.
Me: No.
Claire: You didn't? He was just here. I told him to get me out of here. He was talking to someone right over there and just looked over his shoulder and smiled and left (she gives a dismissive shrug).
Me: Hmm (not mentioning that he works at night).
Claire: You have a coat for me in your car.
Me: No.
Claire: You don't? I just want to inquire about my clothes.
Me: They're probably in your room, at the end of the hall. I'm sure Patty (my sister) brought them here from St. Lawrence (the rehab facility).
Claire: I don't know if that room is open.
Me: Where'd you get the clothes you have on?
Claire: I wore them from home. Yesterday.
Marge: You don't have a coat. That's the first thing I look at before I leave the house. If you're going out tonight, you need a coat.
Claire: It's an old sweatshirt.
Marge: I don't have anywhere to go tonight.
Claire: You could go to jail.
Marge: I don't know about that. My brother used to be in charge of the police. In Trenton. Trenton, New Jersey. You know the circle?
Claire: White Horse (a traffic circle, not in Trenton)?
Marge: Yeah. I used to live by there. My daughter don't live there anymore. She's married and lives with the husband. That's what ladies do. At least the ladies I know.
(Claire looks sideways at me and laughs, as if she and I are the ones in on the joke and everything she has said so far has made perfect sense. If I recall correctly, it's like Danny DeVito laughing at his fellow institutionalized patients in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Claire: We were talking about cats, and a big one walked right through here and went right up there.
Me: Right there (in the hallway by the nurses' station)?
Claire: Yeah. I think I'm the only one who saw it.
(Elderly man sucks his upper lip into his mouth again, making a Rice Krispies sort of sound.)
Nurse to elderly man: You want to go to bed?
Elderly man: Uh-huh (it's 7:25. Someone wheels him down the hall, and I reposition myself away from the break-room door, next to Marge, so as not to be in the nurses' way).
Marge: I'm trying to see in there (bathroom door behind me). You've been standing in front of me for fifteen minutes.
Me: I'm not in front of you. I'm on the side of you.
Marge: Yeah, I was over there.
Claire: A girl walked out of there yesterday (the bathroom), took her jeans off, rolled them up and threw them against the wall.
Marge: Right there?
Claire: Right between the two doors.
Marge: You might have seen that. I didn't.
Claire (to me): Is my suitcase in your car?
Me: No.
Claire: No? I thought Patty said it was.
Me: I'm sure Patty put it in your room. I brought it up to St. Lawrence.
Claire: So what'd Michael have to say?
Me: I didn't talk to him.
Claire: You didn't? He was just here. Where'd you park.
Me: In the parking lot.
Claire: Yeah? Geez....
Marge: If you're gonna stay, you need somebody to call because you don't know the people. That's my problem. I don't know the people. I used to. Until I turned 80. I know the dogs (she barks twice, and Claire gives me the sideways-laughing look again. Nurse calls housekeeping to clean up spilled milk.).
Janitor: You have a milk spill?
Claire: There was a big blob of it right there (makes a circle about the size of a baseball with her fingers).
Janitor: Where is it?
Nurse: In there (the break room).
Claire: No, it wasn't there, it was in the chapel.
Me: Ma, I'm going.
Claire: Let's go. (She starts to get up out of the wheelchair.)
Me: No, you're staying. See ya later.
Claire: Did you talk to Michael?
Me: My brother?
Claire: Yeah.
Me: No.
Claire: You didn't? He was just here. I told him to get me out of here. He was talking to someone right over there and just looked over his shoulder and smiled and left (she gives a dismissive shrug).
Me: Hmm (not mentioning that he works at night).
Claire: You have a coat for me in your car.
Me: No.
Claire: You don't? I just want to inquire about my clothes.
Me: They're probably in your room, at the end of the hall. I'm sure Patty (my sister) brought them here from St. Lawrence (the rehab facility).
Claire: I don't know if that room is open.
Me: Where'd you get the clothes you have on?
Claire: I wore them from home. Yesterday.
