What the hell, let’s talk about my Dad again.

Thoughts about my father, the late Larry Donald Bertrand, were stirred up when I recently watched a video in which a British fellow talked at great length about how his apparently quite evil mother died, he felt nothing.

To which I commented something like, “Friend, if you really felt nothing, you would not have made a 35+ minute video talking about it. ”

He replied with something along the lines of, “No, I just found it interesting how… “.

So I told him about when my father Larry died, I convinced myself that it meant nothing to me. I hadn’t seen him in decades. He was entirely not in my life any more. I rarely even thought about him. So his death meant nothing to me. Right?

Wrong. That was pure intellectualizing bullcrap.

Absolutely nothing can make a parent who raised you no longer matter to you.

We are born with slots in our heads for parental figures and once they are in there, they are in there forever whether or not they deserve the job.

All I did by telling myself I didn’t care was uselessly delay my own grieving, And that’s what I told that British bloke.

Mourning my father isn’t easy for me, which is why I am still doing now despite him having died shortly after the beginning of the pandemic.

Meaning we never got to get together as a family and have a funeral for him. Oh well.

I know that in order to mourn Larry, I have to take my memories of him out of cold storage and do my best to feel them completely and thus rid myself of them in the only way that actually works.

And they are not all bad. He and I got along fine when it was just the two of us. He could relax and calm down, and therefore, so could I.

That was later in life, though. When I was a teen. As a child, I was just afraid of him, just like my siblings.

And that meant we tried not to be around him, and I know that hurt him deeply.

But it was his own damn fault for being so impatient, cranky, and irritable. You can’t expect your kids to want to be around you when you make being around you so tense.

It was like living with an ogre.

As a result, I grew up without what old school psychology called a “competent father figure” . Sure, he was there, but it’s not like he taught me how to ride a bike or threw the old pigskin back and forth with me.

And I sure as fuck couldn’t talk to him about my problems. He would only make things worse by getting mad about it. Including possibly getting mad at me.

Yeah, fuck that.

So because he was such a prick, most of my early childhood memories of him are of being afraid of him and having to walk on eggshells around him.

To his credit, he did manage to be calm and pleasant more Christmases than not.

Nevertheless, like I said, that was still my Dad. My father. He was the only father I will ever have and despite everything, I did love him, so I am no longer prepared to pretend that him dying meant nothing to me.

And I do miss him. And it hurts me that he died lonely and alone, even thought that too was his own damn fault for being so verbally abusive.

Drove everyone who might have cared about him away. including my sister Catherine and his second wife.

So dying all alone was the ending he deserved.

But it still hurts.

More after the break.

On being crazy

Still trying to wrap my head around the knowledge that I can’t expect sane, rational behaviour from myself.

Don’t get me wrong. I will always strive to make the best decisions that I can based on my best judgment and my highly incisive analytical faculties and such.

I can do nothing else. Those are the tools I have been given and I will use them the best I can when I can.

What has to change is the post-game analysis, as it were. I need to learn to accept that no matter how wise and insightful and deep I might be, when it comes time to act, I am quite likely to make poor decisions.

Or at the very least, imperfect decisions. And therein lies the rub.

Because I have such an incredibly brilliant analytical engine in my brain,. I will always be able to see a way in which any given decision could have been better.

But that doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. The stakes are far too high for there to be only two possibilities : perfection, or failure.

That’s a recipe for self-loathing, a way for the depression to maintain itself while seeming, at least superficially, to be being merely having high standards.

Not acceptable. Nor is it truly logical. If high efficiency is the goal, then setting the standards impossibly high is antithetical to that aim.

Constant failure does not encourage continued striving.

That’s all just a fancy way of saying I need to forgive myself more. And I really want to. God knows I deserve it.

But it’s a hard thing to do. It requires a lot of very deep rewiring of the fundamental way I process the world and form my evaluations. It requires me to grow my humanity and learn to let go of the machinelike severity that my mind developed over all those lonely hours of thinking and playing games, and instead strengthen my sweet, loving, forgiving, understanding side that just wants people to be happy… including me.

I know that I can be a more strong, healthy, relaxed person who is comfortable in his own skin and not plagued by demons of my own devising who have grown fat and spoiled from all the latent potential they have consumed.

But I also know that getting there will not be easy. Change never is, and I am going to need to change a lot if I am to stop being the world’s oldest caterpillar and finally launch as a brilliant shining butterfly.

I hereby surrender myself to transformation.

Long live the new flesh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.