We all tell ourselves stories about ourselves and our lives and the world around us, how we fit into it and where we belong. These stories are necessarily subjective, they have to be. I have been making excuses for my parents and now for my brother for a long time, accepting that I was somehow less than they are. Allowing them to bulldoze any boundaries I might try to hold, shaming me when they disapproved of my thoughts or words or actions, or efforts in the world. I was pretty much a person who was supposed to see the world, do in the world, perceive in the world exactly the way my parents approved of. The stories I told myself by the time I was 15 were not stories I had developed, but the stories of my parents. Especially of my father. My own stories were in submission and lower than his (and silly and worthless any how). I didn't even hear them anymore. I was and had become the echo.
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To my father, there was no such thing as being born worthy of respect and love and nurturing. It simply wasn't in his world view. Nobody is worthy of respect unless it is earned, and by earned, I mean, approved by him. To my father you must have been tested, and hurt, and competed with in order to be worthy of some sort of love and acceptance. You must think with his ideas and if you deviate or point out an obvious flaw in his logic, attitude or behavior, you could then be slapped and sent to your room.
These were the boundaries. You stayed in your room until you were ready to swallow all your own feelings, words, thoughts and opinions and then you could come out only to apologize at your angry parents in order to have some semblance of acceptance back into the family. Except apologies were never enough. Their anger lasted for months and even years, so the apology was only to have them hold on to that anger for days on end; to never really let anything you did go, always to bring it up, to add to the pile of shame, poor character traits and failures on your part.
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In their attempts to feel powerful themselves, they steamrolled over their kids.
I really didn't have parents, as I define parents. I have spent time mourning the loss of what I didn't have. My estranged sister and I agree on one thing and that is that our parents were never really parents. It was a competition with dad at all times, to outdo him, to outdo anybody else, win, argue and win your argument. His emotions of anger, frustration, impatience and intolerance were allowed, ours were not while in this competition. We were either laughed at, yelled at, or criticized. And as I posted previously, my mother was all about us being bad kids, and always the ones who were wrong.
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My father competed against his own children it seemed like constantly. There was always a power struggle going on.
“Let me tell you what I just heard. Talk, talk, talk, I. Talk, talk, talk, I. Well, what about me?” ~ Gena Showalter, The Darkest SeductionAnother story that stands out as a one of the countless examples of how my father's voice has ended up forming my inauthentic feelings about something I really didn't know I felt about: my father disapproved of musicals. He felt huge disdain and contempt for them. He thought they were an unrealistic, gaudy and a vulgar representation of what my father said were too serious events to be breaking into song suddenly. Shakespeare, yes, musicals, no. Speaking plays, okay, musicals, not okay. So when I was cast in a few of the musicals at high school, my father refused to attend. Never mind supporting his daughter, not even a glimmer in his eye. He didn't want to discuss it with me, he didn't want to hear about it, he didn't approve of it and he therefore withdrew his approval from me and hardly spoke to me during those musical productions. His method was lots of silent treatment and avoidance. My mother attended, at least. I was grateful to her for that.
But for being in those plays, I felt foolish and as though I had done a wasteful thing with my choice, my time, my energy and effort. I felt my excitement was ridiculed and belittled. The fun had been drained out of musicals for me and to this day, I have trouble with them, even though I have no personal reason of my own to feel that way.
My father's voice nearly destroyed that genre for me. He couldn't screw up "Fiddler On The Roof" for me though, no one could. I tried to show him "Fiddler" once and he made it about 15 minutes in and discovered he was actually enjoying himself, so he turned it off and spent the next 20 minutes criticizing it. It's too bad about the genre, though. I might have actually liked them if given an opportunity to explore my own mind instead. I've instead internalized his distaste for them, because they feel like shameful gaudy things to me now. And that's a loss. I'm just not comfortable sitting in most musicals. Never will enjoy Les Miserables, for example, tried... couldn't do it.
In fact, if I expressed a love for a kind of music, I was teased and ridiculed and that went for my extended family as well, especially my father's brother. They both seemed to take great pleasure in degrading the things that inspired me musically. What is that?
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Or in the case of a particular movie, my father never once trusted my assessment. I told him at 17 that if he really wanted the best scare ever, with some of the best writing and science fiction, he needed to see "Alien." And I also recommended "The Terminator." He scoffed at me at both recommendations. A year or so later, he calls me up and tells me that one of his *colleagues* had strongly recommended both those movies to him and now did I want to bring them over and watch them with him? Of course I said yes. And I did. I wanted to please my dad. I wanted him to listen to me because I was his daughter. But no... it had to be a colleague. I openly admit to enjoying watching him squirm during those movies, asking me what was going to happen while I grinned with my mouth sealed shut. He even wrote a poem about "Alien." Never published, but I still have it. It's wonderful, and so very much from the little boy he was inside, the little guy who didn't ridicule his own strong emotions. I wish he'd let that little boy out more often.
