A Fully Functioning Family - The Downside

My upbringing scarred me for life. I won’t write a lurid biography which will land me on Oprah, or even worse, Jerry Springer. Nonetheless my youth has made many parts of my adult life unmanageable.

What horrors have I lived through? None. That’s the problem. My formative years were spent almost completely in a state of contentment and well-being. Ergo my thresholds for putting up with mean spirited people, dealing with anger and aggression, and my ability to fly off the handle and fully engage all my organs of suspicion are severely diminished. Yet, more and more, it seems those are the skill sets which would best serve me in the world we inhabit today.
I remember my father commenting when a person accuses you of having a certain trait it is often a trait that person himself has in spades. If someone thinks you are a liar it often means they are good at lying themselves. They assume others are doing it just as often as they do, thus they accuse people, truthful or otherwise, of also possessing that tendency.

The opposite is also the case. It doesn’t occur to me to lie. I am not saying that in some sort of “aren’t I pure as the driven snow” egotistical manner. It just doesn’t occur to me to lie. There are times I did lie because I screwed up so monumentally lying seemed the only recourse available to me, but it is not the default setting for my software. Because of all that, it is also not my default setting for interpreting what others are telling me. It does not occur to me that people are lying to me even when most other people, including the majority of toddlers and people who actually look up when told the word gullible is written on the ceiling, can tell Pinocchio’s nose just grew longer than Durante and de Bergerac combined. I am easier to fleece than a flock of sheep in May. (I probably shouldn’t have said that in such a public venue. My voicemail will be chock full of wonderful opportunities for aluminum siding and credit cards with the low, low interest rate of a pound of flesh compounded annually.)

My family liked each other. We chose to spend time together, on purpose. Don’t get the wrong idea. We weren’t the Waltons. Oh, we were that supportive and we had the strong highly principled father and the stalwart caring mother it is just we didn’t have wacky strangers show up on our doorstep every week in order to teach us meaningful lessons about life. (Although having a traveling band of circus performers live in our garage for a while would have totally rocked.)

Come to think of it maybe we were the Walton’s. My oldest brother was named after my father so we could have called him George Boy, and that was well before there was such a thing as a Boy George. Just like John Boy, George Boy wanted to be a writer when he grew up. He didn’t sit at a tiny window in an attic bedroom scribbling stories into a big chief notebook, but he did sit at a desk in his room with a circa 1950s typewriter creating the Great American Novel, yet to be published.

Like so many damaged adults living out the residual after effects of a youth gone horribly, horribly right, I fear I may be passing on the traumas to my own children. Just the other day I witnessed my eldest daughter walk right up to her younger sister and give her a hug. Right there in broad daylight, like it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of both girls showed sisterly affection for each other without being blackmailed into it with promises of iPods and cell phone upgrades if they would just get along with each other for ten minutes.

My fear is it may be too late. My three children may grow up thinking the best of others. They may believe marriage is a supportive partnership between two people based on respect and love as opposed to a sentence of punishment to be endured until the kids are out of the house and then the lawyers divide up the assets and the mental health of the two exhausted combatants of the matrimonial skirmishes. They may have an over-developed sense of fairness and become addicted to the rush one gets from injecting a hit of unadulterated altruism.

All I have to do to save them from a doomed life of contentment with an appreciable lack of angst is expose them to the most effective antidote: talk radio.