Читать книгу The Forging and the Death of a Reflection - Dr. Peter J. Swartz Swartz - Страница 9

My father’s intentions were not, on the surface, designed to be purposefully hurtful.

He simply and utterly lacked awareness of what was happening for me,

or for most anyone else for that matter.

He was fabulously diligent in asserting his own way of being—markedly unaware of how it may have been impacting any other sentient being.

He was simply keeping track of his own priorities—the patterns so central to his own existence. Not only did it include things like keeping his shoes scrupulously polished or his car scrubbed inside and out, it also encompassed his disgusts, his dissatisfactions, his stinging views all circulating in a world only he could keep track of.

A hard worker bee assiduously cultivating his life-blood—never moved or interrupted by an empathic moment.

Center stage, with ducks in a row.

No one was immune.

My mother, a gifted and dedicated cook, after serving a lovely pot roast, could easily be victimized with a dinnertime remark,

“This meat is too wet,” accompanied by a look of disdain more fitting, I thought, for the hit and run death of somebody on a bicycle.

The critiques came easily for my father—shot from a grim but blank face.

It was his first and only nature.

He censored himself little.

And it was the bulk of what I ever knew or witnessed about him.

For me, there was no escape.

It was pretty much all there was to gather from him.

If anyone in the family was especially targeted by my father, it was most certainly my older brother. For him, comments and looks at the dinner table were augmented with some regularity by the addition of a moderate crack on the knuckles with the butt end of a butter knife.

The infraction hardly mattered.

(My brother parlayed that particular style of parenting into a lifetime of marijuana abuse.)

Surely it generated a profound reaction in my brother, but to me, in the moment, it turned into a brilliant education in fear.

And fear is a powerful anesthesia when it comes to knowing oneself.

I failed to pay attention to the details of my brother’s reaction, as my own parallel recoiling dominated the scene for me.

I wondered when I might encounter the same treatment.

It was an effective stimulus, even if indirectly delivered.

Dinnertime provided a wide array of its own standard drama night in and out.

My mother’s bachelor brother, my uncle, had lived with our family for most of his life. My mother cooked for him and laundered his clothes.

My uncle kept to his own quiet routines, arriving home from his construction job promptly at 5:00 pm.

My mother had dinner ready for him each weeknight. Alone at the table, head down, my uncle dutifully worked at his plate.

He rarely spoke.

No stories from the day or comments about any people were forthcoming. He actually bore a slight speech impediment evident when he tried to grunt hello or goodbye. His hands were likewise gnarled, from a construction work mishap.

I would sometimes acknowledge his presence with a brief comment on the woeful local baseball team.

My uncle usually, at least, acknowledged me with a full-mouthed nod. We were both somewhat secure in knowing that we shared the same interest in a sport and that the sharing would indeed be brief.

Brief was especially valued, because we also shared in the vague but palpably anxious anticipation of my father’s arrival home from his own workday, promptly at 5:20 pm.

My mother undoubtedly shared that anxious anticipation while she circled in the kitchen, none of us comfortable, none of us speaking about it.

My father’s entrance is characteristic and relentless.

It seems timed and well coordinated with the tail end of my uncle’s dinner.

My confusion is reinforced with each repeat of the drama.

I never understood the back-story of how those two men ended up living under the same roof.

Neither is there much immediate information to be learned from my father’s face.

I try to observe it, but it remains empty and coldly impassive.

There’s the brief glimpse of disgust flashed toward my uncle.

There’s no greeting to anyone.

Now the determined move to the living room happens.

Then there is the unfolding of the daily newspaper, the ultimate blockade of his face.

The entrance may be quiet, but my father’s message is loud:

“I do not eat dinner with him.

I will not even appear in the kitchen until he’s gone.

He and my wife are to be vaguely punished with my absence and my silence and my disdain for something or nothing committed long ago.

It will not be talked about.

It will never be forgiven.

It doesn’t matter what it was.

He is still here, and it is still a problem.

I do so hereby declare.”

With my uncle soon escaping off to his own room, dinner starts for the surviving family members.

That familiar disconnected feeling in my body and soul is silently and profoundly registered, as if forged with the sharpest and hottest steel.

