Manipulative Martyr Fam Syndrome, 1 and 2 RAY
The Manipulative Martyr Family Syndrome, Parts 1 & 2 (Ray)
--Or, as I like to call it, Adolf Hitler meets the perfect Eva Braun and has kids.
My father, as far as I know, never drove any Jews into a gas oven, nor did he ever grow one of those pathetic little mustaches, and yet he could have been, in his own small-scale, family way, quite the Hitler protg. He absolutely breathed fire at us three kids (older sister, younger brother, and me) so unpredictably that one could reasonably conclude he did it just for fun. Were he now a couple of decades younger he'd make a perfect subject for a reality TV series since he has one of the most sine qua non qualifications for such: The ability to go to pieces over nothing.
I must admit I don't know much about Eva Braun except that she was Hitler's mistress, but I submit she must have had a good deal of the masochist/martyr in her because-well, because she was Hitler's mistress! How much proof do we need?
Here I must parenthetically insert what will look at first like a shameless attempt to blow my own intellectual horn: All the IQ tests I've ever taken, at widely spaced intervals of my life, have indicated I am pretty damned smart. But here's the inquisitorial pin that deflates the balloon of my transiently swelled head: If I'm so damned smart, how come it took me nearly 50 years to figure out how my poisonous family dynamics worked? For what I'm about to describe should have been obvious to any observer, but I guess that's the problem. I was not an objective observer of the whirling vortex but one of the entrapped "vorts," so to speak.
Basically, my family's dynamics worked like this. My father was a mean, insensitive, creep who controlled his family by terrifying them with continual fits of rage. My mother was a martyr, long suffering and secretly proud of it. She married a ogre of a human being whom no one falling into even the loosest definition of sanity could have mistaken as loving, or sensitive, or kind, or attentive, or even very smart. Why? So that she could feel persecuted.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Hesse had one trait in common. They longed for their kids to shut the hell up and not trouble them over such trivialities as feelings. Such things as loneliness, anxiety, excessive shyness, learning difficulties, or being raped in a bathroom were no concern of theirs. And yet, since they were Catholic (and even worse: Converts to Catholicism), their consciences wouldn't let them simply announce in so many words, "I don't give a damn about how you feel," it was necessary to devise a system whereby the nettlesome issue of some brat coming to them about feelings would never arise in the first place. And I must admit the system that they developed was, especially since it sprang from minds proudly and adamantly anti-intellectual, pure genius.
Its genius lay in both simplicity and effectiveness.
My mother, the Eva Braun stand-in, was the nervous type, and that is a grand understatement. She was nervous, and she worried constantly about practically everything. I suspect that, had the wondrous day ever come when she could think of nothing that required worrying about, she would have worried that some urgent, awful possibility of a catastrophe had been forgotten, and that when the indefinite but inevitable catastrophe actually did occur, it would have failed to receive its just and due amount of worrying beforehand, and she would have, in addition to the torment of the catastrophe itself, the added hell to be paid for being derelict in meeting her worry quota.
Had she been a character in a comic strip ("Eva on the Brink," or some such), her thought balloon in this situation might have read: "Why, oh why did I not see that coming? I could have been wringing my hands over it for days."
My mother was also a world-champion cigarette smoker. She had started at age 15, probably because of high school peer pressure, or, I suppose, in an effort to look cool, although the idea of my mother exhibiting any degree of "cool" is inconceivable to me, since constant anxiety is by definition the direct opposite of cool. Or maybe she did it to calm her anxiety, in which case that little plan definitely backfired in later life, because it became one of her most dependable sources of anxiety. She worried about getting lung cancer, emphysema, stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, et cetera. I believe at the height of her smoking she was puffing more than two packs a day. To be sure, the more she smoked the more she enjoyed it, but of course the more she smoked the more she worried, too.
Sometimes she actually worried to the point of attempting to quit smoking, but not often, because every time she did brave out existence for as little as a few hours without a cigarette her nervousness would reach the absolute volcanic boil-over point. I hated cigarettes, and I especially hated what they were bound to do to my mother eventually, but after a day of bitch-on-parade, nicotine-less mom, I was silently begging God, or whoever called the shots up there, to stick a cigarette in her mouth so she'd shut up for a while. I never had to beg for long.
So here was this walking, wheezing land mine of a worry-obsessed woman trapped in the same bunker with Hitler's raging spiritual twin. My father's rage had to have a target, and it didn't dare aim at the land mine, because, unfulfilling as their precariously balanced partnership was, it was all either one of them had. Had it exploded, neither would have had any role in life at all. So Daddy's rage focused on the three kids: My older sister Helen; younger brother J.J., or raging Adolf, Jr.; and pathologically detached me, the poster boy for middle-child syndrome.
