Nothing in particular in mind tonight. Guess I might as well keep on bitching about my family.

I never really bonded with my Dad much. There was the issue of his temper, which was rarely directed at me (Anne and Dave took the brunt of that abuse) but which nevertheless made me afraid of him and his volatility,

And like I said, you can love someone, or fear them, but not both. Love requires trust and fear is pretty much the opposite of trust. If you fear something, it means you see it as a threat. That’s incompatible with trust.

But there was also the fact that we were just very different people. He tried to get me into the things he was into, but they were mostly the exact sort of hands-on things, like carpentry or fixing things around the house, that I just can’t do. All my talents are on the cerebral track and I am very clumsy with my hands.

And he correctly sensed that while I was always willing to give it a shot if he asked, I really just wanted to get away from him as soon as possible.

Because he scared me. That fear makes every moment in the angry parent’s presence painful because it is fraught with tension. One of our strongest instincts is to flee from that which scares us. It’s a basic survival instinct. And so the angry parent can’t really bond with the kids, no matter how friendly they are, because the kid knows that could change at any second.

Still, despite all he did to me (molestation, taking me out of college, making the whole house a minefield when he was around with his temper), part of me wishes I could go back and try harder to see things from his point of view. I understand how frustrated he must have been by his inability to really connect with his kids, whom he does genuinely love like any father would. The problem was of his own devising, but I understand how painful it must have been to repeatedly try to reach out to us only to have our fear of him and/or his temper push us away.

And of all of us kids, I think I would have been the one most capable of bridging the gap, because I have a unique talent for understanding people, even the unpleasant ones, and I am quite capable of having compassion for the beast.

After all, my father had a nightmarishly bad childhood because of his father, who was Satan, and I am sure that is what fueled the anger, the frustration, and his inability to stand up for himself at work.

I mean, his sister Mary Jane reacted to their depraved and deprived childhood by retreating to a house in the boonies which was so strictly religious and antiseptic that the only things their kids were allowed to watch on TV was tapes of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best.

I swear I am not making that up.

My mother, on the other hand…. it is very hard for me to talk about her. Children of polarized households with an angry parent and a nice but submissive parent invariably end up idolizing the nice parent. My mother is writ deep into the bedrock of my mind, and even thinking about her objectively makes me feel like I am trespassing on sacred ground.

But she played her part in my unhappy childhood as well. She was emotionally absent a lot of the time. Part of that was the terrible injustice of her working full time as a teacher and also being responsible for all the housework. Words cannot express how angry that makes me now.

And this was the normal thing back in the Seventies. Women were just happy they were finally allowed to have jobs. They certainly weren’t about to rock the boat by suggesting their husbands pick up the fucking slack.

So my mother was tired a lot of the time. I think she was also depressed, though I doubt she would agree. But I remember her basically going through life in this zombie-like state, like the burdens of life were so heavy that all she could manage was to sleepwalk through it.

And that sounds like a kind of depression to me. Life was a very hard slog for my mother when I was a kid and she was working full time and looking after four kids and an idle at home husband at the same time. And I think it really took its toll on her.

How I wish I could go back and not just volunteer to help with the housework (which I did many times, only to be rebuffed because she didn’t want to invest the effort in teaching me to do things), but insist on doing the housework and make my siblings and my father take up more of the load as well.

We were a family of six, and many hands make light work. It would have been a small price to pay to get the mother I had when I was a tiny tot back. The sweet, attentive, kind woman who delighted in teaching me new things.

The woman who sat me down beside her and we would sing songs from her guitar books while she strummed her guitar. The woman who showed me how our back yard garden worked. The woman who read me Huckleberry Finn, both Alice books, and all of the Chronicles of Narnia books, and did all the voices as well.

She gave me all that is good within me, and I will always treasure her for that. She taught me compassion and kindness and curiosity and gave me a thirst for knowledge and understanding that has never left me.

I think if I had been raised by that version of her, whether or not she had gone back to work, I would have been a much stronger and more confident person.

Maybe a bit of a Mama’s-boy, but there are worse fates.

Well, that’s all from me for today, folks. Thanks so much for reading this.

Seeya tomorrow, faithful readers!