Batten your angst hatches because I am going to talk about my mother again. I think I have unlocked a clue to how she raised us and why we turned out like we did.

I was watching television in my GP’s office (I had plenty of time, he was an hour and a quarter late, as usual) and I was watching some movie about bank robbers and hidden loot and so on, and there was a scene where a teenaged son was arguing with his aunt about what it is like to have a father who went to prison, and I found myself getting really angry at how unreasonable the kid was being.

This is not unusual for me. I often get angry at unreasonable people. But this time, I caught myself doing it and asked myself…why?

What’s so wrong with being unreasonable? What’s so wrong about acting out of emotion alone? If you had asked be before this incident if I thought people had to be reasonable all the time or they would be bad people, I would have said of course not. Demanding constant reasonableness is in itself unreasonable. We are human beings, not robots, and that means we are primarily emotional creatures. Emotion drives all we do. Reason can sort fact from fantasy and provide methods for achieving our emotional ends, but it is reason that is the tool of emotion and not the other way around.

So why was I so mad at the kid for being unreasonable?

I traced that emotion back to its source, and its source was, of course, my family. My parents, with the best intentions in the world, set up a family culture that was deeply intellectual and reasonable. Acting from pure emotion was not accepted. My father’s temper tantrums gave us plenty of examples of what it is like when your emotions do the talking. Amongst the rest of us, there was a pressure to be restrained and, above all, reasonable.

Partly that was my father’s doing. He set up a home environment where you had to be able to defend your actions. I think he did this assuming that he would always be able to dominate us intellectually that way.

Instead, he got arguments, especially (eventually) against me.

And I cleaned his fucking clock.

But I think the chill I am talking about, this demand for reasonableness, primarily came from my mother. Not overtly, of course, but she always got very upset when things got out of control, and one of the basic rules of childhood is do not upset your mother, for she is God.

In this case, a very gentle and kindhearted God, but she and I share a very strong emotive capacity. When she was upset I could feel it very clearly, and those very few times she got mad at me, I felt it like a hammer blow.

So all of us learned to sort of manage her. We made sure not to say or do things around her that would confuse or upset her. In a very real way, we were as much on eggshells around her as we were around my father.

Hence, reasonableness. Being a teacher, my mother was very good at encouraging our intellectual development. That’s why we all turned out so damned intellectual.

But looking back, emotional growth was not exactly on the agenda. Between my father’s volatility and my mother’s sensitivity, and with no religion to encourage us to develop our spirituality, I feel like we all became very smart but without a lot of emotional coping resources to draw on.

Especially me, of course. I am, perhaps, the purest example of the problem. The others all had friends and social lives outside the family to give them a place to develop themselves away from our parents.

But I spent a lot of time friendless and the rest of it with friends I did not exactly trust enough to let my guard down, and so I grew strange in the dark.

And so we all grew up pretty neurotic. Neurosis, in my opinion, is the natural result of having your mind grow bigger than your soul. When you intellect overpowers the rest of your psyche, you end up trying to solve emotional problems by intellectual means, and that’s a recipe for disaster.

So you end up chasing your own tail in a hall of mirrors and going pretty crazy doing it. It has taken me a very long time to realize that when it comes to your own emotional health, you have to say to hell with reasonableness and let yourself be yourself for a change.

Some problems simply cannot be solved by rational thinking. The only solutions lie in the murky world of emotions and spirituality. You have to be able (and willing) to feel your way to a resolution of the problem and that can be very hard and very frightening to someone who is used to attacking everything with the tools of rationality. The million watt lamps, the microscopes, and the telescopes will not help you solve this problem.

You’re going to have to get your intellectual hands dirty.

Of course, one symptom of an overwrought neurotic mind is an inability to stay on topic. Back to Mom.

In order to not upset her, I think we all learned to sort of take things slow and soft around her. We all love her very much and because of that, we learned to take care of her.

That’s not exactly right for a parent. The parent should look after the child, not the other way around. And when I look back on my childhood with a critical eye, I have to ask myself what, exactly, did I get from my mother?

Up to a certain point, quite a lot. When I was a wee thing and she hadn’t gone back to work yet, she taught me a lot about being kind and being curious and loving to read and to learn and to love all the creatures, great and small.

But after that, there was very little connection between us. Little bits here and there, but for the most part, we kept to ourselves.

There was a period when I would tell her about my day while she did the dishes (!) after supper, but eventually I stopped because she was so tired and zombie-like that it was worse than talking to myself.

And after that… I guess we were just strangers living in the same house.

And that is a very cold way to live when you are a child with nobody else to turn to and a life that is fraught with peril and stress and emotional instability.

No wonder I grew up feeling abandoned.

I guess I was.

That’s all from me for today. I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.