Marge: You don't have a coat. That's the first thing I look at before I leave the house. If you're going out tonight, you need a coat.
Claire: It's an old sweatshirt.
Marge: I don't have anywhere to go tonight.
Claire: You could go to jail.
Marge: I don't know about that. My brother used to be in charge of the police. In Trenton. Trenton, New Jersey. You know the circle?
Claire: White Horse (a traffic circle, not in Trenton)?
Marge: Yeah. I used to live by there. My daughter don't live there anymore. She's married and lives with the husband. That's what ladies do. At least the ladies I know.
(Claire looks sideways at me and laughs, as if she and I are the ones in on the joke and everything she has said so far has made perfect sense. If I recall correctly, it's like Danny DeVito laughing at his fellow institutionalized patients in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Claire: We were talking about cats, and a big one walked right through here and went right up there.
Me: Right there (in the hallway by the nurses' station)?
Claire: Yeah. I think I'm the only one who saw it.
(Elderly man sucks his upper lip into his mouth again, making a Rice Krispies sort of sound.)
Nurse to elderly man: You want to go to bed?
Elderly man: Uh-huh (it's 7:25. Someone wheels him down the hall, and I reposition myself away from the break-room door, next to Marge, so as not to be in the nurses' way).
Marge: I'm trying to see in there (bathroom door behind me). You've been standing in front of me for fifteen minutes.
Me: I'm not in front of you. I'm on the side of you.
Marge: Yeah, I was over there.
Claire: A girl walked out of there yesterday (the bathroom), took her jeans off, rolled them up and threw them against the wall.
Marge: Right there?
Claire: Right between the two doors.
Marge: You might have seen that. I didn't.
Claire (to me): Is my suitcase in your car?
Me: No.
Claire: No? I thought Patty said it was.
Me: I'm sure Patty put it in your room. I brought it up to St. Lawrence.
Claire: So what'd Michael have to say?
Me: I didn't talk to him.
Claire: You didn't? He was just here. Where'd you park.
Me: In the parking lot.
Claire: Yeah? Geez....
Marge: If you're gonna stay, you need somebody to call because you don't know the people. That's my problem. I don't know the people. I used to. Until I turned 80. I know the dogs (she barks twice, and Claire gives me the sideways-laughing look again. Nurse calls housekeeping to clean up spilled milk.).
Janitor: You have a milk spill?
Claire: There was a big blob of it right there (makes a circle about the size of a baseball with her fingers).
Janitor: Where is it?
Nurse: In there (the break room).
Claire: No, it wasn't there, it was in the chapel.
Me: Ma, I'm going.
Claire: Let's go. (She starts to get up out of the wheelchair.)
Me: No, you're staying. See ya later.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Mother
My mother had a stroke about three weeks ago, and the turn of events has driven home the notion that we come full circle, with the role reversal rendering kids as caregivers and the infirm parent regressing into the lack of self-sufficiency that is one of the hallmarks of childhood.
Along with this descent into dependency comes the inevitability of emotions surfacing that I had segregated and mostly controlled for much of my adult life. My first reaction was decidedly ambivalent but weighted toward pity. To see someone who was previously a robust 81 years old in such decrepit condition elicited that pity. Tempering the pity has been a long-held survival mechanism that I installed to protect myself from my mother's manipulations.
The initial physical toll on her has receded somewhat, but cognitive impairment has remained. When I sit in the rehabilitation facility and watch her attempt to sort out her thoughts, it's disturbingly similar to watching a child attempt to grasp complexities. I've never felt understood by my mother or that she ever considered my feelings to be as remotely as important as her own, but now she literally doesn't understand me. When I walked in her room a few days ago, she asked me if she heard me discussing Gus a few hours earlier. No, I hadn't been there a few hours earlier, let alone discussing my late Labrador.
She has to relearn how to eat, and some of her visitors are inclined to feed her to expedite matters. I can't bear interaction of that nature with her. In feeding a child, you're providing nourishment for someone who has yet to arrive at his full potential; feeding my mother is the equivalent of sustaining a life that is far down the other side of the mountain, but also a life that long ago surrendered its innocence and involved exacting a particular toll from me.
