By way of introduction

I am a brooder. For as long as I can remember – as an adult, in any case – I have brooded, often bitterly, over the past. Most of this brooding – I dare say, all of it – has been, one way or another, linked to my old man and my mother. (I’ll refer to them, hereafter, as T and E.) So the brooding is not without cause. I am not crazy. Indeed, there were many and good causes. To put the matter as graciously as I can, T and E were, for me, lousy parents. T, never a cruel or perfectly hard man (just possessed of the sensitivities of a ground hog), nonetheless had issues, as they say – a problem with anger, to put the matter mildly – which he was wont to bury in strong doses of alcohol and vent in some hard hitting of his kids. E was, to put it mildly (again), unavailable – not mean, not cruel, not malicious – not sensitive or loving, either – just not available (also embarrassing and somewhat scatological, but let that go). However, I will not pursue further details in this matter. (Did I just sense the Reader breathing a sigh of relief?) My purpose is to take a hard look at myself.

Why should I now care about what happened to me many years ago? T has been dead now for some twenty years and E is mentally incoherent to the point of not even knowing her own children by name. So why do I continue to brood? True, T could not deal in feelings (except rage and shame) and E was shallow enough to live with that. The kids, therefore, were left to wander in an emotional desert. But, brooding for all these years? Could this be nothing but me? Is it just a peculiar personality trait, present in the package since birth? Is it a smidgeon of craziness, perhaps? I mean, forget about the violence – being beaten up as a kid by T while E sat at the kitchen table, perfectly passive – and the great love of alcohol, and the periodic embarrassment (E never met a checkout clerk or waitress who was safe from some jab) – am I by nature a sour brooder? Would I be brooding, had my parents been sweet and attentive; perhaps, instead, over some unjust restriction placed on me because I came home late from a ballgame?

True enough, I have mellowed over the years, even to the point of taking E to church on rare occasions. But I remember, with a shutter, what life was like when I was in my 20s and even 30s. At times, I was wont to think that the bitterness of the brooding would drive me mad. “How could it be worse,” I recall thinking, “to be cut slowly with a knife?” One must be young to survive such grief.

But I lived. Now, in more sober times, I am inclined to wonder how much of this pain was the result of bad parenting (nurture) and how much was just, alas, me (nature). After all, T was only a gentleman to me after age seventeen or so (when I could defend myself) and E, as I say, remained only a pain, not cruel, malicious, and so forth. But, as I say, further, they were lousy parents for me. The question is should the emphasis be on “lousy parents” or on “me”?

Mr. Pinker’s thesis

Some years ago, I happened to see a psychologist named Steven Pinker give a talk on TV. The man is surpassingly brilliant, and wonderfully engaging. His talk, moreover, touched a chord within me, and keenly. Mr. Pinker’s thesis is that human nature is all that we are. Parenting does not matter. This came as an outrage. In Mr. Pinker’s assessment E was right when, as a kid, deeply depressed and hurt, I reached out to her (never did that again) and she said, with a smile and a merry nod of her head, “See, you’re wrong, you’re wrong. You’re just too sensitive. Don’t be so sensitive.” I grumbled through Mr. Pinker’s talk, half-listening, though I stayed to the end. He was asserting – to my feverish brain – that nurturing is over-emphasized and under-effective. What my parents did to me (T, mostly) – or did not do for me (E, mostly), did not matter. What matters are genetics (me) and something else, outside the home, but not parenting.

After the talk, when I turned off the TV, I regarded the set as one might regard someone who has just delivered an insult. The whole matter gave me pause and consternation. Have I really been brooding all these years simply because I have a sour nature – when, in fact, I think my nature is rather sweet and becoming?

Mr. Pinker wrote a book on the subject called “The Blank Slate.” With a final grumble, I filed the title away in a memory bank, and tried to forget about the talk. Alas, a few sour wisps of what Mr. Pinker had said stayed in my mind.

Taking a stand

Over the following years, from time to time, in my mind and in my journal, I marshaled my arguments in opposition to Mr. Pinker. Parenting doesn’t matter, indeed! I strove to dismiss the fellow as someone badly informed. Certainly parenting has a powerful effect on personality – why, look at the depression, look at the anxiety, look at the great swathes of time I have wasted, lost in a mindless stewing, when I could have been doing something useful and important. No, I could not let my parents off the hook. They were bad parents (for me – I do not attempt to speak for my six siblings – let them speak for themselves – though the wreckage there, too, is obvious). Yes, T and E had a huge impact on my life.

