If the gods are not to blame

One of the surest ways to insanity, is to be asked (or always asking) questions, and never provided with (never finding) the answers. Some questions we afflict on ourselves, like:

Am I beautiful? Is there a God? What happens after we die? These questions can allow us to gnaw on the bone for our entire lives, and we’ll never come up with a definitive answer.

Our whole lives are the long answers to the question: what is the meaning of life? Our entire lives represent our individual interpretations – but no single moment provides a definitive answer.

As a young teenager, I remember, when the burden of having perfectionists for parents became too great, I resorted to making lists of the things they had done to injure me, both physically, but more often psychologically.

One of the best books that addressed my personal agony, being one of three children in a bizarre and dysfunctional family, was The Prince of Tides. Unlike Tom, I did not suffer any kind of sexual abuse, except that, given the circumstances of how the family came into being, sex was also an almost taboo subject. It was, after all, what had gotten my parents into trouble in the first place, and marriage exacerbated the original mistake.

I have a friend who married under the same circumstances, but divorced nine years later. My parents stayed married, at least half of it miserably, for 19 years. Their marriage ended not in divorce, but in the suicide of my mother.

Recently, having explored similar themes (delusion, death, objective reality) in plays like Death of a Salesman and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (the latter shows off how money motivates certain behavior within a family), I find myself, absurdly, inside similar dramas. Only mine are not make believe, even though much of the power comes from the refusal of those around me to be honest with themselves, or with me.

I’d considered writing a play, but it would almost all have to be voiceover, because where I live, now, the most dialogue by far is with four dogs and a cat, and although the dialogue between father and son is colorful, and dramatic, they are too few and far between to knit together into any useable kind of dramatic pullover.

I feel compelled to report on these privacies because, like Tom’s sister Savannah in Prince of Tides, I am susceptible to memory loss, when it comes to the deepest and essential emotional twists in the family saga. Virginia Woolf wrote that until something is written down, it hasn’t happened. Mostly I would disagree with that. A private sense of being can provide a satisfactory sense of actuality – unless of course, reality slips from you, and madness stalks around in the background and back alleys. Thus, in this instance, where a family is not a family, behavior needs to be policed, and evaluated, and antidotes applied against the poison to prevent an infection of the mind.

Like many writers, I am aware of my own madness, and the intense pace of thinking and analysis means that madness has to be countered – with exercise, with tributes to truth, with an active sense of consciousness and a solemn determination. A parent who behaves like a child – with selfishness, vindictiveness, and spite – creates a pussy vessel, a cloud of doubt, in the mind of a child, even an adult child. It must be lanced, its poisons and fabrications removed. A writer that intends to live a reasonably happy life needs to balance perfection (in his work) with imperfections (in his heart).

Before I forget, and before I am tempted to blame the gods, I have to wonder, as a son, as a man, why any man would use:

Cardura XL
Cipralex 10mg
Risperdal 0.5mg

I don’t know because it is never talked about. Life is apparently perfectly fine, except that it isn’t.

I have to verify, when I am told by a motherly figure who is not my mother, that my mother was not a weak, sick person. That depression simply overwhelmed her, despite the good intentions of all around her.

In fact, the last year or two of her life, and ours, while she was alive, was exhausting. Each person seemed to be distracted by their particular burden – and I remember mine the best. Part of my reality, running up to my mother’s death was a high school experience welded shut by an exterior orthodontic apparatus. It did not render me mute, but it certainly managed to change a sunny 12 year old into a cloudy, troubled teenager, for a number of years. My mother was hyper vigilant when it came to discipline, when it came to what not to do. Prevention ranked high on her list of things to do. But doing, experience, finding and testing one’s ability in the world does not happen by avoiding the world, or by placing certain impediments to experience (like obsessive churchgoing and religiousness).