This is the distillation of a life. The innocence of children gives them extraordinary license. The machinations of adults do not.
When I consider her self-serving undertakings, especially as viewed through the prism of the parent I have become, I try to control the flood of emotions. First, I suppress the initial burst of anger, hurt and shame, and allow my rational self an opportunity to reason. She behaved like she did because that's what she knew. She turned around and repeated the cycle instilled in her by her own upbringing. She was just incapable, perhaps, of sorting through her experiences and discarding those that were detrimental. I don't think she had the capacity to acknowledge that there was anything amiss about her upbringing. Her life was idyllic, and her parents were deities. Somewhere along the line, she shut out the realities of fallibility. Her preoccupation with her parents was obsessive, and she provided her own father with end-of-life care that included enemas. So, she was a victim of her own upbringing.
Sometimes the rational self gives way to the angry self. How could she have done this to her own child? How could she have saddled me with guilt that has taken a lifetime over which to gain a measure of control? Why did she never reach a point where her kids' emotional needs were more important than her own? She put an inexcusable amount of pressure on an 8-year-old when she told me that she would kill herself if I turned out like my brothers, for I believed her. She charged me with being responsible for her survival. She denied me a childhood, because she wanted me to be the husband she lacked, without the physical intimacy.
Then there's the undeniable familial bond tugging me in the other direction. This is my mother. She read to me before school when I was a child. She sang to me. I used to call down the hallway, telling her how much I loved her when she put me to bed. More than all the stars. She bought me a dog when I graduated from eighth grade.
But that dog may have been to assuage her own guilt. To make up for the dog she took from me and dropped off in a neighborhood when I was younger than that. That was her solution to my not caring for the dog in the manner she would have preferred. Denying issues, pushing them aside, served her well.
She used to go out at night or on vacation and leave me in the care of my siblings, just kids themselves with too much responsibility thrust upon them. I recall, as a boy of about 9, phoning her preferred social establishment at 1 a.m. trying to track her down. I was in tears, terrified. I was in fear of losing my one remaining parent, and the pit in my stomach threatened to swallow me. I cried when she went on vacation, again out of fear that she wouldn't return, as she sometimes threatened. I hadn't yet gotten to the point at which I didn't want her to return.
She wanted me to go to a particular high school, and when I balked, she shunned me. Same thing with college. She made it appear as if my worth was a direct result of the school with which I was associated. But her sense of worth was at issue. She was unapproachable when I wanted to discuss my reservations.
She was a child of the Depression and seemed to take pride in retaining the habits instilled decades earlier. Money was an overriding factor. I attended school with holes in my shoes. I bore the ridicule of coaches for having worn-down spikes. We could have afforded better, if she hadn't been hell-bent on clinging to that house like a drowning person to a life preserver. Study the practical disciplines. Go after the job with the benefits. Never did she encourage me to follow my heart.
She turned her head the other way. I needed shelter from the violence and drugs, but she allowed my exposure to them. So I smoked the pot and drank the booze. Why wouldn't a sixth-grader? I was collateral damage in her war to satisfy her own needs.
She has enabled my 50-year-old, alcoholic brother to continue that way of life, without having to hold down a job or otherwise pursue assistance. That has mattered more to her than trying to improve relations with her other three sons. As long as she was satisfied. She would still put me in situations that would be damaging if I allowed. That's a source of enormous frustration, that my mother still doesn't care enough, or isn't capable enough, not to put me at risk.
Her mortality, like my own, always seemed so distant, often too distant. I knew intellectually that she was elderly, but there appeared to be little difference from what I had always known. I tried to explain some of this to her while her faculties were more intact, but I failed to break through. She's gone now, and I don't know if she's coming back, but I accepted years ago that an epiphany would never be forthcoming. Maybe it all boils down to there having been too much risk for her to put anyone else's interests above her own, even her children's.
