When people ask me how I am, I reflexively say that I am fine. Even when I am anything but fine. It’s hard coded into me.

But why? Why is it so hard for me to admit things are not OK at all?

Even with my doctor. And your doctor is supposed to be one person you can tell anything if it is relevant to your health. But the moment I am talking to my GP, I snap right into “placate and vacate” mode, where I only want to get the authority’s approval for giving them the answer they want so that they will leave me alone.

That’s how it was with my family. I was always a-OK to them. Even when I was so depressed that nothing felt real and I was constantly filled with anxiety and dread.

I gave them the answer they wanted, and they went away.

Because honestly, what good would it have done to fess up? All that would happen is that they would stop for a moment after saying “Oh.”. Then they would change the subject. My family was not equipped to deal with a lot of emotion.

Instead of help, I would have ended up feeling more depressed than ever because I opened myself up and then got rejected. Actually, not even rejected. It was more like being ignored for being too much of a disruption to the person’s expectations and making emotional demands of people who, like me, were highly cerebral.

Unlike me, however, they were not natural empathic healers. Especially not to me. I was officially unimportant. My needs were irrelevant to their lives and I was expected to mroe or less just fade into the woodworking so they could go back to pretending that this surprise interloper hadn’t shown up and upset the apple-cart of the family dynamic.

They never made room for me. There was no room in their emotional budget for me. I was left to fend for myself in all things because I did not officially exist and there was no way they were going to tale anything away from what they already had in order to give me anything, let alone my fair share of the love, attention, consideration, feeling of importance, or even basic validation.

Instead, I had to live like a mouse. Fitting in where I could, trying hard not to be noticed (because I would be passively punished for drawing attention to myself) and being absurdly and pathetically grateful for even the smallest scraps of attention and approval because I was so lonely and starved for attention that a bread crumb was a feast to me.

I couldn’t ask for anything. If I tried, I would get that same awkward pause and then be treated like I had asked for a lung, a kidney, and a firstborn child.

The message was clear : there was no room on the budget for me. When someone does not officially exist, the very idea that they would have the temerity to actually ask for something is absolutely ridiculous, not to mention outrageous.

It was as if I was caught trying to steal from them.

No wonder, then, that I stopped trying, and started deflecting their insincere inquiries. It was the least painful option. To this day, I battle a deep sense of feeling like I don’t deserve anything, that I am unimportant to the point of irrelevancy and that I should never stop apologizing to the universe for existing.

How you treat your kids is way more important than what you say to them. Nobody ever told me I was unimportant and that they wanted me to disappear. If they had, they would have had to confront how badly they were treating me, and obviously I did not, in any way, warrant that level of discomfort, so they just went on thinking everything was fine.

And like a trained seal, I did what was expected of me and played along.

School was the same. Nobody wanted to deal with me. When I tried to tell the teachers about the brutal bullying I was experiencing, I was just told whatever it took to get my to go away so they could go back to dealing with something actually worthy of their attention.

Actually acting on my behalf was so far out of the question as to be unthinkable. After all, they would have had to get up from their desks, and go outside, and find the perpetrators, and haul them to the office and punish them, and oh my, they are exhausted just thinking about the going outside part of all that.

And all just to keep a grubby little smartass from getting what he deserves for being such a weird and difficult child?

No fucking way.  They resented even the effort it took to get rid of me. Anything more than that would be an unconscionable imposition.

If it had been another kid, one they liked as opposed to one they thought of like one would think of an incontinent old dog with fleas, they would have intervened. If it had been one of the keeners in my class, the very fact that they had been physically attacked would have been seen as a major indictment of the whole school and caused people to wonder what the world was coming to when an innocent (and highly presentable) child can’t even feel safe at school.

But it was just that weird Bertrand kid, and he brings it on himself by being weird, so to hell with it.  It’s not even worth the time and effort it takes to reject me. Only the absolute minimum of engagement is acceptable, and even that is deeply resented.

What happened on the playground stayed on the playground, along with my blood.

So whether it was home or school. I was treated like I was less than shit. I deserved absolutely nothing and should be grateful people ever notice me at all.

And that’s how I still feel to this very day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hmmm. Now where did we leave off yesterday…. oh right.

I love my Dad.

I really do. It’s hard to remember that sometimes because of how much anger towards him I have, but I do still love the man.