As worry was to Momma Eva, so was rage to Daddy Adolf. Anger was his thing; it gave him a purpose in life. Given how rotten the world was, and how everybody seemed to be getting a fair shake out of life but him, there was seldom a lack of things to get pissed off about, but even he couldn't make his seething hostility audible to every son of a bitch on Earth that deserved it, so the three relatively innocent little pigs inhabiting the same cage as he became the privileged audience. A lot of adult children of inadequate fathers lament the fact that he was never "there" in any way, physically absent as well as emotionally. I, on the other hand, was most grateful when he wasn't "there," in any sense of the word.
I have done by my conscious and unconscious best to forget as many of Poppa Adolf's screaming sessions as I could, but I remember parts of a fairly typical one. It occurred on a Sunday afternoon. I believe I was in junior high at the time. J.J. and Helen were arguing across the table, as often happened, about some utterly trivial thing. I think J.J. had started griping about Helen monopolizing the telephone. (This occurred in that primitive era during the 1960s when an entire family would share the same phone line. Some lucky families, as we did, had one or more extensions, but only one line.) I was doing my usual mentally-leaving-the-room thing, so I can't remember what they said, but I snapped back to attention when voices suddenly became much louder. J.J., in mini-Adolf mode, was screaming something back at my father. I don't know what the subject was, but clearly the bone of contention was no longer Helen's sadistic overuse of a public utility. My mother, never one for subtlety, burst into tears, sobbing hysterically. Standing, she histrionically threw herself on the dining table, her head in her arms, crying, "Stop, stop!" or some such line.
My father put his hands on my mother's shoulders and roared his loudest, employing an impressive number of decibels. "Shut up, you kids! You're going to kill your mother!"
When my father went into one of his tirades I, not having an overt death wish, never, ever, ever uttered so much as a word in protest-audibly. Inwardly, however, where that mental weakling couldn't begin to approach, it was a different story. To this particular invective I remember thinking: "She's doing a pretty good job of that herself. Can't we kill you instead?"
But back in the real world, Adolf wannabe's order was obeyed. Everybody shut the hell up, all right. Nobody said so much as a single word, friendly, hostile, indifferent or otherwise, for the rest of the afternoon and into the night. This was not an atypical day, especially for Sunday, when our happy family would be confined in the same place for a maximum number of hours.
And social critics stupidly wonder why so many family members turn to the magically soothing, calming power of TV when instead they could have such a blissful time talking to each other! Seems like a no-brainer to me.
This was my father's excuse for not dealing with any of his children emotionally. All he had to do was snarl, "Don't upset your mother." And it became our mother's convenient excuse, too. Got a problem? We didn't dare express it, or we'd upset our mother. Got a headache? Don't whine; it'll upset your mother. So depressed you could die? Keep it to yourself ; don't upset your mother. Happy for once, against all odds? Better keep it to yourself, or your mother will think you're up to something that could bring on calamity and make her worry--more. Lonely? Oh, please. What do you expect from life?
Just get sexually assaulted? In shock? On the verge of literally losing your mind? Don't you dare mention that, of all things! For God's sake, keep it to yourself. Don't upset your mother.
Depression, problems, injuries, hurts of any sort were not parts of our lives to be helped or guided through and dealt with; they were awful weapons we were trotting out, insensitively and deliberately, with which to hurt her. "How can you do this to me?" She might as well have had the question embroidered on the pillows we slept on. Everything-every damned thing-was all about her.
If I were to draw a picture of my family's emotional life, it would probably be of a little, stingy, airless, and utterly empty room.
In childhood and beyond, I used to wonder why our family was so-and here it was hard to find the right word. Distant? No, not strong enough. Hateful? Except for Daddy, too strong. We weren't allowed to feel anything enough to actively hate each other. I finally settled on antiseptic. Except for Poppa Adolf's rage, always hairpin-ready to go off, nobody felt much of anything about anybody. Helen actually liked me, but she was eight years older and, after I started school, we weren't really part of each other's lives. J.J. felt complete contempt for me, but that was mostly because I was a sports-challenged, effeminate sissy, to him a lousy example of an older brother. (Contempt was the utterly normal and expected reaction to such a blatant sissy-code for queer--in the U.S. at that time, and nobody would call such a reaction abnormal even today.) I was literally afraid of J.J. and my father, but that was nothing. After that thing occurred in the grade school bathroom I was afraid of pretty much everybody and everything.
--Or, as I like to call it, Adolf Hitler meets the perfect Eva Braun and has kids.