Why, I was something of a certifiable loony. Just before my divorce, I took the MMPI person-ality inventory. The psychologist, looking down at the test scores, stealing uneasy glances at me sitting naively before her, assured me that I was indeed fairly nuts (my term, not hers), especially with regards to depression. Furthermore, all the rancor – the lingering hurt, I mean; there were a million other pains of the passing variety – was directed at T and E, and no one else on the face of the planet. Moreover, the more years I placed between myself and the events of my childhood the happier (sic) I became. I would not live my life over again if it had to include the decade of my 20s. (If I could sleep through my 20s, I might take it.) My 30s were a little better, and so on. Is there not a connection here?

Even as late as in my forties, after an evening with E, putting up with her manipulations, coarse slights and crudeness, I would lose the will to live. I am not an early riser, but on the morning following one of these lovely encounters, I would be utterly bereft of the capacity to get up and go on with life. I would stay in bed until noon, or even after, unable to start the day, as if the life had been drained from me. “I’m sick,” I would lament, shrinking beneath the covers. “I can’t face it. I can’t go on.”

Yes, I had been utterly beaten down and succumbed to depression; I was too fatigued to carry on the fight. E had whipped me – emotionally speaking. I learned, alas, that rancor serves a purpose, for to stop the ranting and raving is to give up on life. Not to rage is to despair. A darkness closed over me, like a heavy black shroud; nothing seemed worth living for. All too apparently, as a kid, I had tried my little heart out to get a response from E and succeeded not at all. She was there, but not there. In dealing with her as an adult, I was reliving the painful memories.

Perhaps the reader needs a specific incident:

I was sitting on a leather easy-chair in the library with T standing over me. He was yelling and screaming down at me; his face is inflamed, his eyes bloodshot, his arm red to the elbow from hitting me across the head and face. I am fifteen. “You should be ashamed!” he screamed. “You should be crawling on the floor in shame for the way you treated me!” Why might that be, daddy dear? “You’ve treated me like dirt!” Oh, really? In what way? (For the record, I called him “buddy.” Hell, that might even be a term of endearment – it wasn’t – but he could have interpreted it that way.) “You should be ashamed!” During all this, E was sitting at the kitchen table being very passive. “Ashamed! You should be ashamed!”

After the episode, I was down in the basement, throwing darts into a dartboard with great force, when T came to the head of the stairs and called down to me, perfectly composed, “Your mother and I are going for a ride, Patrick. Take care of the house, okay?” They went off for a drive in the country. When they walked out the door of the house for all intents and purposes they walked out of my life.

The poor bastards only wanted everything to be nice – happy parents, happy children honoring happy parents. Unfortunately, they had two things bearing strongly against them: 1) They were lousy parents, and 2) They had me for a kid.

But not just in myself alone, time and again I have seen the effects of bad parenting on people I have known. I’ve faced across the table in a restaurant more than one young woman on the first date (also the last date) whose change in attitude – and facial expression – in response to some innocent remark, taking issue with something she said, would make Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” look like an exemplar of sweetness and mental health. And I’ve engaged in an innocent bit of chatter with some guy, a new acquaintance, at a social function, and, when I happened to mention his parents, my interlocutor lighted up with anger. Shaking with rage, he muttered, “Yeah, I hate ’em both.” Are people born this way? When I say that the parenting of these people was poor, the likelihood that I am wrong is only slightly less than the likelihood of two plus two not equaling four.

I’m aware of the numbers: One out of four women (one out of six or seven men) was sexually abused, more or less, in the course of growing up. As my psychologist brother told me, “Some fathers think they should have first shot at the daughters.”

(Going through childhood, especially as a woman, can seem to be a dicey proposition. One almost thinks that women, when they reach age eighteen or so, should they have been so lucky as not to be abused, would breathe a sigh of relief and say to themselves, “Well, I made it.”)

No wonder so many women and men shy away from talking about their parents when the subject comes up in conversation, and men sometimes refer to their father as only “that guy.”

