unconscious parental cruelty

27 july 2010

unconscious parental cruelty

mom was cruel in a sort of defensive way – she blocked me out, as if I were – something frightening?

and my dad was just mean – he’d smash me down as cruelly, unkindly, unthinkingly as you would a bug. I think he gave me just about as much thought, too – and when I got old enough to ‘talk back’ to him? learning to do things just the way he did (no surprise – why are parents *always* so fucking surprised when their children – miniature mirrors that we all are at that age – start mimicking them? parroting them, perfectly, word for word, gesture for gesture, capturing tone, body language, and facial expression as well as the best comic mimic?) it was as if I’d stung him, unexpectedly, like that harmless, fuzzy little bug that would be so easy to squish because it’s so small, and therefore, weak and helpless, right? suddenly giving you one HUMDINGER of a bite on the ass [evil grin here :-]

So. I got even. But boy, did he ever make me pay for it. I think I said something cutting to him when I was about in 7th grade (maybe 12 or so? remember, I skipped a grade so my numbers were off by a year at that point.) and he never, EVER forgave me for it. Way to go, dad, way to set an excellent behavioral example for your offspring. Rock ON, dude.

My parents were fucked up (emotionally) in so many ways it’s a little embarrassing to try to catalog them all. I guess that was at a time when everyone wore their fucked-up-ness on their sleeve, as if it was some kind of badge of individuality or something.

Actually, I thinking it was the beginning of what some call ‘the Age of Aquarius’ – that vast, cosmic, universal ‘enlightenment’ that’s supposedly happening to us all right now.

I think the potential for such a thing is there, but I think there’s going to have to be a whole hell of a lot of pain, fear, anger and resentment on a pretty much world-wide level for it to really start happening. I’ve been wondering if the massive oil spill off the Gulf and the ensuing fucked-up responses, both the actual physical attempts to deal with it, as well as the political posturing and endless finger-pointing (trying to find a scapegoat, as usual – last night it sounded, on NPR, as if some folks were going to try to pin it on NOAA, one of the most underfunded and least powerful agencies on the planet, as I understand it) might end up acting as a trigger to set it all off.