rlfj: A Fresh Start

I went over to my room and crawled onto my bed, rearranging the pillow to sit upright against the wall. I was no longer hungry, just tired. It had been a long day, and dealing with my parents simply made it more tiring. Ham and Suzie came home a few minutes later. Ham came upstairs and dropped his shit off and then left without paying any attention to me. I mean every word of it when I say that he is self-centered to the point of near psychopathic proportions.

I was forced to give my parents a lot of thought, and reflect on what they had been before and what they were now. It was a very complicated subject. Charles and Shirley Buckman are good people. They are the rock solid upper middle class foundation of this country. They work hard, go to church, pay their taxes, vote, and give to charities. By any stretch of the imagination, they are people you would want living next door.

However - they are lousy parents. Don't get me wrong on this. It's not like we were chained in the basement, eating gruel and being whipped. We weren't. By most standards we were raised well. By any objective standard we all turned out okay, with three white collar jobs, college educations (mostly), grandchildren, and nobody ever getting into trouble (until this morning.) Further, kids don't come with an instruction book, and they never really got lessons.

But it was not enjoyable growing up in that house the first time and I was seriously wondering if I could do it again. My father could be very abusive. His view of child rearing involved using a carrot and stick approach, but the carrot was a few tiny slivers of orange shaving and the stick was a half inch thick oak pledge paddle from his college days. If anything, and I do mean anything, was not perfect, Ham and I would get hit with it. Further, since we were supposed to always exhibit proper behavior, whatever that was, and since you do not reward correct actions, only above average actions, if we behaved properly, there was no notice taken. If we behaved, nobody would ever say how good we were, but if we were bad, we would get beaten with a stick.

In some ways, my mother was worse. She didn't hit as much, preferring to wait until Dad got home, but she could be very cold. She fully bought into the idea that good behavior was expected, and therefore not to be rewarded, and that bad behavior should be punished severely. Further, her job was to mold us, especially me, as the oldest, into a proper adult. Being loving did not enter the equation, but teaching and training us did.

Once, when I was five or so, I made a birthday card for her birthday. On the front side it said "I love you!". Then, when you opened it, it said, "I love you too!", "I love you two!", and "I love you to!" I thought I was being clever, and proudly gave this to her. The average mother would probably hug and kiss her child for this. My mother used this as a chance to correct my spelling and teach me proper word usage. I never made a mistake in using those words again, but I never made her another card, either.

As the oldest child, I got the brunt of this. Hamilton, two years younger, got some, but he wasn't the first born male child and wasn't as important and they didn't hide this fact, which must have done wonders for his self esteem. Suzie, on the other hand, was a girl and the youngest child, and they made no bones about the fact that she was the favorite. You would think that I would have been jealous about that, but actually not. Suzie was a good kid, and even though she knew she had her father wrapped around her little finger, she didn't rub it in our faces. She was also six years younger than me, so we didn't have all that much in common. We never went to school together, for instance. Later on, whenever she managed to get something really outrageous (an all expenses paid trip to New Orleans, for example) I simply smiled and considered her a really sharp operator.

By the time I was a teenager, it was very obvious that my future position in life was to be Charlie Buckman's clone, only better. Like my father I would go to a good school and become a scientist or engineer. This is about the only part of the plan that actually happened. The rest was a disaster. I was to go to an Ivy League school like Dad, but four years and not the two that he did. I would get a graduate degree, which he never did, and be a professional (letters after the name), which he never did. I would marry properly, another WASP, also a college trained professional, and we would have 2.3 children. We would live in the suburbs, only a nicer and more expensive one, have a bigger house than theirs, and I would work for a large conglomerate. We would be good Republicans and pass on these values to future generations of Republican Ivy League WASPs.

Inasmuch as almost none of this was to occur, my parents made no attempt to hide their disappointment in me. Even though by almost any rational standard I led a good and happy and well-off life, until the day they died they made no bones about the fact that I had let them down. There was a very good reason that I went to school three hundred miles away and never moved back and rarely visited.

Part of today's discussion with them was an effort to put them on notice that my life was to be lived on my terms, not theirs. I was not naïve enough to think that today would make that much of an impression. I knew that before too long Dad, and especially Mom, would begin molding me back to the path of righteousness. The first time around I had usually acquiesced unhappily for a time until something would go wrong and cause me to explode in juvenile anger. This time I would have to be different, and they would have to be taught that if I was to be a part of their lives after I was seventeen, it would be their expectations which would change, not mine.

One of the curious events that had transpired today was when I told them never to hit me again. You might not believe that would happen, but on the first go-around, it actually happened when I was only a year older. My mother had decided I needed to be slapped, probably for backtalk or some damn thing, and I had instinctively brought my arm up to block her. She was so startled she had stared at me for a second, and then swung at me again. By then I was already in too deep, so I blocked her again. She put her arm down and promised to tell my father, at which point I had told her to do what she thought best, but they couldn't hit me anymore. They didn't hit me anymore, either.

I don't mean to say that when my parents were home we were cowering in the basement hiding from them. It really wasn't like that. The best comparison I can make is with other families. I've seen normal families. Mom or Dad get home from work or the store or wherever, and the kids show up to say hello and see what they brought back or whatever. We didn't. We avoided them lest they figure out what we'd done wrong that day and hit us. It was over quickly, but it was never a good thing to be called up to see them. There was never any praise, only punishment. No carrot, only stick.

I skipped dinner that night, which was very unusual. Generally speaking, you ate what Mom put on the table, when she put it on the table. There were no substitutions and no delays. If you didn't like it, which could happen, you ate it anyway, since the other choice was a beating with the oak paddle. If the meal was toxic radioactive sludge, you ate it. If you didn't eat it and survived the beating and still wouldn't eat it, you didn't get fed until the next day. Surprisingly, my parents let me skip out, even after I told them I would eat something later.

I stayed in my room, thinking about what I was doing and how I would survive the next few years, until Hamilton came upstairs to bed. We had a small room but had managed to cram in two twin size beds and a dresser. By then my stomach was growling and I went downstairs to the kitchen. Everyone else had gone to bed, so I scrounged up a can of soup and opened it and poured it into a pan and set it on the stove.