“Every perfect picture hides a mess or two …”
Some years back, I was looking at a small color slide in one of my mother’s photo albums. I looked and looked at it and could not figure out who it was.
When I finally realized who it had to be, I literally could not believe it. It was a picture of me at age 20, looking at my birthday cake and surrounded by my younger siblings.
Even then I rejected it.
“I was never that good looking” was the thought that kept going through my mind.
I don’t have the full picture anymore, just a cut-down version showing only me and the cake. When you see it, you might wonder why I was making a fuss. The kid in the picture is pleasant looking, but he’s no Robert Redford or Brad Pitt. If I didn’t even think I had been that good looking, I must have thought I looked like a troll.
I remember that time as a particularly conflicted one in my life, just as most of my life after about age 6 was. I was early in my first really special relationship, and even though it lasted less than a year, I remember it very fondly. On the other hand, I was about to flunk out of school for the second time.
If I remember one thing about the years around that time, it’s how little self-confidence I had.
And how much I was hurting myself to express my anger toward my parents. I was like Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles” with one exception.
I pulled the trigger.
Again and again.
One thing I’ve written about before was when I was seeing a therapist in 2002, I was surprised when she told me she was amazed at how much anger I was bottling up inside.
Sometimes I think everyone knew it except me.
When I was 6 years old, a teacher told my mother that I was so amazing that someday I would cure cancer or be president of the United States. Fifteen years later, it had become question of whether I would live to be 30.
I just kept pulling that damn trigger.
And even though I didn’t know it, the anger kept building and building.
It started before I was 3 years old, even though I didn’t know it. My father walked out on us and I never saw him again.
My mother remarried when I was 6, and even though my new dad was a very fine man, he had anger issues of his own. I was a great student and even skipped a grade. I never got anything other than A’s, but instead of leaving me to my own devices, they pushed me harder and harder.
After seventh grade, I never got an A for the year in an academic class for the next 10 years.
Basically, I went to war with my parents. The one thing they wanted of me was to be a good student, and that was the one thing I wasn’t going to give them. They probably didn’t realize it, but they had infantilized me and filled me with fear. My mother made me promise not to ride a motorcycle or dive off the high board at the swimming pool, and when I was asked by one of the coaches to come out for football in high school, she refused to give her permission.
Yes, I went to war. But I had as much chance of winning as Poland did in 1939.
I became the king of passive-aggressive behavior.
They wouldn’t let me get my driver’s license at 16 unless I improved my grades, so I refused to get it until I was 17 1/2.
Another pull on that damn trigger.
As much as it hurt them that I wasn’t living up to their expectations, the only real damage I was doing was to myself.
In 2009, the year after my dad died, my mother came to California for my son’s wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, Virgile toasted Nicole and me, saying we were the best parents he could have hoped to have.
I was sitting next to my mother, and I told he that being a parent was the one thing in my life I had done really well and that what my son had said filled me with pride.
I was shocked by her response.
“But you don’t think we were good parents.”
All I could say was that I had never said that. She responded again by saying that I may not have said it but I thought it, and all I could do was shake my head.
If I had said anything, it wouldn’t have been correct. Every time I was in real trouble, they came through for me like champions. They were wonderful parents in that respect. But in day to day, month to month life, they were not the parents I needed.
They rarely made me feel good about myself, and they made sure every time I pulled that trigger, I had plenty of ammunition.
But one thing is true. For any anger I have toward them, I have always had far more for myself.
I don’t blame them for my shortfalls in life.
I blame myself for not being stronger and overcoming them.
That’s the mess the picture hides.