Wolfgang von Skeptik

MY WORST CHRISTMAS EVER: THE PRELUDE (I)

THE EMOTIONAL COALS AND switches I found in my stocking this Christmas were mostly the self-inflicted consequences of a diabolically insidious form of dishonesty – that infinite folly we humans call Hope, further perverted by weakness into Denial: the most convincing proof of Original Sin I have yet encountered. My mother, father and stepmother are all long dead – my father since 1971, my stepmother since 1982 and my mother since 1995 – but the legacy of their abusiveness (and my own denial-intensified difficulties in dealing with that legacy) will probably not die until I am myself naught but ashes scattered on running water.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never been in denial about the scars my mother inflicted on me, but until this past year – until I had a chance to experience it in all its malignant fullness – the magnitude of the contempt my father bequeathed to me through his sons and daughters and kinfolk remained beyond my ability to comprehend. His abhorrence was too violent, too huge, and – just as he always said – I was too weak and too afraid to confront it. Until now: this writing, which is in two parts, is thus an amends with myself and others, a penance, perhaps even a step toward the ultimately greater healing of more pointed honesty.

Which is not to let my mother off the proverbial hook. Nor myself: probably the only reason I was never in denial about my mother’s behavior is that I had no choice but to accept it at face value, especially the campaigns of in-person or telephonic hatefulness with which she assaulted every woman who ever came into my life for more than a night or a weekend. I was forced to accept these infuriating onslaughts merely because they were the byproduct of my mother’s madness and there was thus absolutely nothing I could do to stop them or even defend against them. For that very reason – my mother’s insanity and the spitefulness it so often bred and the fact her family mostly refused to protect me (or anyone else) from it and the corollary fact it was exactly analogous to living with hurricanes or under a volcano or atop a seismically active fault – I knew it was absurd to expect anything else. I also knew it was hopeless to imagine even for a second my mother would not eventually win: that is, pointless for me to entertain so much as a scintilla of hope my mother would not succeed in driving off any woman who might have imagined herself enamored of me.

My mother did just that with both my wives – my second wife the one woman who (briefly) believed herself enough fond of me to conceive our child, a child who is no doubt better off for having been born dead and thus spared the parenting of beings too emotionally crippled for the task. (Else why – were my wives themselves not emotionally defective – would they have been drawn to me in the first place?) My mother also frightened off every other woman I became involved with, until I finally gave up the whole notion of romantic involvement: whatever attraction a woman might feel for me, it could not possibly ever be powerful enough to resist my mother’s unavoidable presence in the relational equation, specifically my mother’s antagonistic onslaughts that – thanks to Alexander Graham Bell – could span an entire continent.

But the bottom line here is that my mother was crazy – hatefully crazy, yes, but crazy nevertheless – and like all crazy persons, her only power was the power of disruption. And I would again be guilty of the sin of denial if I did not also make it clear all these women she drove out of my life would almost certainly have eventually abandoned me anyway, my mother’s antagonism not withstanding. As I wrote on Christmas Eve, I am simply not sufficiently loveable to be worth the trouble of enduring the rabid onslaughts of a crazy relative. Indeed I am the human equivalent of a dog no one wanted, and the only times I have gotten in trouble in my life are the occasions that, for one reason or another – invariably some physical or emotional weakness – I have deluded myself into forgetting that fact – another form of denial. In the final analysis I cannot not-forgive my mother, and I now pray she has found peace in the hereafter.

My father is quite another story. He was unquestionably sane, logical, brilliant, and as a Mensa he claimed an IQ of 180, 45 points brighter than me. He was the product of some of America’s finest private schools, and he was to have attended Gill University in Toronto, but the Crash of 1929 wiped out his family’s fortune and left him and his mother utterly destitute, which endowed him with both a consuming bitterness against capitalism and a fanatically unforgiving attitude toward human weakness of any kind.

