Manipulative Martyr Family Syndrome (Ray)
The Manipulative Martyr Family Syndrome (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 or homosexuals 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 utterly 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 wide intervals of my life, have indicated I am pretty damned smart. But here's the inquisitorial pin that deflates the balloon that is my only 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 even in 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 the system that they developed was, shockingly--since it sprang from minds proudly and adamantly anti-intellectual--pure genius.
Its genius lay in both simplicity and effectiveness.
[Just made it to the blog within the 48-hour limit. More to come, I swear.]
--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 or homosexuals 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 utterly 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 wide intervals of my life, have indicated I am pretty damned smart. But here's the inquisitorial pin that deflates the balloon that is my only 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 even in 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 the system that they developed was, shockingly--since it sprang from minds proudly and adamantly anti-intellectual--pure genius.
Its genius lay in both simplicity and effectiveness.
[Just made it to the blog within the 48-hour limit. More to come, I swear.]
posted by LifeWriter at 7:30 PM
2 Comments:
Michael here--you see, Ray, you have no business not writing. You have a gift, not unlike that of David Sedaris, of mixing ugliness and pain with lightness and delight. The resulting mix doesn't feel like masochism. It feels more like strength and resilience, the ability to really laugh at the devil. I like it very much that your writing is so much like the way you talk, because your conversation (and your monologues) are so expressive of your character, so bright and interesting. You need to find time to write, babe, because you're damn good at it.
Ray, your style is interesting, complex and intriguing. You got my interest. - Jim
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