The Age of Rage

The comedian Jackie Mason used to do a routine about visiting a psychiatrist. “You hate your father,” the shrink told him. No, Mason protested, I love my father very much. “Then you hate your mother.” No, said Mason, I love my mother. Told that he didn’t hate his brothers or sisters either, the shrink suggested, “Maybe you’ve got a cousin?”

Reversing Tolstoy, the twentieth century decided that unhappy families were all alike. According to Freud, it was natural for boys to hate their fathers. And their brothers too. Phrases like Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry became part of the vocabulary of educated people.

The idea that anger lies at the heart of family life has become pervasive in contemporary culture. Anger in general has been exalted in contemporary drama, especially cinema. Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, John Osborne (first of the British “angry young men”), Marlon Brando, and Robert (Raging Bull) De Niro are only a few of those who have created and sustained the vogue of rage. Anger certifies “authenticity.”

As always, life and art imitate each other, and fiction and fact have merged. Celebrities now tell their life stories with special emphasis on how cruel their parents were. Miseries that used to be hidden in shame are now featured with perverse pride; skeletons in the family closet have become precious heirlooms. If you weren’t abused as a child, don’t bother writing your autobiography; you won’t find a publisher. The comic and affectionate genre of Life with Father has long since given way to Mommie Dearest.

But maybe the reason for this is not that anger is typical, but that it is especially dramatic. From Aeschylus to Dostoyevsky, great literature made use of family tensions, but with the understanding that they weren’t necessarily normal.

If it weren’t for my late stepfather, Jerry Fox, I might have been able to write a lucrative bestseller. My parents, after a stormy marriage, divorced when I was still small, and for a couple of years I tasted Dickensian childhood.

But then my mother married Jerry, and from then on I enjoyed a normal family life. I called him Pop, because, out of respect for my real father, he wouldn’t let me call him Dad. But over the years I saw less and less of Dad, and Pop shaped my life.

Here is where my autobiography gets really dull. You may want to skip the next few paragraphs.

Pop was a gentle man, but no wimp; in high school he’d been an all-state football lineman (I learned this from one of his old friends; he never mentioned it). He treated me like his own son.

Pop almost never raised his voice; he did spank me once, in a rather half-hearted way. If he and Mom ever quarreled, I missed it. There was no anger in our house, either overt or, as far as I could tell, seething. Displays of anger were called “tantrums” or “pouting.”

Mom and Pop had a strict moral code, but it never seemed strict; its style was easy-going. It was tacitly understood that some things just weren’t done, and they rarely had to be spelled out. We weren’t always blissful; life was partly a matter of putting up with each other, and making ourselves easy to put up with. This meant doing our duties, conversing agreeably, sharing jokes, and avoiding temperamental scenes; saying “please,” “thank you,” and “excuse me.” Love was expressed through good manners as well as hugs and kisses. Undramatic, but no less real for that. Even, in its way, “authentic.”

My heart always lifted a little when Pop came home from work (he repaired telephones). Dinner time was a cheerful get-together. Mom laid out a good meal, and Pop, after saying grace, told funny stories.

It was nothing to brag about, but it was, and is, something to be grateful for. At the time I assumed it was a typical family life. I’ve heard of much worse, and I’ve learned too that many stepfathers — and mothers, for that matter — are much less kindly disposed.

An acquaintance, imbued with the modern spirit, once speculated that there must have been a lot of buried anger in our family. I’m still trying to figure out where it was buried. I got the indelible impression that family life can do without it, if you’re willing to cultivate good humor and contentment.

Mom and Pop did have one great failure. They failed to teach me how much I owed them. They left me to figure that out for myself, and it took me an unconscionably long time.

What is sick is that this, in psychobabble, is 'repressive.'

Simple things, simple things, simple things -- that is where riches are hid.

Good Evening All-

Posted by The Invisible Hand: "...What is sick is that this, in psychobabble, is 'repressive'..."

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My parents are still married after 40 years and seem quite happy. They never beat me, they helped me to graduate from college with a BS degree, and subsequently assisted me in starting a life of my own afterwards.

My siblings and I respect our parents very much. I lived at home until I was about 30 years of age, contributing to the running of the household and paying rent equivalent to that on the open-market. It was a bittersweet time for my folks when I purchased a home seven miles away. I've since started my own little family.

With all that understood, a therapist with whom I'm acquainted through a mutual friend calls this an "enmeshed relationship"...which is somehow bad. I call it "parents and adult children getting along as friends like they have done for generations" but, of course, I'm not a professional...

~ Blue Jays ~

I was raised in a very dysfunctional family. My father is an alcoholic. My mother is an enabler. There is still a great deal of animosity between my father and I, mostly because he ignored me most of the time. The only time I got any attention from him was when he was dictating my life and future to me, or when he was abusing me by calling me "fat" and "stupid," or beating me. I was sexually abused, but not by either of my parents (nor by any of my family members; it was a neighborhood man). It occurred when I was nine, but my parents blamed me for my shift from a relatively cheerful and outgoing child into a suicidal, depressed, rage-filled adolescent. Evidently, it didn't occur to them to ask me why my personality had changed so much. This is the very definition of dysfunction.

I hate to think that people would want to have the kind of childhood I had...punctuated with obscenities, loud fights, long stretches of the silent treatment, beatings (called "spankings" by my father) for such minor things as allowing my bike to fall over in the garage and make a small scratch on my father's new car (the bike did not have a kickstand...I was eight years old at the time and was bruised for a week from that beating), etc. As a senior in high school, I finally could not stand the stress anymore. I packed a bag and drove to my grandmother's house in the suburbs. I continued to attend school at my regular high school for the two weeks I stayed with her. While I was in college, my father made it abundantly clear that the reason he had sent me to school (and paid for it) was so I could find a husband; he cared nothing about my education and instead pushed my brother into high-earning disciplines like business. It didn't occur to him that I was the smarter of the two of us; I have a higher IQ, I scored higher on the SAT (and I took it before they made it easier; my brother took it afterwards) and I was a straight A-student while my brother brought home report cards full of Bs and Cs. I was still "stupid" and my brother was still "smart."

This is not something I'm proud of. I'm not ashamed of it, but I haven't written a book about it and I'm not standing on street corners screaming, "My parents were abusive...I'm a victim...love me!" I don't think that most people like me, who come from extremely dysfunctional families, are proud of it. Rather, the opposite is true...people who grew up in similar situations are often tight-lipped about it and feel shame because they blame themselves for the way they were treated. I find that the milder the abuse, the louder people crow about it. A light slap on the hand by mom turns into an all-out beating. People who've REALLY been through it are usually loath to speak of it. I'm open about it, but I think that anyone here would agree that I don't mention it in every single post...I only mention it where it's relevant.

I would hate to think that ANYONE would want to endure the kind of abuse I endured as a child merely in order to seem "interesting." Ironically, I'm not really interested in other peoples' sob stories. I run a depression group on the internet and have long ago stopped reading the sob stories that the members post because they're boring. I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to read that woe-is-me crap. I'd be amazed if anyone was actually still reading this post at this point.

**ramble mode: OFF**

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