His loathing of me – more contempt than hatred – was without bottom, and the manner in which he engineered its metastasis throughout his offspring and kin is as sadistically cunning as anything I have encountered. From 1945 onward – from the time he failed in his effort to abandon me in a Virginia orphanage – he treated me with nothing but scorn, as if I were the most repugnant creature he had ever met. Admittedly I was damaged goods – very badly damaged goods, damaged beyond repair, in fact – as is any child who has somehow survived a mother’s attempt on his or her life. And my father, who had consulted with a child psychologist, clearly understood the source, magnitude and depth of my wounds. But it did not matter: he simply did not care. I was an embarrassment, a “problem child,” a bad investment, and just as he would later deny me any and all financial aid for college (pointedly telling me I was “not worth it”), so in 1948 he would refuse to squander any of his hard-earned money on obtaining psychological help for someone who was so patently beyond salvation. If I did not find the strength to overcome life’s setbacks, too bad – my failure would merely supply additional proof of the inferiority of the unwanted creature spawned by the miasma of my mother’s womb. My father already regarded me as hopelessly stupid: hence his favorite pejorative for me, “goon boy.” He also considered me genetically deficient, something better to have been discarded in an abortionist’s garbage can: “You’re just like your mother,” he often said. “You have shit in your blood.”

Moreover I was a physical weakling, not only small for my age but woefully uncoordinated (another symptom of dyslexia), and I was thus abysmally inept at the feats of skill so important to building self-esteem during male childhood, which burdened me with a frightened reluctance to compete – a reluctance my father constantly belittled as cowardice. But why try to catch a ball when I knew I was so uncoordinated, I could not reliably prevent the ball from smashing me in the face? Why climb a tree when I knew I would lose my balance and fall? Though eventually I would play junior-high football – not out of any love for the sport, but rather in a hopeless and thus pathetic attempt to win some respect from my father – my father nevertheless demonstrated his unending scorn: he refused to attend even one of my games.

My father’s attempt to dump me in the Virginia orphanage was a telling enough example of family dynamics it deserves further description, not the least because I believe a small degree of the hatefulness my father expressed 20 years later toward his third and final wife (my stepmother, and the mother of the younger four of my half-sisters) was an expression of his lingering suspicion she had helped me escape the orphanage trap. As indeed she did – probably because of some maternal instinct toward me my father later managed to bully her out of with his constant insistence I was worthless, inferior, even criminal. Which my father accomplished in less than two years: when I was six, I was with three or four other children who lit a tiny fire – a child’s-handful of crumpled oak leaves – in the three-foot-high space beneath a Florida house. Of course the fire was ill-advised; much of what children do is ill-advised. But my father welcomed the fire as a rationale for my total damnation: he convinced my stepmother I had been the ringleader of a band of arsonists, and that our intent had been to burn the house down. None of this was true; it was winter, and some of these kids were not allowed inside their homes (save for meals) during daylight hours. The fire, not only scarcely larger than a candle-flame but in a hole carefully scooped out of the sand, was for warmth. We were under the house to get out of the rain, and I was there merely because the other children were my playmates. But my father nevertheless triumphed: he seized upon this incident to convince my stepmother I was not only burdensome but evil, and soon the damage was done. From then on – predictably – my stepmother and I grew ever more distant and ever more mutually distrustful.

For a time, however, my stepmother was very kind to me. And whatever our final differences, she died an undeservedly ugly death of Huntington’s Chorea, and I pray her soul rests in peace.

My stepmother knew I had witnessed the struggle between my mother and father on the night my father saved my life – a struggle that was truly mortal combat, as horrifically violent as anything I have ever seen in all my 64 years. Its details are etched forever on my consciousness. My mother, disarmed of the butcher knife with which she had intended to consummate her Summer Solstice Eve sacrifice, tried to strangle my father with his neck-tie, a solid-color, probably rough-silk neck-tie that was one of his favorites, an attractive shade of middle green. But my mother yanked so hard she jammed the tie against its knot and then, as my mother and father wrestled and fought on the living room floor, she chewed the tie to ribbons, her frothy spittle darkening its ragged edges. When the Roanoke police arrived, it took my father plus six male officers plus a neighborhood MD with a horse-syringe full of sedative to subdue her.

