When love has nowhere to go
People who watch or listen to Disaffected often comment that it must be difficult to tell the stories of abuse from my childhood and youth.
It isn’t. Telling the world about the lies, the psychological manipulation, the night raids and beatings, doesn’t faze me. It never has, telling stories about the alarming or the extremes I’ve encountered. Perhaps it’s connected to my ability to be competent in (other people’s ) emergencies. For all my neuroticism, especially about my internal anxieties, I’m a good friend in a disaster. I don’t fall apart or cry until I’ve taken care of the immediate danger.
It is also easy for me to tell these stories because they have a pedagogical purpose; I am not narrating my past to get sympathy. I do not want it or need it. I take this approach because it is effective at helping other people see their own lives and pasts, and their potential futures, more clearly.
What is difficult to talk about are the good times, the happy memories. They are fewer, of course, but they exist. It is hard for a person to know how to understand a mother who “loves” you one day and hates you the next (and for most of the next days). I find it hard to express it.
There is an even deeper loss that I am coming to understand only recently. As I approach 50, I know that my life is more than half gone. Though I wouldn’t have predicted this feeling even a few years ago, knowing that I will never have my own family is heavy on my mind.
What could have been, but was not, is a mournful part of middle age.
The full knowledge of it is coming home to me now. What my family could have had, what I tried to magic into the world long past the time that ship had sailed.
That’s why I went into debt to buy my mother a house. If I could solve her lifelong money problems, we could be a real family. We could make supper together with good humor. There wouldn’t be any more need for screaming, or raging, or crying, or talking about suicide.
‘Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for these things will have passed away.’
That was never possible.
There was a time before I became hard, and mean. As a boy and a youth, I was not this way. I wanted my family to be happy. I loved caring for my baby brother and sister. I adored the cats and enjoyed caring for them, until they were inevitably given away. I loved my mother and I wanted to make her stop crying and to make her happy.
There was no place for that love to go. I wasn’t allowed to give my mother the love I wanted to give. Whatever I gave her was never enough. Often, what I did in love was thrown back at me as evidence of my selfish depravity.
There is still no place for that love to go, and there may never be.
Telling the truth about an ugly past is not difficult. Being unable to give love is.
I want you to know something: even though this isn't a reciprocal relationship because we don't know each other, your love is going somewhere. Your love is in your writing, your thoughtfulness, your ability to make others reflect on their own lives and their own behavior. You hold up a mirror that gives people a chance to see themselves and choose to be better.
I live in an area where I have no one outside of my own household to build community with. My community is here, in the digital world, with people I don't know, can't speak with, but who at least share some of my views. It's enough to help me feel a little less crazy in an insane environment.
I know you have this profound effect through your writing because I've experienced it, but I also see it in other people's comments on your posts, so I know it's not just me. That has an effect out here, in the real world.
Like many of your readers, I survived a fucked up childhood. I had my first son at 22, and I guess predictably, I did what fucked up people do...I fucked up some more. A lot. I didn't know any better. I didn't know how not to become my mother. At that age, I didn't even realize just how much of a monster she had been to me. I grew up believing her abuse behavior *was* love, or at least some integral part of it. Oddly enough, I believed I was doing things differently than she did. With the benefit of age and hindsight, I was able to see that at the heart of it all, I had made the same mistakes, with different window-dressing.
I waited until my mid-thirties to have another child, and my last at age 42. I've had a lot of time to think, grow up, and change my ways. I don't trust therapists. I've been to so many of them and they've done immeasurable damage to me, my family, and my marriage. Sometimes worse than whatever issue brought me/us to them in the first place.
I've come to the conclusion that our reliance on therapy is just another way of abdicating our true responsibilities to ourselves and each other. A way of expecting someone else to fix us, rather than taking up the mantle of doing the work to make ourselves better people. Parents would rather send their children to "professionals" than do the work of being better parents. If we want better kids, we need to be better parents.
In this, we can learn from our own shitty childhoods and from the shitty childhoods of other people, who have also decided to do the work of self-improvement and have something to contribute.
This brings me back to you. You've done the work, you're *doing* the work. You share with us as you work through your own shit and strugge with it sometimes. It gives your readers the space to do the same. That is a gift, and it is a gift love. A gift that you give not only to yourself in healing, but a gift in healing others. That healing extends to the people that we, your readers, come in contact with. That is a multiplying force of good in the world.
I will likely never meet you face-to-face. You'll likely never know my kids, or meet the sweet kitten you inspired me to bring home. But I can tell you this, the gifts I've received from your openness in sharing your stories are felt in my family, and that will have a good and loving effect in the future branches of this family tree.
Your love has someplace to go, @JoshSlocum
I am 47 this year and have similar feelings about not having a family. When I was younger I was terrified of having children and thought it was best to end the 'generational trauma'. I was was afraid of being a terrible parent and behaving like my mother. Now there's no going back and I wonder if I made a big mistake. I don't want to blame everything on my family and I need to take responsibility for my own decisions, but there's no doubt that my childhood made me believe that I would fuck it up. I didn't expect to feel so sad about it later on.