I do not understand how people can fail to recognize others for what they are. Women live with serial killers for years and never see that they are living with soulless monsters. To a virtual certainty, I have long thought that T was sexually abused. As a youngster, he was raped, probably by a hired hand on the family farm. This is what led to the predictable emotional depredations – rage and shame. In a word, the rage and shame was not something T was born with. It was not a matter of innate personality; it was a matter of being raped, told to keep his mouth shut and left to his young emotional devices. T must have thought that his parents had abandoned him.

For a long time, remembering bits and pieces of Mr. Pinker’s talk, I was wont to wonder where he was coming from. How could he say that parenting does not matter?

We who have suffered the effects of bad parenting are, it seems, in very good company. I recall, not long ago, an interview on TV with an athlete who was one of the greatest divers of all time. On his climb to the top of his sport, he lived with a gay lover, who beat him up. The interviewer asked, “Why didn’t you leave?” “I thought I deserved it,” he said. “Why didn’t you find some-one else?” he was asked. “Who else would have me?” he said. This, in spite of his great gifts. He was damaged, one guesses, with something like certainty, by poor parenting.

That “Who would want me?” has been a mantra of my life.

Consider a few other examples of the notable, the accomplished and the parentally-damaged:

David Niven

Some years ago, I saw this fine British actor interviewed on TV. In the course of the interview, he was asked about his service in the British Army during World War II. He commented proudly on his military record. “Wasn’t your father an officer in the British Army, too?” he was asked. “Yes,” Mr. Niven said, “he was,” adding, “Wicked bastard. … Oh, did I say that?”

Yes, you did. And at age, perhaps, seventy-five. How harsh! I would never call my father a “wicked bastard.” One imagines a deeply sensitive nature and a father determined to “toughen up” the kid. An unhealthy mix.

Winston Churchill

He brooded, as I’ve heard – when he had the time (perhaps less during the War; we can be distracted from our preoccupations). Randolph was a father who could not be pleased. Toward the end of his life, Churchill lamented, as I understand, that for all his efforts and accomplish-ments, he was still not able to please Randolph.

Abraham Lincoln

As charitable a man as there ever was, Lincoln did not attend his father’s funeral. Tom, it seems, was hard on the sensitive kid.

George Washington

Gouvenor Morris, who knew Washington well, said, “Many men have to control their passions, but few men have to control passions of such a violent nature as General Washington.” What happened to George? Was he born with such rage? I doubt it.

Ludwig van Beethoven

The great composer brooded, I am given to understand, as much as any man could brood. One would think the great man’s passions were all directed toward resonant beauty and complexity of sound. Not at all. At least one scholar says that the predominant emotion of Beethoven’s life was a burning angry passion directed against his father – who earned it.

So, you see, Mr. Pinker, this brooding has a long and storied history, and it clearly has its origins in bad parenting. Whatever were you talking about?

I was able to set Mr. Pinker aside, largely, for a long time.

Reading Mr. Pinker

I am not one not to give a man a chance. But I only stumbled upon Mr. Pinker’s book (“The Blank Slate”) by accident at the local library recently. Sitting down, with only a hint of trepidation, I fell into the elegant prose and read on. Here are the major points, related to parenting and its effects that Mr. Pinker brings out in his book:

Law 1: “All human behavioral traits are heritable.”

There are five major behavioral traits (represented by the acronym OCEAN):

4 Openness to new experiences
5 Conscientiousness
6 Extroversion-Introversion
7 Antagonism-Agreeableness
8 Neuroticism

All these have been shown in studies to be heritable. For example, identical twins reared apart are similar in their traits. Biological siblings are more alike than adoptive siblings. The differences between siblings are the same, whether raised apart or in the same home, and so forth.

Law 2: “The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.”

To quote Mr. Pinker, “Whatever experiences siblings share by growing up in the same home makes little or no difference in the kind of people they turn out to be.” I had to admit that he had a point in this regard. Though we shared the same parenting, I am not like any of my siblings (a matter which, were they to ponder it, would be an immense relief to them, I am sure).

Law 3: “A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.”

It turns out, in determining personality traits, genes rate 50%, the family rates 0% and the unique environment rates 50%. In a word, children don’t turn out more the same because they are in the same home. In the words of Mr. Pinker, “Parental behavior does not seem to shape their children’s intelligence or personality over the long term.”