Along with this descent into dependency comes the inevitability of emotions surfacing that I had segregated and mostly controlled for much of my adult life. My first reaction was decidedly ambivalent but weighted toward pity. To see someone who was previously a robust 81 years old in such decrepit condition elicited that pity. Tempering the pity has been a long-held survival mechanism that I installed to protect myself from my mother's manipulations.
The initial physical toll on her has receded somewhat, but cognitive impairment has remained. When I sit in the rehabilitation facility and watch her attempt to sort out her thoughts, it's disturbingly similar to watching a child attempt to grasp complexities. I've never felt understood by my mother or that she ever considered my feelings to be as remotely as important as her own, but now she literally doesn't understand me. When I walked in her room a few days ago, she asked me if she heard me discussing Gus a few hours earlier. No, I hadn't been there a few hours earlier, let alone discussing my late Labrador.
She has to relearn how to eat, and some of her visitors are inclined to feed her to expedite matters. I can't bear interaction of that nature with her. In feeding a child, you're providing nourishment for someone who has yet to arrive at his full potential; feeding my mother is the equivalent of sustaining a life that is far down the other side of the mountain, but also a life that long ago surrendered its innocence and involved exacting a particular toll from me.
This is the distillation of a life. The innocence of children gives them extraordinary license. The machinations of adults do not.
When I consider her self-serving undertakings, especially as viewed through the prism of the parent I have become, I try to control the flood of emotions. First, I suppress the initial burst of anger, hurt and shame, and allow my rational self an opportunity to reason. She behaved like she did because that's what she knew. She turned around and repeated the cycle instilled in her by her own upbringing. She was just incapable, perhaps, of sorting through her experiences and discarding those that were detrimental. I don't think she had the capacity to acknowledge that there was anything amiss about her upbringing. Her life was idyllic, and her parents were deities. Somewhere along the line, she shut out the realities of fallibility. Her preoccupation with her parents was obsessive, and she provided her own father with end-of-life care that included enemas. So, she was a victim of her own upbringing.
Sometimes the rational self gives way to the angry self. How could she have done this to her own child? How could she have saddled me with guilt that has taken a lifetime over which to gain a measure of control? Why did she never reach a point where her kids' emotional needs were more important than her own? She put an inexcusable amount of pressure on an 8-year-old when she told me that she would kill herself if I turned out like my brothers, for I believed her. She charged me with being responsible for her survival. She denied me a childhood, because she wanted me to be the husband she lacked, without the physical intimacy.
Then there's the undeniable familial bond tugging me in the other direction. This is my mother. She read to me before school when I was a child. She sang to me. I used to call down the hallway, telling her how much I loved her when she put me to bed. More than all the stars. She bought me a dog when I graduated from eighth grade.
But that dog may have been to assuage her own guilt. To make up for the dog she took from me and dropped off in a neighborhood when I was younger than that. That was her solution to my not caring for the dog in the manner she would have preferred. Denying issues, pushing them aside, served her well.
She used to go out at night or on vacation and leave me in the care of my siblings, just kids themselves with too much responsibility thrust upon them. I recall, as a boy of about 9, phoning her preferred social establishment at 1 a.m. trying to track her down. I was in tears, terrified. I was in fear of losing my one remaining parent, and the pit in my stomach threatened to swallow me. I cried when she went on vacation, again out of fear that she wouldn't return, as she sometimes threatened. I hadn't yet gotten to the point at which I didn't want her to return.
She wanted me to go to a particular high school, and when I balked, she shunned me. Same thing with college. She made it appear as if my worth was a direct result of the school with which I was associated. But her sense of worth was at issue. She was unapproachable when I wanted to discuss my reservations.
She was a child of the Depression and seemed to take pride in retaining the habits instilled decades earlier. Money was an overriding factor. I attended school with holes in my shoes. I bore the ridicule of coaches for having worn-down spikes. We could have afforded better, if she hadn't been hell-bent on clinging to that house like a drowning person to a life preserver. Study the practical disciplines. Go after the job with the benefits. Never did she encourage me to follow my heart.