I mean, he’s my Dad. The only Dad I will ever have. He might not have been good at the job of parenting, but he is still one half of the parental influences on me from my childhood, and to try to simply excise him from my life and my mind entirely is to remove a very large part of me, both good and bad.

And yes, there is good in the man. Nobody is ever all bad or all good. Hitler loved dogs, and Mother Teresa let people suffer in her hospitals because “pain was good for the soul”.

How very Catholic of her.

And the thing is, when it was just me and my Dad together, we got along fine. I suspect that was because I am not particular about who is driving the conversation and I was perfectly happy to let it all revolve around him, with me as the student.

There is great strength in being harmless sometimes. When you don’t threaten people, even passively, they feel safe around you and trust you. That’s a great gift.

So he would hold forth and I would listen and contribute in my own way. I never felt like this meant he was “winning” or that my ego was somehow being threatened or suppressed by him. We got along fine.

And outside of his temper tantrums, he was a genial and wise kind of guy, with the typical Capricorn wry and gentle sense of irony about life, and human frailty. He was aware of (some of) his flaw, and loved to tell stories of times he had, in his words, “outsmarted himself” by getting a little too caught up in his own cleverness to think things through.

I spent many a pleasant evening with him. We’d watch the news, he would provide his analysis, I would provide my own, and we’d talk it over.

Perhaps my willingness to be deferential to him is what made him spare me his wrath. I never seemed like a threat to him, even at the dinner table.

Well, that wouldn’t last. He’s the one who turned the dinner table into a battlefield. I’m just the schmuck who took him on so the others could sit their passively, and occasionally make me feel like I was the problem, not him.

That’s how the cowed thing, I guess. From their point of view, everything was fine – that is to say, it was horrible but normal – until you came along and rocked the boat by sticking up for them against their oppressor.

Well too bad. I am a hero by nature. I don’t mean that in any grand sense, like I am some kind of icon or image of any form of purity.

I simply mean that when something wrong is going down, I have no choice but to intervene. It’s something I have to do. To do otherwise is almost literally unthinkable. I have to believe that when the time comes when the shit is going down, I did what I could to protect people from the badness.

I refuse to ever violate that, come what may. I accept the consequences of my need to act. I understand that it might lead to trouble I could have avoided if I had just kept my mouth shut. It could conceivably even get me hurt or killed one day.

But it’s both who I am and who I choose to be.

Anyhow, back to Larry.

He had a lot of genuine wisdom to share. He taught me things I still believe. Like that the best environments, especially work environments, are gender balanced enough so that neither gender can completely dominate.

Strange and terrible things happen when one gender has it all their way. Balance is lost and a in-group/out-group dynamic forms and with the diffusion of responsibility that exists within any group of people bringing out the worst in the in-group, things get incredibly ugly very fast. The in-group gets into the habit of taking all their aggression on the out-group while socially reinforcing the righteousness of doing so.

Thus the paradox of blaming everything on a powerless out-group with no ability to actually harm you.

It’s the perfect solution for intellectually dishonest cowards. They never have to face anyone who can actually fight back. Instead, they can take it out on people who are literally zero threat to them and they are perfectly willing to believe whatever it takes about the out-group to justify the abuse.

Hmmm. There I go, digressing yet again.

The fact that my father was an okay guy some of the time just makes his unwillingness to even try to restrain his temper even worse. I wish he could have just stayed the person he was when it was just him and me all the time. He would have been a pretty good Dad.

But no. And yes, I understand that, given the absolute nightmare that was his childhood as the only son of goddamned Satan,. aka my paternal grandfather, it is remarkable that he came through it with only a non-violent anger problem.

Instead of, for instance, becoming a serial killer. Or some other kind of sociopath. If that had been me,  I would have been ten different kinds of crazy by the time I hit puberty, and quite honestly, I probably would have killed the bastard.

But here’s the thing. Parenting can’t be graded on a curve. It is either good enough or it isn’t. The value is an absolute number, not a relative one. You either measure up or you don’t and it doesn’t matter where you came from.

And I am not expecting perfection from a parent. Everyone is going to make mistakes. I am not setting the bar impossibly high.

I am just saying that one of the minimum requirements for a passing grade in parenting should be “being able to refrain from taking your bullshit out on your kids”.

That’s not a lot to ask, is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.