I’ve known some people who have serious rage and anger problems, and I’ve seen how this leads to a lot of self-destructive behavior as well as unimaginably cruel behavior. For instance, I have an uncle who was a very vindictive, mean-spirited man. When my mother’s sister first married him and had a baby, they didn’t have any money, so they would sometimes stay at our house, and my uncle would sometimes pinch my cousin in his crib to make him cry. When my cousin was a little older, my sister and I caught him trying to get my cousin to put sand in the gas tank of our go-cart. Later when I was about 11, I saw him masturbating my cousin in our backyard. My cousin was about 5 at the time. My uncle saw me, and I’ll never forget the sneer he had on his face. He wanted me to see what he was doing, and he wanted to hurt me and his son. My uncle wasn’t sexually interested in his son or me. He was being hateful. I simply put the incident out of my mind for years. I never talked about it. Just like I never talked about a lot of the other crazy things that I saw and experienced when I was a kid.
My uncle is developmentally disabled. He has the mind of an 8 or 9-year-old, and he’s been mad at the world for most of his life. My father told me what it was like for my uncle when he was growing up. He never knew his father, and back in the ’50s, a kid without a father was stigmatized. His mother was also developmentally disabled. My father told me that she used to go to the outhouse without bothering to shut the door, and she was almost always sitting there doing her business as the school bus went by. The kids would laugh and make fun of her, and she would merely wave at them. My father also told me that the kids were mercilessly cruel to my uncle because he was developmentally disabled--the word was “retarded” back then--he didn’t have a father, and his mother was odd and did things people didn’t understand. And he became a bitter, hateful man. His son, my cousin, is also developmentally disabled, and he’s become alcoholic. He’s also had a couple of children by different women--women who aren’t exactly high functioning by the way--and he doesn’t have the means to take care of them emotionally or financially.
Most of my mother’s family was in some way out of it. Many of them were scary people. And my mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. I was subjected to fundamentalism from my father’s side of the family. They tended to be more stable, but their love was conditional. Lots of rules. Lots of preaching. Lots of condemnation. I sometimes felt physically unsafe when I was around my mother’s people. Most of them lived in an old coal camp outside of town, and it was a very rough place. I hated going there, but my mother insisted on visiting every Sunday afternoon for years. When I was around my father’s family, I usually felt emotionally unsafe. These people looked for fault, and they would berate you when they found it. So I saw a lot of crazy stuff when I was a kid. And most of it went unexplained. And when I went to school, I was the shy, weird sissy boy. The only person who seemed to accept me and appreciate me for who I am was my mother, and she lived in her own world most of the time.
Of course I had my own anger issues, but it took me a while to deal with it because I spent my childhood braced for the unexpected, and I didn’t have any rational person to talk to about emotions. But I was smart enough to seek therapy the first chance I got, and that saved me. I started listing all of these things that happened to my therapist, and eventually--it took more than a year--she stopped me during a session and bluntly asked me if I was angry. The question took me by surprise because I never really considered it before. Anger wasn’t an emotion I was allowed to have. Anger was defiance. Anger was accusatory. Anger was mean and nasty. I didn’t want to be angry. But my therapist told me that if she were in my shoes, she would be angry. And I learned that you have to acknowledge your anger before you can deal with it.
I can now admit that I was angry, and I still am angry from time to time. I’m even filled with rage sometimes. But I deal with it. One of the things that helps is that I have the capacity to reflect on the complexity of life. I know my mother couldn’t help being ill. I know my father was not equipped to cope with having a mentally ill wife. I know what kind of environment my mother’s family came from--the depth of ignorance and poverty. I know the Bible thumpers in my father’s family were echoing what they had heard, and the judgment game was something they learned and picked up before they had a chance to think about it.
I also know that even though I’m a mess, I’m doing a lot better than many of my relatives. I’m not an alcoholic. I’m not a drug addict. I’ve never held up a store, ran over anyone while drunk, or raped anyone. I’m also still alive, and many of them are dead. (One cousin didn’t just kill himself, he blew himself up along with his entire apartment building. Thankfully, no one else was hurt. Talk about uncontrolled rage.) I know that life is hard for many people, so hard. Unbelievably and unimaginably hard. And I know that much of the time there are no easy answers or simple solutions. I’ve also known people who some might call evil and despicable, and on some days I might agree with them, but I grew up with them, and I caught glimpses of their humanity and the enormous pain they endured, pain no one has ever even attempted to sooth.
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