It’s funny.
This week has been very hard for me. Not really in terms of getting to work or doing my job–I always seem to be able to compartmentalize my angst enough to drive, smile and perform my functions. Even well enough to obtain the odd “good job!” here and there. But inside myself, I was struggling.
I’m not sure what made me remember some really unpleasant stuff about my childhood, but I’ll take a stab and say the “deep inner work” that people on Facebook are so damn fond of telling everyone they should be doing. When me and my therapist try to get to the bottom of why I have never been particularly successful at maintaining relationships, we always look for clues in my formative years. Turns out, everything I need to know about that took place in the seventies when I was in first, second, even third grade.
I turned ten in 1980 and, by that point, I knew which way the wind blew in the Manas residence. I discovered Iggy Pop and David Bowie and I stopped communicating how angry I was. Besides, I had been told that everything that I was seeing and everything that I was feeling wasn’t actually happening. “All kids think they get treated unfair and they’re always wrong.” That’s how things were left until I got my first apartment in 12th grade.
Now, forty years later, I was bringing my kids home to their mother and it dawned on me that neither of them ever once made mention that the other receives favorable treatment. This is most likely due to the fact that Lea and I are very conscious about the way each one is treated. As I continued to drive home, I allowed myself to remember many of the slights that made me feel as though I was not held in the same regard as “junior.” After much thought, and decades of distance, I can say that, not only was I justified in the way I felt, but their insistence that it wasn’t happening seems more egregious than the favoritism itself.
It’s bad enough to continually signal to a child that they aren’t as important as their older sibling, but it’s nothing less than gaslighting to address a child’s concerns by incessantly claiming that they’re just not seeing reality. Which, again, makes me question everything about my elders parenting style. I try to imagine myself telling my children that the way they feel is simply not valid and I just can’t. Even when they were very little, their feelings meant a lot to me. I don’t remember once feeling like I’ve had to “defend” myself to them.
This all began to snowball as the week progressed. The whole “defense” issue began to seem ludicrous. It takes just as much energy to listen to a child and try to understand a child as it does to build a defense and argue your case. That is seriously the last thing a small child wants. An argument. A child wants to be listened to and validated–two things you are not doing when you are only concerned with defending yourself.
Then I remembered something that I have been able to block out for forty years. As a child, I had this fantasy that I would storm up to my room and my parents would come up and sit on my bed and ask me what was wrong. At least once a week I would storm upstairs and slam the door and hope desperately that that might happen. But it never did. Neither of them ever came upstairs to investigate the issue. Every time, I would begin to get hungry after a few hours and come back downstairs. I got the feeling that they weren’t even curious about where I had been for so long.
That memory spun me out into a very bad place. By the time I was in third grade, I was dealing with (and hiding) profound depression and anxiety. So, self-medicating seemed quite natural. By 11 years old, there were my father’s Playboy magazines. By 12 years old, I began smoking a pack a day. By 15, I began experimenting with mescaline. By college, there was pot and after college, pills. And it just kept going and going.
And listen: personally, I have never had much use for people who couldn’t get over their childhood but, see, all of this shit is still affecting my life right now. Every time I have to answer the question “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” “Any plans for Christmas?” The answer is always the same: nothing. I am doing nothing and I am going nowhere. Then after the holidays, there is the tragedy of my dating life.
Like a lot of men who frustrate the shit out of the women they date, when things begin to get emotional, intense and heavy, I lose all ability to communicate. This, of course, leads to more contention between myself and my lover and that is followed by my walking away and escaping the discomfort.
Most of the memes that my female friends like to post, focus on the fact that men are babies and they don’t know how to deal with emotions. I don’t necessarily know about other men, but I know for myself, the sadness, neglect and subsequent gaslighting of my childhood forced me to create what some might consider maladaptive survival skills.
The very thing that kept me from killing myself as a very young person, has managed to stick around long enough to bite me in the butt. The knack of being able to disassociate from my own feelings, the talent of plying myself with enough diversion to not feel anything, has helped me reach my early fifties utterly alone. Not to mention that the damage was so extensive that it took an appointment every week for TWO years just to get here. We’re just scratching the surface.
The good news? Once I was able to get this off my chest during my appointment on Wednesday, all the fight had gone out of me. I was so tired from the spiral of anger, that I just let it go. It was necessary to look at, though. I needed to allow myself to mourn for that little kid who sat up in that room waiting for someone to ask what was wrong.
After forty years, I needed to be that for myself. Like in some strange way, I was the one who sat on the edge of that bed and asked.
I see you little Billy Manus . Thank you for your gifts and sharing.
I have dated/married alcoholics/para-alcoholics my ENTIRE life. I never understood why. I attended AlAnon for years, off and on, until I finally heard what I needed to hear, "it's not them, it's YOU!) in 2019. My sponsor then mentioned "Adult Children of Alcoholics (AND dysfunction)" and I found my way back to ME for the first time since 1981! OMG doing the work is hard, but I feel absolutely GREAT!