She turned her head the other way. I needed shelter from the violence and drugs, but she allowed my exposure to them. So I smoked the pot and drank the booze. Why wouldn't a sixth-grader? I was collateral damage in her war to satisfy her own needs.
She has enabled my 50-year-old, alcoholic brother to continue that way of life, without having to hold down a job or otherwise pursue assistance. That has mattered more to her than trying to improve relations with her other three sons. As long as she was satisfied. She would still put me in situations that would be damaging if I allowed. That's a source of enormous frustration, that my mother still doesn't care enough, or isn't capable enough, not to put me at risk.
Her mortality, like my own, always seemed so distant, often too distant. I knew intellectually that she was elderly, but there appeared to be little difference from what I had always known. I tried to explain some of this to her while her faculties were more intact, but I failed to break through. She's gone now, and I don't know if she's coming back, but I accepted years ago that an epiphany would never be forthcoming. Maybe it all boils down to there having been too much risk for her to put anyone else's interests above her own, even her children's.
Monday, December 7, 2009
The Last Resort
I'm going away to the last resort in a week or two real soon....
--John Prine
I would have killed myself, but it made no sense, committing suicide in self-defense....
--Butch Hancock
When the medication doesn't work and the therapy doesn't work and desperation is at hand, don't fret, you still have options. Foremost among these is suicide. Granted, it's extreme, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Sometimes life is a task, and I look forward to its conclusion. No more of the trials and tribulations. Unless, of course, purgatory is real. Then I guess it will just be more of the same, and who needs that? Anticipating the relief that will accompany my earthly demise is akin to looking forward to summer vacation at the end of the school year, just on a grander scale. But killing yourself is a mortal sin, so I guess you don't get into heaven. Do people who accidentally overdose get into heaven, though? What about alcoholics who kill themselves slowly over a number of years? People who commit suicide are merely attempting to mitigate their pain, just like substance abusers. If drug addicts and alcoholics get into heaven, so too should people who commit suicide. And are there drugs in heaven? Because heavenly detox could be in store for the substance abusers.
Just as alcoholism is characterized by medical professionals as a disease, a predisposition toward suicide appears to have been hard-wired in me, accompanying the depression as far back as I can remember. I threatened to jump out the window when I was four years old. I would think that might have set off alarm bells, but apparently not. So, I've been thinking about suicide longer and more consistently than anything else.
I've come close but also felt constrained by the finality. I have envisioned the cold steel blade of a knife liberating blood from my veins and bathing in its warmth. I never thought of a half-measure, the suicide attempt that's really a cry for help. Because if you really want to kill yourself, how can you screw that up? I've held a gun to my head that I didn't think was loaded. I didn't squeeze the trigger, and it turned out to be loaded. What made me not squeeze the trigger? I've wished many times since that I had.
I've always considered that it might be selfish, also. What would the people left behind think in its wake? Although I also have thought that if the people who cared for me knew the pain, they would endorse the decision.
The suicide-prevention brigade, for all its good intentions, could be off the mark. Don't kill yourself. It's not that bad. Things will get better. There's help. You're not alone. How do they know things will get better? Maybe they'll get worse. And you most definitely are alone. Anyone seriously contemplating suicide has to feel that the suicidal pros outweigh the cons. Probably in some cases, preventing a suicide is noble. Maybe a person has had a considerable moment of weakness and isn't really a suicide devotee.
It is reasonably popular, though. In 2006, suicide was the eleventh-leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 33,300 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That year, suicide was the third-leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 24. There are even statistics regarding the suicide rate for children 10-14 years old. Either these kids have incredible insight into what the world holds in store, or they're misguided. In these cases, intervention should be a duty. Children this young are too inexperienced/uninformed/stupid to recognize that perhaps there are alternatives. The same is likely true of some adults, it's just that there are other adults who have come to reasoned conclusions that suicide is a viable option. And I know that there are people who will say that that kind of reasoning is warped, but what do they know?