Just what is the unique environment that contributes a full 50% to the personality traits? Mr. Pinker points to two factors: peer groups and chance. By chance, he means that we end up in this neighborhood or that, thereby associating with this peer group or that. Moreover, things happen to us, momentous things, with life-long consequences, by chance (more about this later). In addition, there might also be considerable room for chance in the development of the brain. The genes do not strictly determine how the neurons grow. Could it be that my brain grew in a funny way? I suppose anything is possible; this is human nature, after all.

Mr. Pinker marshals has arguments like a man steeped in the self-assurance that comes from the knowledge of a large and growing body of evidence that supports his position. This all was disconcerting at first.

Then I came across the following, altogether telling, sentence: “The studies exclude cases of criminal neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and abandonment in a bleak orphanage, so they do not show that extreme cases fail to leave scars.”

Yes, Mr. Pinker, and they would not show that extreme cases fail to leave scars. I have seen the scars, and have them, too.

Now, see here, Mr. Pinker, I’m not a psychologist, but it seems to me that this changes the game. You are taking out of consideration the very situation I am talking about. We were physically and emotionally abused. What good are your studies to me if you are confining yourself to Ozzie and Harriet? I would grant that it would make no difference had I been raised in family A or family B – lovely households across the street – but I was not. I was raised in our family, and that made all the difference. Trauma has an effect; it leaves scars.

I finally saw it: Psychologists could not include grossly dysfunctional families in their studies, because they would be legally obligated to report such abusive situations to the authorities. (Were our family investigated for possible inclusion in the study, T might well be sitting in a jail cell for some time.) One must extrapolate.

But extrapolate one can. Thoughts and feelings, one comes to see from the pages of “The Blank Slate,” are merely add-ons, not personality traits. But does not bad parenting leave scars? Yes, but scars, too, are not traits. I was losing the battle. But, wait, what about the character of the scars? Would not the nature of the scars, their depth and persistence, be dependent on the nature of the recipient of the scars? More and more, as I delved into Mr. Pinker’s book – he brings forth the evidence like waves of assault on the skeptic – I came to see that he has a point. He is certainly much better grounded than those who subscribe to the facile notion that our person-alities are due entirely to our culture and family.

Yes, I had to admit, nature is important. The evidence is compelling and growing – much of what we are, we were born to be.

Al and T

In my life I have known four men – T and three others – who were sexually abused. They all had characteristics in common: a blinding rage which was sudden and without apparent reason, a tendency to lash out at others as the causes of their pain, a remarkable ability to calm down quickly as if the outbursts were no more than passing mental storms, and a decided propensity to leave others with the sense of an impending explosion. One dealt with them as if walking gingerly through a mine field.

Let’s consider just two of the four men – T and a landlord, long departed, I had while at the University, whom I’ll call Al. These two men could scarcely be more different. T was very intelligent and sophisticated. He was well-kept – always clean and nicely dressed – and very solicitous of his reputation. People who didn’t see his rages would think he was a model of coherence, propriety and self-control. For all his drinking, I never saw him embarrass himself in public. (He once almost got in a fight with a man in a bar – a good man, by the way, a much better man than him: both were drunk – but we’ll let that go.)

Al was a retired garbage collector – from the days when they manhandled garbage cans. Not unintelligent, Al’s long face, bony nose, hollow cheeks, and tired eyes gave a fixed expression of mental distress and dismay. He always wore a dirty tee-shirt and ratty pants. As he moped about the paper-strewn living room, which, incidentally, doubled as a bedroom (he and his wife slept on couches across the room), he grumbled constantly, spitting tobacco juice (the reason for the papers) and complaining about vague enemies and afflictions. Al kept a pair of dogs, mongrel creatures, who peed on the rug and nipped at strangers (me, for instance).

My point is this: Imagine the childhood environments turned around: Al brought up in T’s circumstances and vice versa. What would you have? The same outcome! I cannot abide the idea that Al would be clean and sophisticated. Not that fellow, not if he were raised in Windsor Castle. And T would not be walking around a paper-strewn living room in a dirty tee-shirt and ratty pants, spitting on the floor and peeing here and there (oh, no, that was the dogs). Their personalities were vastly different and would have remained so no matter how they were raised. Furthermore, they were not rendered more alike because they were both abused. The abuse made them no more alike than being steeped in Mozart as children would have done. They were different people; learning and culture could not bridge the gap between them. Mr. Pinker, you have a point.

