The Great Betrayal

Reflecting more on the abusive environment of my childhood, I got down to another crux aspect of the dynamic shortly after flat out owning in my knotted stomach that family dinners were a fraught and traumatic emotional landscape. I started wondering why family dinners were required, every night, even in the face of the discomfort, claustrophobia, ambush, arguing, power struggles and shame around food, and general emotional upset, even for the parents. The simplest answer is just that family dinners were required every night because that is what families did. 

And this gets to the great tragedy of my parents' lives, from my perspective. I realize that all of these perspectives of mine are my own judgments, stemming from my own values. But, nonetheless, I always thought my parents lost themselves in what was expected of them, and lived truncated, foreclosed and small lives as a result. Noble, martyred, dutiful and conformist, with a lot of approval from the dominant culture, and a lot of their own sense of setting something right that had never been right for them—except they could never set it right the way they tried, which, more about below. I have had the opposite problem of not being able to fit myself into roles very well, and having a repeated pattern, both drunk and sober, of burning my life down when it got too tightly contained by what was expected. 

But here's the thing: my father, if he could be flat out honest about it for a blinding second, would admit: he never wanted to have kids. At least, he never really wanted four kids and then all of the burden that he placed on himself afterward. In fact, after we all got older than about five, it always felt to me that the absolute last thing he ever wanted to do was spend any time with any of us. His idea of fathering was to show contempt for his children in the hopes they would improve somehow. Every moment with family seemed like an exasperating burden to him. After dinner, he would retreat to the darkened basement of our stupid fucking tiny house and watch television for five hours, alone, then go to bed. His favorite shows were police dramas where the good guy was tough, unfettered, and always got the bad guy, and justice was always served. 

I know, in my heart, that my mother would confess to the same thing. She has said as much, in a moment of tipsy candor over cocktails with my sister. My mother's coping strategy in the face of my father's boiling frustration and resentment was to be pathologically cheerful. Chirping, happy, exhausted, smiling up a storm, chatting at my father as he sat grumpily at the table and just wanted to read the paper, be disgusted by the death of the world, and be left alone. The two of them had a vision of what life was supposed to be, and what it would be like, and they made a lot of choices based on that vision, and then, holy hell, were they surprised by reality. I can safely say that, although outward appearances contradict me, they were two of the unhappiest people I have ever known, for decades. Now, when people celebrated their 66 years together this past summer, for example, I am impressed, of course, but I mostly just feel sad. I know, in my bones, what price they paid for those 66 years. By my estimation, a much, much higher price than they would have paid if they had chosen for themselves what made them happy, and the look good be damned.  

I bet that their commitment, even to the degree of the death of their souls, to this outward appearance of what people were supposed to do, stemmed from their own abusive and terrifying childhoods. My father's father was a raging, violent drunk who regularly beat his wife and children. They grew up in grinding, awful poverty, cabbage soup for days, a couple of saltines with margarine for lunch. They grew up in a tiny town where everyone knew all of the violent, awful, pitiful and shameful secrets of the family, where well-meaning but insulting church people would drop off food on the porch and my father's father would take it and throw it in the trash, get drunk and leave for days; and my father's mother would go out and retrieve it from the trash. My father worked three jobs his senior year of high school and his father ridiculed him for it, beat him up and stole his money to buy whiskey, more than once. There was no look good at all for the Hades family, just rumors, shame, bruises, hunger, anxiety and sadness. 

My mother's family was from the other side of the tracks. Sportscars, vacations at the shore, trips to Manhattan, a big ranch house with a pond and a couple of pet swans. But my mother's father was an alcoholic, a party guy, prone to affairs, disappearing from home, horrible fights when drunk with his wife. My mother's mother was also an alcoholic and a rage addict, "disciplining" my mother by holding her hand over a lit stove burner, beating her with a hairbrush, starving her for days, etc. My mother's family had *all* the look good, but my mother's life was actually in danger a lot of the time, because her mother would start drinking at 8 in the morning and expect my mother to stay home from school and take care of her, at age 8. My mother's mother nearly burned the house down several times. No one in their small town knew anything about any of this. My mother told some people when she was about 14 and was disbelieved, accused of being crazy, and severely "disciplined" at home. 

So of course, my parents set out to create a happy family in spite of the way they were raised, and I imagine that 90% of their life was lived in reaction to the negative example of their own childhoods. This is vastly better than the unconscious recreation of the horrifyingly violent families they grew up in. Yet, whether understandable or not, of course, the abusive atmosphere of my own childhood was real. Whether "better" than what they had or not. To a three year old, it's rather irrelevant whether or not one has it better than one's father did, when one is on the beating end of a hairbrush and one's mother is screaming that she would kill you if it were legal, that she wished you were dead, and that you ruined her life. 

