Wolfgang von Skeptik

MY WORST CHRISTMAS EVER

OF COURSE I WISH everyone a Merry Christmas. But I don’t feel at all merry this year, and instead of hiding that fact as we have all been brought up to do (lest we somehow blemish someone else’s almighty Christmas parade of materialistic wallowing), I’m going to write about my feelings, and I warn you in advance that while it may at times achieve poetic power, it will not be pretty. Not at all. Or maybe it will include some beauty by default – because in truth this IS somewhat like the writing of a poem: an emotional outpouring leading I know not where, an electronic nakedness that, good or bad, is my Christmas gift to those of you who read this site and may sometimes wonder about who its author really is, and what he might be like in person.

One of the very few positive things I can say about “my” family is that no matter how much my father and stepmother wished I were dead or that I had never been born – and it was painfully clear this was their normal attitude toward me – they also believed Christmas should be a time of familial solidarity and good cheer. The resultant amnesty, typically from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, was intended only for my half-siblings, but by proximity it included even me. It was thus a truly blessed time – the only time of year I was not subjected to daily reminders of how infinitely resented and utterly despised I was in that household – and a sense of the emotional specialness of the holiday season has stayed with me ever since. It was powerful enough even to momentarily counteract the clinical depression that laid me low during the late 1980s and – denied treatment as I was by Washington state’s feminist quota-mongers – beset me well into the 1990s. Thus even during those years of psychological near-paralysis I could manage to arise from the depths of despair long enough to celebrate Christmas in my own way. Because I cannot justify paying someone to kill a tree for my seasonal pleasure, I would go into the woods with my dogs and gather evergreen boughs that had been downed by the Pacific Northwest’s solstice-time storms, then trim the boughs and weave them into a dining-table centerpiece I decorated with blue glass Christmas balls. I would surround the centerpiece with the faux-presents of the cards sent me by my few remaining friends and the dwindling number of kinfolk who chose to acknowledge my existence. Merry Christmas.

Often – not every year but often – I would light a Christmas Eve candle, especially during the decades I was too alienated from the Church to attend even a once-a-year Midnight Mass, and when I lived alone with my dogs in the country, I would set the candle in a window, there to burn all night. But this year my despair is too deep to climb out of. Thus I have not done any of these things, and I will probably not do any of them ever again.

There is more I need to explain: I put quotes around “my” whenever I use it as an adjective modifying “family” because in truth I have had no family of my own since the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945. I had turned five that March. On the solstice eve, my mother intended to murder me; she failed only because my father happened to arrive home from work about five minutes early – an error he obviously regretted, because once my mother was out of his life (granted sanctuary by her parents and ultimately sent to a funny-farm), my father promptly tried to dump me in a state orphanage, an effort that failed only because the local court would not allow him to shirk his parental responsibility. Thus when my father divorced my mother and wed his secretary, I remained under my father’s roof, never again anything more than an unwelcome burden, and constantly belittled accordingly – save during the Christmas-holiday amnesty of course. Had I been female, it might have been half a Cinderella tale, unappreciated chores and all, though without ever a Prince Charming, and most certainly without any happy ending.

My birth-mother’s people became understandably distant too – given the values of the 1940s, the matrimonial failure I represented was a huge embarrassment and a monstrous social liability as well – but, even so, my mother’s people were also kind (a quality in which my father’s kin were utterly deficient), though I would not have an opportunity to appreciate this fact until my mother was again a free woman and got summertime custody of me – something that terrified me at first (for obvious reasons) but with which I made peace merely because I had no alternative.

During that first summer of compulsory visitation, 1948, my mother’s people learned to their great dismay that I could not read even after two years in school: I am dyslexic, and my teachers were trying to teach me to read by word-recognition, which is as futile as trying to teach a blind man color, and which had given my father and stepmother opportunities aplenty to demonstrate their bottomless vexation at my existence. My difficulties (and the mental retardation they seemed to indicate) had already prompted my father to nick-name me “goon boy,” a pejorative he applied mercilessly whenever I did not measure up to his standards – in other words, constantly (though never during the Christmas amnesty). But an aunt, my mother’s older sister – soon and ever-after my favorite relative of all time – rescued me from my reading difficulties, hiring a tutor who taught me phonics: by the end of Third Grade, I was reading at a 12th Grade level. Indeed but for her I would probably still be semi-literate at best, and my gratitude is beyond description: my aunt gave me not only my entire career in journalism, but my entire intellect as well.

