What if you just got the wrong parent bzw. kid?

In light of what we learned on Tuesday, I’ve been chewing over things.

[and this is a brief note that passworded posts always have the password in the subject line. The point isn’t to prevent anyone from reading it, but rather to keep those posts out of Google indexing.]

So on the one hand — what the doctor concluded is that dad really can’t help most of his impulsive behavior or speech. This came out in a sort of disturbing conversation. He told the doctor that (a) he had fallen last week — I did not know, because (b) he tried to move a heavy TV off a high shelf in the workshop and when she asked, when you decided to do that, did you think that all that maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea? he said (c) no, it’s no problem. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea? When she pointed out that he’s had a stroke, he asserted that nothing has changed for him since the stroke, he’s still fully capable of moving heavy things. it really does not and cannot occur to him, when he decides upon a particular course of action, that he should think about it. Extrapolating: once it had popped into his mind as a possibility he wanted to pursue, he could not have decided on his own not to drive the tractor. Or yesterday morning — when we ended up in yet another confrontation with me physically restraining him from starting the washer — it isn’t physiologically possible for him to remember or consider that he’s been asked repeatedly not to operate it, or that his laundry is now our senior helper’s job. He’d decided he needed to wash clothes and he was going to do it and there was no reason to think twice. That part of his brain is non-operational. So notwithstanding how he appears from the outside and some of the things he says, he’s not planning in the conventional sense to endanger himself or anger me.

On the other hand — what comes out of his mouth, even if it’s not something he says in the sense of intending to say it, is also true in the sense that he’s saying what he thinks — he simply now lacks the self-restraint to control its expression. So when he says I’m lazy, or wasteful, or stupid, or a pain in the ass — or whatever the complaint of the day is — that is the articulation of something real that he feels, even (if, though) the judgment itself isn’t accurate.

So — at the same time that he’s not doing it to upset me, his behavior nonetheless reflects his current view of me. This is certainly supported by his current state of mind; he also told the doctor that nothing is wrong with him, he “lets” me drive him around, and he could get along perfectly well without assistance. He has now told two doctors that I do things on purpose to aggravate him.

Even if this language is an expression of his resentment more than an objective observation about me, it’s not a surprise to hear negative stuff about myself from him. He has always thought I’m lazy and that the work I do is not real. He very much personifies the anti-elite impulse that has captured American politics at the moment — no expert knows anything better than he does. He has always objected to some of the ways I spend money (books, for instance). In many ways I embody exactly many things he finds repugnant politically or culturally objectionable. I’m not pretty or compliant. I’m single and childless. Rather than being a homemaker or nurse or a music teacher (what he thought I should do with my life), I have an advanced degree and work at universities. I don’t make things or money; I spend most of my day reading, learning, and communicating things. I have political views he detests and I am capable of defending them with much more information and vigor than he’s ever been comfortable with a woman having. And I like to make a plan and follow it, rather than winging it.

That there are certain contradictions in this position isn’t something he’s ever thought of (I suspect). As a former systems analyst, for example, he himself was the epitome of the obscure, rarefied expert (feel free to raise your hand if you know without looking what CICS does — I can assure you both the Servetus children do). Or: While we were waiting in the doctor’s office for the results of the evaluation, he saw that I’d brought a soup cookbook along with me to read from the library and said, what d’you need that for? When I replied that fall is nearly here and the term is about to start and I was looking for new soups to put into the rotation, he said, his voice and his face full of scorn, That’s really silly. Why would you do that? I put it away to think about later, and I thought two things. First, the real problem is that he does not value the labor of homemaking in the least, even though he’s quite demanding about how it should be performed by others — and now his brain injury frees him to say it. The idea that I would be planning ahead further than he would about what we’d be eating is not worth a minute’s thought, or once thought, any further consideration. Second, as much as I wrestle with whether mom would have dealt with this situation better than I do, maybe it’s actually better for her to be dead, than to become, even potentially, the target of this kind of scorn or contempt. It’s the double whammy: women should stay in the home, but / and homemaking and the things one does in the home are meaningless, subordinate activities.

Before you become defensive on my behalf — don’t. It hurts, but I spent a lot of time in therapy considering aspects of this problem about a decade ago. I didn’t resolve the issues but I’m fairly aware of them and I have a basic idea of how they shape my reactions to things, even if yes, it still hurts, and to some extent I still have the desperate need of the adult child for parental approval. He can get under my skin because the buttons he built into my personality to push for this very purpose are still there.

But as usual my own conflicts made me think about the more general problem of children and parents who (despite their obvious biological relationship and even some shared personality or intellectual components) just don’t “fit.” My dad and I are a good example of that. I think people who know us can see quite clearly what I “got” from him — and not just his poor vision. At the same time, he was not the right father for me and I was not the right child for him. He did not get past that when I was a child and a teen (or did not see the need to do so); when I left home I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to please him any more; and now, given his brain injuries it’s probably too late. Keeping him reasonably comfortable is still an important goal, but it can’t be done anymore in the hope that old wounds can be healed.

Another father who didn’t quite “get” his son: Steven Mackintosh as Elton John’s father, Stanley Dwight, in Rocketman (2019).

I found myself fascinated by this film over the summer, and it got me into reading lots of biographies of Elton John. One thing one quickly learns is that much of what Elton John has said about his father in interviews is factually false, and most of the event-level representation of their relationship in this film is also incorrect (I put some details about Stanley Dwight specifically in SueBC’s comments). Dwight made many more efforts at effective parenting than the film reveals. In essence, I think the film narrative is a psychogram that reflects the version of his past that Elton John knit together in order to get sober. I could guess, based on a critical reading of the available evidence, about what might have happened in that household and in Elton John’s relationship with his father (and maybe I will sometime). But I think in the end the basic problem was that the father never felt fully comfortable with his son, and the son never felt loved or approved of by his father (a deficit potentially exacerbated by his parents’ poor relationship with each other), and so his struggle toward an adulthood away from addiction involved accepting that he could live with himself apart from his father’s approval or affection. This is the sentiment represented in the one of the final scenes of the film, where film-Elton confronts a series of influential figures from his youth and says to his father, “I think I’m okay with [being] strange.”

The notion of the Dwight family as a group of people who were a poor fit for each other is also reflected in the film, in the early scene organized anachronistically around the song, “I Want Love.”

In it, the members of the family, at what looks like a Sunday dinner, appear disengaged and snipe at each other while each sings lines of the song that point both to their feelings of isolation and their desire for connection. I cried when I saw this the first time (and so did Elton John, reportedly). In the end, too, both of Elton John’s parents found families that “fit” them — and as the film reveals, so did the artist himself, even if much later. It was just that none of them were well equipped to deal with the conflicts in their own original nuclear family setting.

I’m not comparing myself with Elton John or even our two families with each other. One important difference is that my mother did not spend her time directly feeding the fire of a hostile relationship between me and my father (as Sheila Dwight did). My own understanding of what happened between my father and me is reasonably consonant with available evidence — and I haven’t ever wanted to understand him as a total villain in the way Elton John seems to see his father in this film. I just wish — and I really I wish this — I was less troubled by the picture of dad so often expresses. Am I worried he’s right?

Another compelling trope of this film is the bottomless need of the addict to replace what he lacks with other things (alcohol, drugs, shopping, etc.). One of the things I realized in the wake of the Tuesday appointment is that going forward, my relationship with dad will be less about how he and I actually related in the past and more about the continued building and tempering of my character. The question for me this whole summer, watching the film, and now after this appointment: how do I figure out how to fill the hole that dad built? How do I learn to accept having been the wrong kid?

~ by Servetus on August 30, 2019.