Emotional baggage, Mr. Pinker is saying, does not define who we are or what we do with our lives. A person becomes an accountant, has a family of three kids, has a dog but not a cat, dreams of winning the lottery, takes camping trips to the woods, hates to stand in line, loves the theater and bright clothes, hates spicy foods and noisy people, loves his wife for her quick mind and lithe body, tries to be fond of his kids but likes the son much more than the twin daughters, reads science fiction novels, goes to hockey games, and so on, ad infinitum. It is all in the genes and the greater environment – apart from the family – we happen to grow up in. Whether, in addition, this man carries through life some foul memories of his childhood, whether he thinks his parents are lovely people or monstrous jerks, whether he goes to see them in the assisted-living center or would just soon not – is all minor. These are mere add-ons to the personality.

I made a careful mental examination of the seven siblings of the family. We are vastly different people. The bad parenting did not tend to make us all alike. True enough, all of us carry some emotional pain from childhood, but when I think of my brothers and sisters I think of their personalities, and not some little grief added to the great mansions of their natures.

And besides, what do feelings matter? I have long known that how I happen to feel has nothing to do with my writing. I recall sitting down to write one afternoon, while shaking with rage – a ladyfriend! – and composing a scene about a young couple, very much in love, who go for lunch in a woods, where they make love for the first time. My feelings did not matter.

I didn’t read Mr. Pinker’s entire book, but I read repeatedly the parts that apply to me. The upshot was a startling revelation. The evidence you present, Mr. Pinker, is very compelling. You are right, Sir! I am not a personality molded by T and E. To a large extent, I am just me. This is liberating. We are only ourselves, and not the product of someone else’s efforts or lack thereof.

A whole different way of looking back at my life opened up before me. I saw myself as never before.

Near death experiences

With a new way of looking at myself, I began to examine my life carefully.

The winter before last I almost died. One morning in March, sleepy and in my usual daze, I went out on the patio to get the morning paper. It was icy – sheer ice, in fact. I retrieved the paper and headed back inside. But I slipped and fell heavily on my left side. As I sat up on the ice I recalled distinctly that the hair on the back of my head had been brushed as I went down – distinctly lifted, as by a stroke with the fingers. I looked behind me – a four-inch pipe projects from the gas meter. I had just missed it. Had I fallen three inches closer to the house, the upshot would not be just a bruised hip (I could not lay on my left side for three weeks) but probably the final curtain. I was only annoyed by the bruised hip.

This experience made me think of other occasions when I have come close to death. We all have these “near death experiences” of another kind. If you only look back on your life, you will probably see five or six of them. You are lucky, too.

We imagine that our lives are so momentous and meaningful and so permanent. There is a tendency to brood as if everything would be alright if we could only figure it out. One would think this incident would have cured me. Alas, it did not. Brooding seems to be in my nature.

Much more recently, as a late-night snack, I was eating a bowl of whole wheat crackers. In my usual state of angst – I had been thinking about this article; frustrated by an inability to make progress – I was chewing and only half-swallowing the crackers. They were lodging in my throat. I am in good shape – I run almost every day – so I did not notice till the fifth or sixth cracker that something was not right. Finally, stopping the eating, I tried to draw a breath – no air was forthcoming. It got no farther than the blockage. Another breath – still no progress, but now some discomfort. Luckily, I am not inclined to panic – this has saved me on several other occasions, too – and I only tried, gently, to draw a breath two or three more times – as the pain rose to something very disturbing. No luck. I walked into the living room, thinking about 9-1-1. I had been drinking a Coke; I tried a swallow of that. But this only added a note of authenticity to the sensation of drowning. It, too, got no further than the blockage. (There has been a debate in this country on the use of water-boarding as an interrogation technique: Is it torture? Let me tell you, I am on the side that thinks it is.) The pain became hard and frightening. I am convinced, that had I stood erect and gasped hard for air, I would have been finished – history, defunct, a goner. The unswallowed food-stuff would have lodged hard, blocking the windpipe.

I live alone. I have always been bothered by the thought that if I died at home my body would not be found for some time. I have a small cadre of friends, but these are not people who check on me periodically. They do not check on me at all. They would only think I had taken off on one of my vehicle trips. Alas, it would be weeks.