My father, as far as I know, never drove any Jews into a gas oven, nor did he ever grow one of those pathetic little mustaches, and yet he could have been, in his own small-scale, family way, quite the Hitler protg. He absolutely breathed fire at us three kids (older sister, younger brother, and me) so unpredictably that one could reasonably conclude he did it just for fun. Were he now a couple of decades younger he'd make a perfect subject for a reality TV series since he has one of the most sine qua non qualifications for such: The ability to go to pieces over nothing.
I must admit I don't know much about Eva Braun except that she was Hitler's mistress, but I submit she must have had a good deal of the masochist/martyr in her because-well, because she was Hitler's mistress! How much proof do we need?
Here I must parenthetically insert what will look at first like a shameless attempt to blow my own intellectual horn: All the IQ tests I've ever taken, at widely spaced intervals of my life, have indicated I am pretty damned smart. But here's the inquisitorial pin that deflates the balloon of my transiently swelled head: If I'm so damned smart, how come it took me nearly 50 years to figure out how my poisonous family dynamics worked? For what I'm about to describe should have been obvious to any observer, but I guess that's the problem. I was not an objective observer of the whirling vortex but one of the entrapped "vorts," so to speak.
Basically, my family's dynamics worked like this. My father was a mean, insensitive, creep who controlled his family by terrifying them with continual fits of rage. My mother was a martyr, long suffering and secretly proud of it. She married a ogre of a human being whom no one falling into even the loosest definition of sanity could have mistaken as loving, or sensitive, or kind, or attentive, or even very smart. Why? So that she could feel persecuted.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Hesse had one trait in common. They longed for their kids to shut the hell up and not trouble them over such trivialities as feelings. Such things as loneliness, anxiety, excessive shyness, learning difficulties, or being raped in a bathroom were no concern of theirs. And yet, since they were Catholic (and even worse: Converts to Catholicism), their consciences wouldn't let them simply announce in so many words, "I don't give a damn about how you feel," it was necessary to devise a system whereby the nettlesome issue of some brat coming to them about feelings would never arise in the first place. And I must admit the system that they developed was, especially since it sprang from minds proudly and adamantly anti-intellectual, pure genius.
Its genius lay in both simplicity and effectiveness.
My mother, the Eva Braun stand-in, was the nervous type, and that is a grand understatement. She was nervous, and she worried constantly about practically everything. I suspect that, had the wondrous day ever come when she could think of nothing that required worrying about, she would have worried that some urgent, awful possibility of a catastrophe had been forgotten, and that when the indefinite but inevitable catastrophe actually did occur, it would have failed to receive its just and due amount of worrying beforehand, and she would have, in addition to the torment of the catastrophe itself, the added hell to be paid for being derelict in meeting her worry quota.
Had she been a character in a comic strip ("Eva on the Brink," or some such), her thought balloon in this situation might have read: "Why, oh why did I not see that coming? I could have been wringing my hands over it for days."
My mother was also a world-champion cigarette smoker. She had started at age 15, probably because of high school peer pressure, or, I suppose, in an effort to look cool, although the idea of my mother exhibiting any degree of "cool" is inconceivable to me, since constant anxiety is by definition the direct opposite of cool. Or maybe she did it to calm her anxiety, in which case that little plan definitely backfired in later life, because it became one of her most dependable sources of anxiety. She worried about getting lung cancer, emphysema, stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, et cetera. I believe at the height of her smoking she was puffing more than two packs a day. To be sure, the more she smoked the more she enjoyed it, but of course the more she smoked the more she worried, too.
Sometimes she actually worried to the point of attempting to quit smoking, but not often, because every time she did brave out existence for as little as a few hours without a cigarette her nervousness would reach the absolute volcanic boil-over point. I hated cigarettes, and I especially hated what they were bound to do to my mother eventually, but after a day of bitch-on-parade, nicotine-less mom, I was silently begging God, or whoever called the shots up there, to stick a cigarette in her mouth so she'd shut up for a while. I never had to beg for long.
So here was this walking, wheezing land mine of a worry-obsessed woman trapped in the same bunker with Hitler's raging spiritual twin. My father's rage had to have a target, and it didn't dare aim at the land mine, because, unfulfilling as their precariously balanced partnership was, it was all either one of them had. Had it exploded, neither would have had any role in life at all. So Daddy's rage focused on the three kids: My older sister Helen; younger brother J.J., or raging Adolf, Jr.; and pathologically detached me, the poster boy for middle-child syndrome.