Endless Cycle


The bias of the father runs on through the son
And leaves him bothered and bewildered
The drugs in his veins only cause him to spit
At the face staring back in the mirror
How can he tell a good act from the bad
He can't even remember his name
How can he do what needs to be done
When he's a follower not a leader
The sickness of the mother runs on through the girl
Leaving her small and helpless
Liquor flies through her brain with the force of a gun
Leaving her running in circles
How can she tell a good act from the bad
When she's flat on her back in her room
How can she do what needs to be done
When she's a coward and a bleeder
The man if he marries will batter his child
And have endless excuses
The woman sadly will do much the same
Thinking that it's right and it's proper
Better than their mommy or their daddy did
Better than the childhood they suffered
The truth is they're happier when they're in pain
In fact, that's why they got married- Lou Reed



I'm sure this is fairly common. It has played out in my life many times, an inherited pattern. I recall many situations now that I imagined first, then entered into, then was bewildered by, hurt by, disappointed by, and rebelled against, often passive aggressively because there was no way to express my bewildered disappointment directly. On top of this pattern of imagining in a rosy way some relationship or domestic situation, and then being gradually disappointed, and then being bewildered and feeling out of control and eventually destroying my life by sabotage, always, always causing myself terrible harm, more harm than anyone else, although at least escaping that feeling that I was going to die, there is also the repetition compulsion of trying the same thing, again and again. 

For example, several years after the emergence of emotionally tense, unpleasant and quarrelsome dynamics on our yearly summer trips to the Jersey shore, exacerbated by increasing alienation of the siblings, cranky babies, partners brought into the mix who did not square with my father's idea of how to act, etc., we tried those trips, summer after summer, year after year. Leading up to those trips, everyone seemed to feel excited, hopeful, ready to rent that beach house and have some fun! And yet, literally within minutes of arrival, the sourness, irascibility, tension, disappointment would set in, once we all arrived. I ended up spending the latter ones of these trips drunk off my ass, walking the beach, just to get the hell out of the pressure cooker of barely contained rage and disappointment that marked "the family vacation." For some years after I gave up on attending these trips, the beach and the ocean held a terrible, aching sadness for me, and I couldn't figure out why for a long time. 

I brought my girlfriend at the time (about 1988) on one of these trips and she was utterly bewildered. "Why is everyone drinking so much? Why does your dad seem so angry all the time? What is UP with how tense that Scrabble game was?" This was a woman who was from a family where, even though her mother and father had divorced years before, they would get together for family vacations and actually have fun. Like, they enjoyed each other's company, told each other what was happening in their lives and were enthused, welcomed the partners and children of siblings, and actually had a good time. Yeah—she and I broke up. We almost got married. But I got drunk and left her for an abusive, unavailable, dishonest and manipulative woman who dumped me a month after we got together. And, since the woman I broke up with had healthy boundaries, being from a healthy family, and having self-esteem, when I wanted to get back together with her, she laughed in my face and said "You are sick. I hope you get the help you need. Have a nice life."

The poignant thing is that my parents tried. They tried hard, in fact, even to the point of selling their very souls to the idea they had of what life was supposed to be like. They got played. They bought what America was selling. America was selling the happy family. The happy family looked a certain way, did certain activities, created a certain carefully curated impression. The even darker promise was, if one simply manufactured the look, the reality would follow. The great betrayal, of course, is that, no, the reality does not follow. The reality has nothing to do with the look. My parents did not have the tools to discover this and radically change their lives. They were blind to the fact that relationships with one's children, for example,. are irreplaceable and definitely not the same as the appearance of a relationship with one's children. 

What I wanted, what I ached for, was to be worth my father's time. For him to be interested in me. I would trade all the family dinners and vacations in the world for times like that, where he taught me things, helped me fail and learn without ridicule, spent time involved with what interested me, without being irritated, without acting like it was a terrible imposition, without acting like I was a silly, exasperating fool. Appreciated my interests without the mild ridicule and judgment of frivolity and stress about "unnecessary expense" that he always brought to it. (A new drum kit for me, who had shown dedication after nine years from age 5 to 14 of practicing on the same piece of shit drum kit, "frivolous." But kids watch and learn—around the same time, he bought himself a very expensive set of brand new, championship level golf clubs. I always thought that was funny because he fucking hated golf. It drove him insane. He once hurled one of his expensive clubs into a water hazard on a bad day. Then he realized what he had done and had to roll up his pants and wade in there and retrieve it. But anything his children enjoyed was "a waste of time and money."). 

I learned the lesson many times over, slowly and painfully, that the look good does not create the desired happiness. It took years for me to stop trying, though. And in the manner of repetition compulsions, I would always hope, then be bewildered, then disappointed, then destroy myself. "I'm never doing that again," I would vow, and would promptly set to work doing it again. I find it coming up around the PhD now. I am sometimes tempted to apply for post docs or jobs that I have utterly zero interest in. "That sure would impress people," I think to myself. But now at least I know enough to put that aside. Stop thinking about expending effort just to get that look good. Seek happiness, ask for happiness, create opportunities to be good to myself. Take myself more seriously than the fantasy of what life is supposed to be like and just live the life I want to live. I sometimes get sad that it took me several decades to become more aware of this, but at least it's more real for me now.  

The great betrayal? I don't buy it anymore.