But I didn’t panic. I bent way over and gently coughed several times – bringing up a sizable wad of food-stuff on to the rug. The whole episode – from the time I discovered the crackers were stuck until I could breathe again – was no more than thirty or forty seconds. But the first deep breath was welcome.

I recall clearly that I was brooding again after the cracker incident – almost, in fact, as soon as I could draw a breath. Lord! I almost died – dead, croaked, finished, kaput… and I only wanted to go back to brooding. This “near-death” experience seems to have mattered no more than if it were something, and rather dull, I had been watching on TV. How foolish human nature is!

I sat at the kitchen table long into the night, trying to make some sense of the world – before I left it. After considerable thought, here is what my “near death” experiences taught me:

1. Live in the moment. Whatever we have could be taken from us in a second.

2. What do little snubs and rejections in life matter, when death is always at the doorstep?

3. Useless-knowledge.com exacts too dear a price.

4. Try as I might – and I have tried – I cannot come to grips with the fact of my death. Any attempt to see a body lying on the rug or feel the horror of death leaves me utterly cold. It is not in my nature to think in this way; I should think it’s not human nature. In the same way, I have come to see, it was not in the nature of T and E to have any deep appreciation for the emotional well-being of their kids. They could never grasp that they had been anything but exemplary parents. T could not come to grips with his kids as human personalities. They were troublesome sprites, who, the girls, in particular, were apt to cause him great embarrassment. Of his nature, then, T was stumbling around in the dark. He had a benighted nature. It is pitiable, but it is him. Besides, people in general are self-centered. That, too, is human nature.

5. This point is harder to understand, but I’ll try to make it clear. Innately, the mind works as a unit. In trying to make self-protective sense of the world, it naturally forges a trinity of mental processes – thoughts, feelings and images – into one coherent assemblage. Such is human nature. Where we differ – our particular natures – is in the expression of that trinity (how insistent it is, for instance) and the role each member of the trinity plays. Burdened with the parenting of T and E, some people, by nature dull, would have scarcely a thought or an image to show for all the bad parenting, others would have a cascade of images – leading them, perhaps, to paint pictures or make movies – still others, besieged by thoughts, would write books (alas, my own thoughts run along a single track – “I’d hit the pathetic bastard back”). But, do you see, the important thing is not this or that thought or image, but the insistent, or not, nature of the thing – our nature.

6. A final point follows from this: The moments one recalls do not matter. The fact that I remember T hitting me in the lounge as I sat on an easy chair (damn, the bastard!) is not the point. The point is that I was saddled with eighteen years of hurt and frustration. The thoughts and images are just an expression of this. Having the hard feeling, the mind selects a thought (that damn bastard!) and image (me in a chair being hit) to go along with it. Do you see?

(Perhaps I should note that Mr. Pinker had nothing to do with this reasoning. These are my thoughts.)

But if bad parenting, however much it burdens us with emotional grief, however strong and insistent the pain, does not affect who we are or what we do, it can, in fact, depending on our personalities, kill us. Recall that I was wont, after dealing with E, to lose the will to live. The accompanying depression and sheer misery can be deadly.

I once knew a woman I’ll call April. I knew April only slightly, but I knew her mother, now departed – call her Shirley – very well, and she talked about April a lot. (April was a poet, published in a young person’s anthology of poetry, and so forth.) I only met April’s father – call him Karl – at April’s wake. From many conversations with Shirley, it was clear that Karl, the man she was so crazy about, though finally divorced from (She got tired of the violence: “You may be six feet and 220 pounds, but if you want to go to sleep knowing you’re going to wake up again, you’d better keep your hands off me”) was a miserable, mean alcoholic bigot and some-time sadist. Shirley was not a bad woman, but she was devoted to Karl – to the near total exclusion of her kids. She was desperate to control Karl’s drinking. In a word, April’s parents make T and E look like the second coming of Joseph and Mary. At one point as a teenager, April had to be picked up off the floor, where she lay in a fetal position, and carried to the psych ward of a hospital, where she remained for three weeks. Later, she ended up moving a long way from home and enlisting in the Army, where she had an affair, lived with the man but did not marry him, and had a child with him. He happened to be a black man. Knowing of April’s troubled life, one guesses that the relationship was not entirely healthy. It’s also predictable, or some species of that kind of behavior, based on the nature of the parenting. Like all efforts of this kind, it did no good. Karl simply ignored April’s kid; he wouldn’t allow a photo of the kid in his house. April made a final attempt to save herself by coming to see Shirley, but got nowhere (Shirley’s focus was still on the divorced and remarried Karl). So April ended up putting a pistol to her head and pressing on the trigger – it went off. She was 23.