Somehow – I know nothing of my stepmother’s girlhood or young adulthood beyond the fact she came from mid-level Virginia aristocracy – she understood those events had left me terrified beyond terror, and she empathized accordingly. She was of course right: I had shrunk into emotional numbness and physical near-paralysis, huddling in the corner of the living-room sofa until the police carried my mother out strapped to a litter. Despite her bonds and shackles, my mother was singing, as if in triumph: “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” a hideously off-key rendition of an otherwise-good song – a song I have ever since been unable to bear hearing – my mother’s breath-strained gasping effort no doubt motivated by some demented word-salad association with her maternal grandfather’s role as a Northern hero in the Civil War. But then my mother was gone – the sudden distance I felt from her was truly unbridgeable – and the other adults had all stepped outside for final consultations with the police before my mother was hauled off to jail. For a moment I was utterly alone – as indeed I would be, metaphorically speaking, for the remainder of my life. At that point our dog Cocoa must have slipped into the living room, taken my arm in her mouth, led me to her bed in the maid’s pantry and nosed me into its doggy-scented safety. Or perhaps I somehow got myself to Cocoa’s bed; that part I no longer remember. In any case, when I finally slept that night, it was on and under Cocoa’s blankets, and only because I was secure in the knowledge Cocoa ferociously stood guard over me, snarling with bared fangs and raised hackles whenever anyone approached. Cocoa was a big big dog, a huge English setter of that old-time stature seldom seen today, probably close to 90 pounds, and her protectiveness was formidable as any Rottweiler’s. Cocoa would let no one – not even my father – near me until the next day.

I was of course still in shock from all of this when maybe six weeks later the social worker (perhaps the most coldly intrusive human I have ever met) came to measure me for the orphanage. My stepmother clearly knew of my befuddled state too. But my stepmother (at that time, still merely my father’s secretary, thus technically only my stepmother-to-be) in this one instance apparently answered more to her conscience than to the demands of my father, and she somehow managed to warn me not to disclose in detail any of my feelings about what had happened – especially my sense I was now aggressively unwanted, or my newfound belief that Cocoa was God and Santa Clause and the Great Mother all in one – the only dependable protector left in my entire world. I heeded my stepmother’s warning and thus I lied, repeatedly assuring the social worker all was well. Thus too I escaped the buggery and other forms of soul-destroying brutality that are said to be characteristic of the orphanage life.

A little more than four decades later, reflecting in 1987 on the dire consequences of that and every other choice I ever made, I would realize that my life is undeniably accursed – that the outcome would have been grim and bad no matter what direction I turned in. Admittedly I was clinically depressed at the time – the trigger of my depression was the fire that had destroyed all my work – but even without the fire, I had every reason to be depressed: such is the legacy (according to all folklore of every culture) of the would-be sacrificial victim who by skill or happenstance manages to escape death. But even knowing that, I cannot not-forgive my mother.

And as I noted in my Christmas Eve piece, my mother’s relatives were generally kindly toward me – mostly distant, but kindly nevertheless – or if not kindly, at least they were never aggressively hostile, as my father’s people so often were. But there it is: Apart from my mother (who because of her madness remained unpredictably, explosively violent until her final confinement), my mother’s people never once laid a hand on me nor ever habitually battered me with deliberately hurtful insults. It was always my father who was predominantly abusive – as free with the back of his hand or a steel ruler (or the one-inch wooden dowel he once beat me with until it broke) as he was with calculated belittlement. It was thus predictably my father’s children – in fact all but one of my seven half-siblings he sired on other wives – who kept alive his contempt. Hence the self-induced blindness of denial for which I cannot really forgive myself: that I did not allow myself to realize this distinction between my father’s people and my mother’s people until far too late to act upon it. I owe my mother’s family a great apology, one I can never voice save in prayer, because most of my mother’s relatives are already dead. The ancient lesson is once again obvious: carpe diem – seize the day, before it is evermore too late. (To be continued.)

Posted by Loren at December 30, 2004 05:03 AM