“The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self awareness.”
I always thought that was one of the best lines from one of my favorite movies. Susan Sarandon nearly always played memorable characters, and Annie Savoy in “Bull Durham” was one of the best.
I saw it at one of the least stressful times of my life, near the end of my two years in Colorado. Of all the places I lived and worked, it was the one place where I never had any problems. It was the one newspaper where I worked that in retrospect I regretted leaving.
In fact, it might have been the one time in my adult life that I didn’t have all sorts of anger bottled up inside about regrets and failures.
When it came to self awareness, it was a lot of years before I got there.
It was 14 years later in Southern California and I was seeing a shrink. About a month or so into analysis, my doctor surprised me. She said she couldn’t believe how much anger I had bottled up inside me.
It was seven years later that I began to understand.
It was September 2009 and my son was getting married. We were at the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding and Virgile stood to make a toast. He said how lucky he was to have had the best parents in the world.
I turned to my mother, who was seated on my left, and told her there was nothing in my life of which I was prouder than being a good parent.
I was stunned by her reply. “But you don’t think we were good parents, do you?”
“I’ve never said that,” I responded.
“But you think it.”
I just shook my head, wondering why she was so adamant.
The picture above was taken in Boston in 2017 and was the last time I saw my mother. Earlier that year she had become the third generation of women in her family to reach the age of 90. She was having memory problems and I couldn’t bring myself to try and resolve the issues I had, and she died three years later.
I am reminded of a quote about personal relationships from a movie I never saw, “I Never Sang for My Father.”
“Death ends a life. But it does not end a relationship; which struggles on the survivor’s mind, toward some resolution, which it may never find.”
I wish I could have talked with my mother and explained the conflicted feelings I had, and the guilt I had always felt about my reaction to the way I had been raised. I would have told her they had been good parents in helping me through the real crises in my life but not good at all with the little things of everyday living.
One thing I never realized until it was too late to matter was that whether she meant to or not, my mother raised me to be frightened. Two examples from my teens stand out.
In September 1964, I was showing off a strong football throwing arm in gym class. My gym teacher was one of the coaches and he told me I should be on the junior varsity football team. All I had to do was get my parents to sign a permission slip and show up for practice.
My mother said no.
“You’re too small,” she said. “You’ll get killed.”
I was 14 years old and still smallish. At 5-foot-7 and about 135 pounds, I hadn’t really gotten my growth yet. As small as that sounds, kids we smaller back then. In fact, two years later I was 5-11 and 165 pounds, and there was only one kid on the varsity football team who even weighed 200 pounds.
The fact was that playing football in 1964 would have shown me how much work I would have had to do to be good enough. I had very little upper body strength, but as much as I wanted to play, I would have worked hard to get stronger.
Instead, I went to war with my parents. If they wanted me to do something, I either did it grudgingly or not at all. I became the king of passive-aggressive and they responded in kind.
When I turned 16, they said I shouldn’t automatically think I would get my driver’s license. I had to earn the right to drive. Nine months later, at the beginning of my senior year, they said OK. I said no thanks. I wound up getting my license just in time to go to the senior prom the next May.
That summer came the second example of being raised to be scared. Our neighborhood swimming pool had a high-diving board, and the popular dive that summer was to stand backward on the edge of the board, to jump up and out and then dive head first.
I wasn’t much of a diver, but I could do that one really well.
Of course my mother saw me diving and said I would break my neck. She made me promise to stop doing that dive.
Even on the big things, they were often a mixed blessing. In February 1969, after I had flunked out of college — passive-aggressive strikes again — I was summoned by the draft board for a pre-induction physical.
Vietnam loomed.
But my parents used a childhood disorder that I had all but outgrown and got a doctor to say I had a form of epilepsy, getting me out of serving in the military. And quite possibly getting me out of learning some discipline and gaining adulthood at age 19.
Of course I might have gone to Vietnam and been killed, and while that would have been terrible, the actual result might have been worse. That no matter what I did, there wouldn’t be consequences.
So were they good parents?
Well, they meant well.
But the anger remains.