Is it so unreasonable to think that had April had lovely, sensitive parents – parents who were happy and loving of each other and her; a father who was not a cruel, bigoted alcoholic; a mother who was not wholly focused on her husband; parents who read Yeats with her as a child – she would still be alive? Yes, of course, she would. Are her parents, then, in some way responsible for her death? Yes, of course, they are. Should they feel guilty? No, they should not. They have their nature; she had hers. I have never subscribed to the “blame-the-parents” game. It is sad and embarrassing, and accomplishes nothing.

Thoughts and feelings, then, matter only to the extent that they consume or even end one’s life: April is dead because of her imagination – her nature – in concert with some very bad parenting. The bad effect of the parenting can cause the person to give up or behave in a risky way.

The key thing then is to go on living. You have much to contribute. No one – except the Lord – gives you your personality and no one can take it from you. No one can change who you are and what you can do. Just go on living – live like mad – and never give up.

Chance

Recently, I attended a celebration for Vietnam Veterans. At the grounds on which the celebration was held there was a one-third size replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Inscribed on the wall are the names of every man and woman killed in the war. I looked at the wall for a long time.

Time does not matter in the mind. Seeing the names of the three guys I knew well on the wall, I was there again, in Vietnam, seeing them, talking to them. Lt. Little, the West Point graduate, who could scarcely bear the burden of not being in a fight. McCarron, my buddy, the good-natured, smiling Irishman from New York City, who was stitched from navel to nose by automatic weapon’s fire. Trotter, the good-ole-boy with a tireless sense of humor, who blew himself up with his own grenade. Bored, I suspect, fooling around – he pulled the pin, lost control of the handle and froze.

Two incidents of the Vietnam War stick in my mind with particular clarity. One of the scariest jobs of the war was the nasty business of checking out an area after a fire-fight. One could only imagine some wounded enemy soldier lying in the grass, dying, determined to kill an American soldier before his end came. On one of these occasions, as we swept an area of jungle, we got off line. In the distance I caught sight of a soldier flickering in the brush. I aimed my rifle and half-pulled the trigger. Something kept me from squeezing off the shot. It was Prescott, a friend, and an elementary school teacher. I blenched as I lowered the weapon.

On another occasion, checking out the area after springing an ambush, a Vietnamese enemy soldier popped up from behind a tree, stuck his hands in the air and yelled “Chou Hoi” (I surrender). I jerked my rifle up but did not fire. What if I had? Would a day go by that I did not think about having killed a man trying to surrender?

Had I killed Prescott or the Viet guy I would have carried the lingering hurt through my life like a sack of salt. It’s about human nature. Most guys would be bothered, but more or less forget about it and go on. Some wouldn’t be bothered at all. I would have been devastated. Personality. It’s not what happens to us, but who we are that matters.

One more incident:

Years ago, in a particularly painful dither – I had just left a meeting with my soon-to-be-ex wife – I became impatient in a line of traffic and made a sudden left turn into a parking lot to get on. In the process, I came so close to running over a kid on a bike that I thought for a second that I had gone right through him. His father, following on a bike, yelled at me; I almost vomited.

I often wonder how people manage to live with the horrors that have happened to them. I recall some years ago getting the car towed for some reason – there’s always something with cars – and striking up a conversation with the tow truck operator. He told me about picking up a smashed vehicle the precious weekend near the airport. A woman drove off the road, killing the lone passenger – her mother. “That would be a hard one to take,” the tow truck operator said. “She was drunk – way over the legal limit.” Hard to take, indeed.

A thousand Ts and Es would be a silly farce by comparison with the emotional aftermath of killing an innocent person. It is my nature.

Life makes no sense. How can eighteen years of frustration, pain and embarrassment count for no more, or even less, than the twitch of a finger on a trigger or the passage of a second? But that is often the case.