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After that, he listened, mostly, to my movie recommendations. One funny incident, I recommended the movie "Contact" with Jodie Foster in it. He really enjoyed it, dare I say loved it. He was very pleased with the full circle the movie had taken, a strong quiet closure at the end. He was delighted with the story and the acting and the direction and the film making and the concept. And he was especially enamored with the line, "So beautiful! So beautiful! They should have sent a poet," when she is traveling in space and sees beauty she cannot describe. My dad looked at me and smiled with that glorious look he could give when he realized you really "got" it about him and what he liked. Then the movie concluded with the dedication to Carl Sagan. And he saw Carl Sagan had written the book and been adviser throughout the movie. My father didn't like Carl Sagan, and that was the end of that. Suddenly, the movie wasn't any good any more. A was wrong with this, and B was wrong with that, and they took it too far with Z and X and yadi yadi yadi.
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Why did he do this? It could only be his ego. He couldn't stand being wrong about things. And it isn't with a light heart when I say he exceeded meeting 5 or more of the standards by which narcissists are measured. Quite a few more than 5, actually. His internal levels of fear and shame must have been enormous. Unbearable. Which doesn't excuse him, but does provide me with a richer understanding of him.
Both parents missed my high school graduation, they really didn't care about it. They were happy about the piece of paper, but unsupportive about the event or me being there. My pain was intense that day as I watched all the other proud, supportive loving parents taking pictures of their kids and cheering them on with great delight, shrieking with pride and joy when their kid's name was called. Also their brothers and sisters were there. Mine weren't. My sister was off going to school and my brother, who knows where he was? I wasn't even a blip on his radar. Here were all these supportive parents who believed in and supported their kids. My parents essentially said, "Okay, that was easy, now do more because I won't pay attention to you otherwise." Or "so what? Big Deal.Try Berkeley."
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Another example, and at a much younger age, I was allowed to take modern dance and ballet, but my father thought tap dancing was loud and vulgar and therefore I was never allowed to do it. Actually, allow me to rephrase that last statement: my parents *placed* me into modern dance and ballet. I was not asked if I wanted to do it. The decision was made for me. As were the arbitrary boundaries that my father was so insistent about about the type of dance I was to take. My life was filled with his decisive limits and boundaries, and he was often busy lecturing me about why these boundaries were justified. All the while holding no respect for my boundaries whatsoever. I was afraid of my father after I was about 18 months old. And to him, it felt we were most of the time just irritating. Only when he was in the right frame of mind, could he play, and then his play was painful, competitive and rough. More on that later.
Anything that was my personal love, if it didn't meet with his rigid standards, I was ridiculed, my interest and love for it were minimized at every opportunity and I was told I was too sensitive about it, and to have a stiff upper lip. This is a narcissistic method of manipulation known as Gaslighting. I was always having my emotional experiences called into question. As if they had the right to dictate how I should be feeling about a particular thing. I learned quite early on not to trust myself. The "you're too sensitive, I was just joking, you're taking things too seriously, Miriam, you're overreacting" where all judgment calls on my father's part which trained me to always second guess my own feelings.
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The fact is. A. Feeling. Cannot. Be. Wrong. It just is what it is. And no one on Earth has the right to tell another person how they feel about any thing. I was so well-trained, I learned how to completely disassociate my own feelings and adopt my father's instead. Because then, I was within the The Family Illusion and a favored beloved child. Gaslighting is also a common practice from men to women. Girl children definitely bear the hardest impact from gaslighting from fathers and this sets them up to accept it from partners later on.
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Further, my father's favorite mantra in front of me was "Children should be seen and not heard." This seemed ever more prevalent for girl children whose voices were to be "ever sweet and low" as Lear had described Cordelia in the play. Dad said he did it in jest, but his actions did not suggest a joke. As well, his sense of humor was always at the expense of another human being, often one of his girl children. These are beings much smaller, less developed (theoretically) and still in great need of being nurtured and valued for just being who they were. We were easy and frequent targets, I think especially myself, being the youngest, and my sister, for her awareness of and dislike for the attempts at controlling her. There wasn't a day I lived in their family that I lived without fear and shame as just part of my daily breath, water and food. It just came with the territory.
I watched my mother yell at and slap my sister hard across the face because my sister was kind to me one night and let us stay and play late, because *I* had begged her to. Mom didn't want to hear it, so my sister took that slap for me. This was no small slap. My sister's cheek was bright red, her face whipped around to the side, this was an adult slapping with the full force of their adult anger on a child who was probably no more than 12 or 13. This was how it was at our house. I will never forget the constant state of dread of my mother's temper after that.
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