There are some glaring inconsistencies which continue to this day. When we were children, my mother insisted we go to church, and we did, almost every Sunday of the year. I only realized the hypocrisy of this, when she started going to church, and seemed to know a lot, before she’d spent even a few weeks in the bosom of Christianity. I doubted that she even understood God – but was only using him for rescue. Worse, I realized that what had been foisted upon us as children, was understood by neither parent, and for the most part, not practiced by either. Parents who impose beliefs on children that they don’t even subscribe to, are obviously operating from a place of transferring guilt, and imposing controls that they themselves violated.

In my current situation, living (temporarily)in my childhood home, with my father, I am keenly aware of this disjointedness. I’m aware how money is God, and more important than relationships or decency. My brother has learnt to serve this God, by buying an expensive car and otherwise living a showy existence, beyond his means, in order to impress an invisible flock of adulating fans. My sister too – choosing to love a much older man, a violent alcoholic, who has the means to buy her things and accommodate her as it might suit her. The buying seemed, for a while, to matter more to her than the beatings. Her contacts with me were only based around settling a debt, and one, through a combination of her laziness, and my being far away, eventually became quite onerous.

There are more specific details, and I mention them only so that I will have a memory, and not wash over reality with soothing pink and purple paint, and flowery, romantic words.

- Dishonesty: telling a romantic friend that he’d never planned to divorce his wife, when, in fact, he had sued her for divorce prior to her suicide, and this was possibly the underlying force behind her desperate and unsolvable unhappiness. It also begs the question, how would she accommodate herself because the chances are they’d married without a prenuptial agreement, meaning she would be left with nothing. My father also continued to live in the house he’d always lived in, and still does, which suggests he had intended to all along. The divorce papers were confirmed by my mother’s sister, who found these in a file when unpacking her cupboard after her death.

- Hypocrisy: behaving in a friendly, social way while in the company of friends, but in the privacy of the home, being constantly standoffish, self-centered and closed. Examples: 1). Favors for friends by contempt for family. A) Computer has two users, indicating long term use, but may not be used by family members. B) The domestic worker gets taken to the dentist, her treatment paid for, yet a possible hospitalization of a family member for a suspected hernia is ignored, not even discussed, even after it is noted that the scans to diagnose are expensive. 2) Playacting. A)After a long trip, embracing and engaging when a girlfriend or friend are around to witness the reunion, or farewell, but in their absence, when arriving leaving or arriving home, no greetings, just television or reading and a process of ignoring and actually closing and locking the front door to prevent the dog from getting out when I am trying to get in – without so much as a greeting. This is understandable as a singular event perhaps, but not as a general rule, and smacks of schizophrenia, or a gross kind of megalomania where one seeks to be seen as important, and worthy of respect, and perfectly lovable and endearing and wonderful around friends and strangers.

- Contempt: This merely exists as a way of always having the answers, of ridiculing ideas, of running down achievements and being generally full of scorn. It manifests also in a perfectionistic attitude where no mistakes are allowed, but it is of course, a one way street. The instances of contempt are of course too many to mention.

- Threats: I won’t expand on these, except to say they demonstrate a passive/aggressive persona, a sort of on/off attitude to live which is very disjointed and haphazard

- Disinterest: I’m not going to provide details, but confirms a mental malaise

The sad thing about communicating dissension in a family is that it is an indictment of oneself. Or it can be. When one reaches a greater degree of disconnectedness, then the family is not seen as a relationship but a stigma. And when it reaches a certain point, to maintain health and sanity, the family stigma needs to be set aside, because what is a stigma other than undeserved shame, and unearned disgrace, This also means that the act of laying it bare, is an act of independence, a means of freeing oneself from a burden, a sticky, choked up yoke that one no longer accepts or is willing to endorse.

This is to be encouraged from children who have been harmed, and need to separate themselves from their parents, in order to live a life that respects itself, and finds itself valuable in its own right, not because it needs the backing of the negligent, dysfunctional parent.

If the gods are not to blame, then the responsibility lies with us. Make all those who are accountable, accountable, and then take up your life and live it, leaving the corrupt minds to madden and fool themselves, if they cannot love us.