The very best part of those summers with my mother and her people was the fact my maternal grandparents had a “cottage” – a hunting and fishing cabin – on the South Branch of Michigan’s Au Sable River, then (as now) one of the world’s legendary trout streams, and in the long-ago years of my boyhood, a region blessedly near to being genuine wilderness, beyond the reach of telephones and electricity, well-water sweet and outhouse-primitive. It was there my grandfather and my uncle taught me to fish for trout, and it was there I learned how to make the woods and water my sanctuary. All that was missing was my dog – the big white and brown English setter Cocoa who had become my sole friend and protector on that awful Summer Solstice Eve in 1945 when I learned that no humans (not even one’s mother) can ever be trusted, Cocoa who was later “put to sleep” – killed for protecting me from one of my stepmother’s rages. I remember the Christmas after Cocoa was executed: 1946. I wanted Cocoa back. I missed her so much I sometimes cried myself to sleep – ever fearful my father would discover my tears and spank me for being a “sissy.” I wanted Cocoa back but I was afraid to say that and so instead I asked for “a toy dog on wheels.” Merry Christmas.

And I suppose it was then I began to know my fate. Or maybe it was a few years later on one of those long slow summer days I spent as a solitary teenager on the Au Sable, wading the river down from the High Banks or Rainbow Pool, fishing its holes and the edges of its currents and relishing the deep cool shade of the overhanging cedars, casting across the clear cold water with an eight-foot Tonkin-cane fly-rod, utterly content with my solitude but nevertheless wishing with all my youthful lustfulness for a girl, a Love – yet already knowing sure as moonrise that truly being loved by a fellow human was something this life would never allow me to experience. For in the human species, even a mother’s love is conditional and contingent. In the human realm, one has to earn love, even from one’s mother. One has to measure up, if one is to be loved. And I didn’t. Though I have never understood the exact nature of my failings, I didn’t measure up at age 5, I didn’t measure up at age 16, I didn’t measure up ever. And now it is too late, so it really doesn’t matter any more – which is no doubt precisely why I can talk about it.

The one thing in this life of which I am absolutely certain is that the circumstances of my childhood left me so psychologically damaged that my quest for love – for the love and affection of humans, that is, including the romantic love of women – was doomed before it ever started. There is no greater or more incontrovertible proof that one is both unloved and un-loveable than the ultimate rejection that is expressed when a mother turns murderous toward her own child. And woe to the child who survives: no psychotherapy on earth can ever heal his wounds, and no amount of makeup will ever hide his scars enough to enable him to be loveable. I knew that bitter truth even as a teenager, but as teenagers we are seldom wise enough to recognize our wisdom. Thus I allowed a succession of false-tongued therapists to assure me my wounds could be healed – that I could be made loveable to women – when in fact I knew better, when in fact the sole purpose of all such therapists is to heal their own egos (or finances) instead. Thus too I filled my life with false hopes – until a long succession of failed relationships finally convinced me, in my 38th year, that the truth of my ultimate unloveability, the truth I had glimpsed as a teenager, was as inescapable as my own flesh and bone. In my 38th year, I at last admitted to myself the bitter truth that no woman had ever looked at me with love in her eyes. Now, in my 64th year, it is still true. No woman has ever looked at me with love in her eyes. Not even once. There, I have said it: I am simply too emotionally damaged, too emotionally crippled, too emotionally malformed. Too emotionally ugly.

(I should point out here that, based on what I have seen in my years as a social-issues writer, most of the traumas inflicted by abusive parents can be ameliorated. The murderous-mother syndrome seems to be the one absolute exception. The problem is that most shrinks hate to admit defeat. They take it personally when a condition is incurable. Hence they lie...)