My father, the first teacher for the soul, is charged with the simple task of merely noticing one small child—a simple recognition.

Having miserably failed this duty to notice, he leaves me standing, unrecognized.

I stand, but I stand shaken and without adequate awareness of what is happening around me.

I do the best I can.

I hope to be lucky.

I survive and try to go about the business of being a child.

I pay a price, unknown to me at the time.

The outcome?

I go on with my life lacking the ability to fully recognize, know, or value myself—most assuredly, the prerequisite skills critical for knowing happiness.

With no direct connection to myself, no solid images, only a growing, empty and dust-covered reflection, I lack full connection to other people and even to the natural world that surrounds me.

I cannot be fully present in any moment.

I cannot benefit from listening to my own voice.

I cannot sufficiently enjoy listening to another’s voice.

I cannot listen to the earth.

I have not learned or practiced how to do these things.

I cannot be ambitious.

There’s no internal hook to hang any ambition on.

I must struggle only to get by.

I will not know trust or safety or peace.

I will not know how to rely on myself or on others.

I do, however, come to know the void inside myself like a boxer must come to know what it’s like to be dizzy.

Soon, I will realize something is amiss and I will become very, very familiar, over time, with the price I must pay.

In a kind of bittersweet poetic justice, my father, that first teacher, having utterly failed to provide me with substantive recognition, will also pay a price himself.

It howls out from his own being, living in his own deficit, missing his own experience of trust or safety or peace.

What goes into this recognition I missed?

It’s not really that complicated.

This is what it could have sounded like to me, more or less, bits and pieces, different times, different days:

“I notice that you are here in this moment.”

“I see you here.”

“I know you are here.”

“I am here also.”

“We are here together now and in the future.”

“I think about you now and in many other moments of the day.”

“These thoughts about you are important to me.”

“I am willing to listen to you.”

“I will try to be patient.”

“I will attend to your needs as best I can.”

“My wish for you is that you will be mostly happy.”

“I have compassion for you and others as well.”

And this is what could have come from such recognition.

I could have said:

“I belong right here.”

“Right in this moment.”

“I have relief here.”

“I know a little about trust.”

“I know a little about safety.”

“I know a little about myself.”

“I don’t exist in a wish or a dream.”

“I don’t exist in merely a hope or a belief.”

“I don’t exist in fear or hurt—not even a fear or a hurt from yesterday or tomorrow.”

“I know I’m here—

my back against this chair,

my foot on this ground.”

It will take a lifetime of practice for me to invent this self-recognition well enough to stand on the ground of my own feelings—to cast a Line, which will land visibly in a still-enough pool.

Along the way, it will usually be very difficult for me, as a teenager or an adult, to be aware that I have a chance for any such relief.

And I will have to struggle with this on a regular basis.

I will struggle to recognize myself.

The dust on the reflection from my mirror will be too thick to see through it.

And as I fail again and again to receive this recognition, even in unrelated ways, even in unrelated settings, quiet pain will fill all my spaces.

It will slowly take my breath away.

It will be like having a window in my heart.

I’ll feel the wind blow through it.

I will live in the shakiness of anger and fear.

I will live the downward gaze of shame and the vigilance of uncertainty.

My emotions will yield only anger and tears.

As a young child, I had felt erased over and over at my father’s knee. But that was certainly not happening all the time. There were some mitigating circumstances. He worked full time as an engineer so his influence got diluted when he wasn’t home. There were some areas that I guess would be described as part of a normal, if not healthy childhood. I had some friends in the neighborhood. I took some refuge with the landlord’s family across the driveway. I played some sports—actually pretty good at tennis at the public courts and ping-pong, which I played with a friend at his house most every day after school.

It was nice to be out of my house.

There was a small Jewish community in town that I felt somewhat, at least, a part of: Hebrew school, Bar Mitzvahs, and holidays at the temple. And, in public school, I did pretty well. By the fifth grade, classes were separated into “accelerated” and all the rest. I was part of the advanced group of kids, and that felt good in a way.

But like all young children, I had a limited ability to have much perspective about anything that was going on. I took things as they came, and later, I would become aware of the templates that had been created. I utterly lacked the requisite practice a young child needed to walk comfortably along with his own sensibilities.