According to the Web site suicide.org, more than a million people annually die by their own hands. Cancer deaths globally were about eight million in 2007, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
I knew someone who killed himself within the past few years. Left behind two little boys. And I thought that was incredibly selfish. And when I see those boys, I think of the ramifications for them. His legacy is anguish for them because he was incapable of enduring his own anguish. He passed the buck to two children.
I used to have so much more to say about the subject, but suicide no longer offers the solace it once did. Sometimes I find it disconcerting that I no longer have the comfort of suicide as a fallback option, like a safety school. Instead, it's just wearying and doesn't arouse the same passion it once did. And I know two kids who wouldn't understand.
--John Prine
I would have killed myself, but it made no sense, committing suicide in self-defense....
--Butch Hancock
When the medication doesn't work and the therapy doesn't work and desperation is at hand, don't fret, you still have options. Foremost among these is suicide. Granted, it's extreme, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Sometimes life is a task, and I look forward to its conclusion. No more of the trials and tribulations. Unless, of course, purgatory is real. Then I guess it will just be more of the same, and who needs that? Anticipating the relief that will accompany my earthly demise is akin to looking forward to summer vacation at the end of the school year, just on a grander scale. But killing yourself is a mortal sin, so I guess you don't get into heaven. Do people who accidentally overdose get into heaven, though? What about alcoholics who kill themselves slowly over a number of years? People who commit suicide are merely attempting to mitigate their pain, just like substance abusers. If drug addicts and alcoholics get into heaven, so too should people who commit suicide. And are there drugs in heaven? Because heavenly detox could be in store for the substance abusers.
Just as alcoholism is characterized by medical professionals as a disease, a predisposition toward suicide appears to have been hard-wired in me, accompanying the depression as far back as I can remember. I threatened to jump out the window when I was four years old. I would think that might have set off alarm bells, but apparently not. So, I've been thinking about suicide longer and more consistently than anything else.
I've come close but also felt constrained by the finality. I have envisioned the cold steel blade of a knife liberating blood from my veins and bathing in its warmth. I never thought of a half-measure, the suicide attempt that's really a cry for help. Because if you really want to kill yourself, how can you screw that up? I've held a gun to my head that I didn't think was loaded. I didn't squeeze the trigger, and it turned out to be loaded. What made me not squeeze the trigger? I've wished many times since that I had.
I've always considered that it might be selfish, also. What would the people left behind think in its wake? Although I also have thought that if the people who cared for me knew the pain, they would endorse the decision.
The suicide-prevention brigade, for all its good intentions, could be off the mark. Don't kill yourself. It's not that bad. Things will get better. There's help. You're not alone. How do they know things will get better? Maybe they'll get worse. And you most definitely are alone. Anyone seriously contemplating suicide has to feel that the suicidal pros outweigh the cons. Probably in some cases, preventing a suicide is noble. Maybe a person has had a considerable moment of weakness and isn't really a suicide devotee.
It is reasonably popular, though. In 2006, suicide was the eleventh-leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 33,300 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That year, suicide was the third-leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 24. There are even statistics regarding the suicide rate for children 10-14 years old. Either these kids have incredible insight into what the world holds in store, or they're misguided. In these cases, intervention should be a duty. Children this young are too inexperienced/uninformed/stupid to recognize that perhaps there are alternatives. The same is likely true of some adults, it's just that there are other adults who have come to reasoned conclusions that suicide is a viable option. And I know that there are people who will say that that kind of reasoning is warped, but what do they know?
According to the Web site suicide.org, more than a million people annually die by their own hands. Cancer deaths globally were about eight million in 2007, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
I knew someone who killed himself within the past few years. Left behind two little boys. And I thought that was incredibly selfish. And when I see those boys, I think of the ramifications for them. His legacy is anguish for them because he was incapable of enduring his own anguish. He passed the buck to two children.
I used to have so much more to say about the subject, but suicide no longer offers the solace it once did. Sometimes I find it disconcerting that I no longer have the comfort of suicide as a fallback option, like a safety school. Instead, it's just wearying and doesn't arouse the same passion it once did. And I know two kids who wouldn't understand.
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