01 - "Past is Prologue" ("The Daughters of The Dust" by Julie Dash)

© Miriam A. Mason, 2014

At my father's memorial, a few of his colleagues listened to my stories and research on my kids' early onset autism, they encouraged me to write a book.  A sweet longtime friend of my parents, said to me, "I expect a book one day soon."

Surely this will not be the book she expected.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/HippieInConservativeClothing

 I instead have spent the better part of my adult life trying to figure out why every direction I turned further uninspired me to aspire to "greater things" which I know I am certainly both bright enough and accomplished enough to have done. Once I had my kids and they developed early onset autism, I knew what my work was, have been driven to help them recover with great success, and it has been the most inspiring thing I have ever done working to help them heal. But -- just within me -- there is this nagging feeling that I didn't live up to my potential and at long last I have finally figured out why.

I also want to take a moment and say that academia was not responsible for my father's behavior towards me, and that parents who are academics who also give their kids unconditional love and support them in their interests and who do not view their children as extension of themselves are lovely people, and I've had the pleasure of meeting many of them.  It proved a point to me that not all families in academia were like mine.  Until then, I'd had rather tunnel vision.  I wish, given the interesting academic environment I had grown up in, I had had more opportunities to explore it without the constant unending company of my father's directives and powerful internal voice woven into all my experiences.  I was to observe the world from his perspective.  My perspective was not a player, and any time I tried to make it a player, I paid for it, always with violence, verbal and physical.

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I also know it was not either of my parent's intentions to harm their children. I genuinely believe they never figured it out, what they were doing wrong. On the contrary, I believe they thought perhaps more of what they were doing might be better. They had no tools and were terrified of what people thought of them and the potential shame their children would [surely] bring them. They didn't realize that sacrificing their relationships with their children from early childhood on would be the cause of such damage.  Perhaps not consciously, anyway.  Somewhere deep down they must have known something, and just never developed that part of themselves.  On the rare occasion they even acknowledged their lack of parenting abilities to me personally. 

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I mention these items so that the usual "but she was your mother and he was your father" comments are completely powerless and ignorant to hold on to. The size and precedence of a human being does not make that human being superior in any way to a smaller person who was born later, contrary to popular cultural beliefs and mores.  When parents treat a child poorly, and our culture backs up the parent, sight unseen, without ever looking at the real picture, without hearing out the child and giving the child a unique voice, the culture is simply furthering the injury the parents have put forward on the child.  This doesn't mean the culture is right. On the contrary, it means the culture doesn't understand. It means most of us have never questioned the value of "old wisdoms" such as punishment will make a child do better and respect is only earned, therefore a child is completely without any worthiness of respect.  I am here to say that respect is not earned. It is a human right, from birth. 

 In my family, respect only flowed in one direction, upwards.  Daring ask for any respect in return meant to meet with shaming and ridicule.

"Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you." ~ Wayne Dyer

Sadly, under the above definition, which I have come over the years to believe is the truth, there wasn't much real love going on in our family. It was continually tainted by expectation and condition. Empathy, as such, did not exist in my family, it was something I had to learn later in life.

As well, I had to find my own voice later in life.  Before then, I only had glimpses of it as it struggled under the weight of my father's louder, more insistent, more self-hating, more critical voice.  I have found my voice.  And I have something to say.