As worry was to Momma Eva, so was rage to Daddy Adolf. Anger was his thing; it gave him a purpose in life. Given how rotten the world was, and how everybody seemed to be getting a fair shake out of life but him, there was seldom a lack of things to get pissed off about, but even he couldn't make his seething hostility audible to every son of a bitch on Earth that deserved it, so the three relatively innocent little pigs inhabiting the same cage as he became the privileged audience. A lot of adult children of inadequate fathers lament the fact that he was never "there" in any way, physically absent as well as emotionally. I, on the other hand, was most grateful when he wasn't "there," in any sense of the word.
I have done by my conscious and unconscious best to forget as many of Poppa Adolf's screaming sessions as I could, but I remember parts of a fairly typical one. It occurred on a Sunday afternoon. I believe I was in junior high at the time. J.J. and Helen were arguing across the table, as often happened, about some utterly trivial thing. I think J.J. had started griping about Helen monopolizing the telephone. (This occurred in that primitive era during the 1960s when an entire family would share the same phone line. Some lucky families, as we did, had one or more extensions, but only one line.) I was doing my usual mentally-leaving-the-room thing, so I can't remember what they said, but I snapped back to attention when voices suddenly became much louder. J.J., in mini-Adolf mode, was screaming something back at my father. I don't know what the subject was, but clearly the bone of contention was no longer Helen's sadistic overuse of a public utility. My mother, never one for subtlety, burst into tears, sobbing hysterically. Standing, she histrionically threw herself on the dining table, her head in her arms, crying, "Stop, stop!" or some such line.
My father put his hands on my mother's shoulders and roared his loudest, employing an impressive number of decibels. "Shut up, you kids! You're going to kill your mother!"
When my father went into one of his tirades I, not having an overt death wish, never, ever, ever uttered so much as a word in protest-audibly. Inwardly, however, where that mental weakling couldn't begin to approach, it was a different story. To this particular invective I remember thinking: "She's doing a pretty good job of that herself. Can't we kill you instead?"
But back in the real world, Adolf wannabe's order was obeyed. Everybody shut the hell up, all right. Nobody said so much as a single word, friendly, hostile, indifferent or otherwise, for the rest of the afternoon and into the night. This was not an atypical day, especially for Sunday, when our happy family would be confined in the same place for a maximum number of hours.
And social critics stupidly wonder why so many family members turn to the magically soothing, calming power of TV when instead they could have such a blissful time talking to each other! Seems like a no-brainer to me.
This was my father's excuse for not dealing with any of his children emotionally. All he had to do was snarl, "Don't upset your mother." And it became our mother's convenient excuse, too. Got a problem? We didn't dare express it, or we'd upset our mother. Got a headache? Don't whine; it'll upset your mother. So depressed you could die? Keep it to yourself ; don't upset your mother. Happy for once, against all odds? Better keep it to yourself, or your mother will think you're up to something that could bring on calamity and make her worry--more. Lonely? Oh, please. What do you expect from life?
Just get sexually assaulted? In shock? On the verge of literally losing your mind? Don't you dare mention that, of all things! For God's sake, keep it to yourself. Don't upset your mother.
Depression, problems, injuries, hurts of any sort were not parts of our lives to be helped or guided through and dealt with; they were awful weapons we were trotting out, insensitively and deliberately, with which to hurt her. "How can you do this to me?" She might as well have had the question embroidered on the pillows we slept on. Everything-every damned thing-was all about her.
If I were to draw a picture of my family's emotional life, it would probably be of a little, stingy, airless, and utterly empty room.
In childhood and beyond, I used to wonder why our family was so-and here it was hard to find the right word. Distant? No, not strong enough. Hateful? Except for Daddy, too strong. We weren't allowed to feel anything enough to actively hate each other. I finally settled on antiseptic. Except for Poppa Adolf's rage, always hairpin-ready to go off, nobody felt much of anything about anybody. Helen actually liked me, but she was eight years older and, after I started school, we weren't really part of each other's lives. J.J. felt complete contempt for me, but that was mostly because I was a sports-challenged, effeminate sissy, to him a lousy example of an older brother. (Contempt was the utterly normal and expected reaction to such a blatant sissy-code for queer--in the U.S. at that time, and nobody would call such a reaction abnormal even today.) I was literally afraid of J.J. and my father, but that was nothing. After that thing occurred in the grade school bathroom I was afraid of pretty much everybody and everything.
posted by LifeWriter at 3:35 PM
2 Comments:
Wonderful writing, Ray. By far, it's the best of yours I've read yet.
(Brad)
Finally had time to read this installment, and loved loved loved it. I agree with Cliff; you are very deft at teasing out the humorous in a horrid situation. Keep it coming. (Peggy)
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