With but two exceptions, I have lived by the too-damaged-to-be-loved truth ever since it became undeniable in 1978. One exception was long ago, my archetypical middle-aged man’s last-tango fling with a woman 22 years my junior: of course she broke my heart, but the woman – a tiny elfin-faced flame-haired sculptress – was truly brilliant and truly beautiful, and even now I believe the pleasure of her company was well worth the subsequent anguish of her rejection. But for the second exception I have not even the excuse of lust; age relieved me of that burden years ago, and I was merely (moronically) hopeful of human companionship in my declining years, this with someone I had known since childhood and thus trusted, as much as I can trust any human: hence the brief relationship that ended with my forcible ouster from my 11-year country home – the ouster that maliciously allowed me so little time to move, I was forced into “senior citizen” housing, the restrictions of which not only compelled me to give up my dogs, but prohibit me from ever having dogs again, and confine me here with no hope of exit save death. Merry Christmas.

The same night in 1945 I learned that, among humans, even a mother’s love is conditional, I also learned that, among canines, love is always UNconditional. No matter how detestable I had become to my parents, Cocoa remained my protector, and she was faithful unto death. That utterly dependable faithfulness is characteristic of every dog I have ever known – or known of. It is no doubt why – a very tiny number of true friends excepted – I prefer the company of dogs to the company of humans. I think of dogs as very close to sacred, closer than anything else I know. They are my one reliable connection to the beyond-me – my link to both the Macrocosm and the Microcosm.

Having lived in close day-by-day contact with dogs for nearly 20 years, I know that dogs think in scents in the same way humans think in words. The name by which one dog knows another is in fact a smell, the perception of which is so subtle, no two dogs ever smell the same. We have vocabulary; dogs have scent. But dogs have no scent-equivalent (the canine form of literacy) that means “betrayal.” Treachery is unknown to dogs. Which, it seems to me, links the unconditional love we get from dogs with the unconditional love we (maybe, theoretically, hypothetically) get from Goddess, God or Jesus. The one is metaphor for the other – living metaphor, in fact, including metaphors for forgiveness and redemption. Not to mention the divine purpose of dogs, if indeed one believes in such a thing as divine purposefulness. Which sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.

Whether dogs are divinely purposeful or not, the simple fact is that I love dogs – I love them more than anything else in the world or out of it. I love their shape, their feel, their smell. I love their character and their absolute honesty and their sheer physicality and, most of all, their rough affectionateness.

Indeed I assumed I would never be parted from dogs. I assumed I would never be so confined in barrenness that I would be forbidden the wonderful ritual of love – the leaping bodies and cold-nosed kisses – with which my dogs always welcomed me home, whether I had been gone an hour or a day.

After the 1983 fire, when my two book manuscripts went up in smoke and all my photographs were burned to ash, I knew fate had not only denied me the brass ring forever, but had done so with particular cruelty, tearing it away just as it seemed within my grasp, and I knew that, so obviously was I accursed, I would never be allowed such opportunities again. Of course I plodded on, but I no longer expected anything in the way of recognition or reward – the fire had taken all those hopes from me already – and I sought only to survive, to make my own way with as little strife as possible. Even though I could imagine disasters aplenty, I never thought life would deny me dogs: their companionship afoot or in my car, the comforting sense of their watchful presence in or around my house, their warm bulk atop the covers beside me in bed at night, the thumping tails and canine grins that always signal morning wake-up time in a house where contented dogs live. But all this expression of love is gone from my life now, and because of my circumstances – chiefly the income limits that confine me here for the remainder of my years just as surely as if I were locked into some prison – it is gone forever. Denied dogs, I am denied the last vestige of any emotional reason to live. Denied dogs, I will never again be allowed to experience what it is to love and be loved, not in this life, and the unspeakably awful emptiness to which I am thus condemned is already shrinking me like some withering leaf: a man who once relished living, I am dwindling to a man who welcomes death. Yes, I wish you a Merry Christmas, but I hope you’ll understand if I decline your invitation to go caroling.

Posted by Loren at December 24, 2004 11:47 PM