Us

When somebody hurts us, we are inclined to attribute the problem wholly to what happened; that is, to the behavior of the person who hurt us. We forget that it happened to us. The key is not what happened but the personality to whom it happened.

It defies sense to say what happens does not matter. (No matter what you do, you cannot hurt me.) It matters a lot. It can matter for the rest of your life. But the salient point is – it matters to you. You define what matters and the extent to which it matters. None of us are made of stone. But what is a crushing burden for some is a matter to be readily dispensed with for others.

If none of my siblings got away unscathed, my reaction to the obnoxious situation was way over the top. This is my nature. I can readily imagine most people, under the parenting of T and E, with some grumbling and angst, pretty much getting on with their lives, as the siblings have. This lying in bed, utterly bereft of the will to go on living, sounds like me.

It was cruel that I should have been paired with T and E. I can imagine some psychologist, knowing me and knowing T and E, sizing up the situation on the day I was born, and saying, with a sad shake of the head, “Poor kid. Well, you just may make it. But it won’t be easy and it will be a near thing.”

Some women, as I understand, skate past sexual abuse without too much trouble. For others, of course, the devastation can hardly be lived with. I once dated a woman whose parents would conduct “gynecological exams” on the two daughters when they were children. She handled the memory of it as well as could be expected. Her sister, at one point, was sexually harassed at work and ended up for a time in a mental institution. Same abusive treatment but different personalities.

Another example: I knew a woman long ago who had been raped – arguably one of the worst things that can befall the human heart. She talked about the incident, which had happened some years before, in a way that did not seem deeply troubled. In other cases, as a police detective said, “Rape is the only homicide in which the victim is still living.” Personality.

So, I am pretty much the same person I would have been with wonderful and loving parents. Yes, people raised with a surfeit of love do not think, “Who would want me?” T and E added depression, anxiety and a sense of not being worth much, but my accomplishments would be much the same. I was not held back from being a good runner or scholar or photographer or whatnot by them. If I had a talent, I would use it no less if the whole blessed world did not want me. No one could not change my basic personality. So what if I was miserable? The glorious substance of me was not touched by them. In short, it is what you do, not how you feel, that matters and what you do is determined by your God-given personality. Moreover, the excess of rancor over all these years is a testament to the fact that it is my rancor. Who else carries on as I do?

Consider again George Washington. What does it matter that he was loaded with violent passion (for whatever reason)? He founded a country. Or consider Churchill. Who really cares whether Randolph was a poor parent? Churchill faced down Hitler and led the world through World War II. Memories and feelings hardly seem to count in the face of such accomplishment. They are just add-ons, a coating of paint on the grand edifices of our personalities.

So, if you were hurt, celebrate, rather, what you have accomplished. (The fact that you were hurt only means you are not a dullard.) The important thing is to go on living, because whatever life amounts to, it is your life.

Imagination

What of imagination? Surely parenting would be different in its effects depending on whether the kid was Monet or, on the other hand, a house-painter?

The imagination makes the past real. It puts T and E out there, so that I am not talking to myself, but to them. I have not been making things up about the past but living it again, vividly, in the present, as if it just happened. Of course, this is not reasonable. It is not reasonable to brood over the abuse all these years later; it is not reasonable to think that T and E are responsible for this current pain; it is not reasonable to think that the issue is something other than my imagination. I am no longer being hurt by them, but I believe that I am. In my imagination, I am engaged in a pitched battle. Perhaps it is a species of madness.

Some years ago, when I was deeply depressed and estranged from the family, E sent me a letter, which, in its demeaning content and self-serving tone, was a model of blind obnoxious-ness. Among other endearments, she wrote, “Please stop hurting yourself, Patrick.” (Oh, gee, thanks, Mom. Your sweet concern for me warms the very sinews of my heart.) But E has a point – my incessant belaboring of T and E is my imagination. One can imagine Mrs. Niven, in the same vein, writing to her son David, “Please stop hurting yourself. Your father really loved you. He was only hard on you because he cared.” (One can also imagine what Mr. David Niven’s response to such a statement would be.) I can easily imagine a dull son who, after age twenty-five or so, would never give the same father a thought. Clearly, Mr. Niven had a powerful imagination. He used it to great effect in his acting. Were I a different person, the past would amount to nothing; not good and not bad, just nothing. We should celebrate that which is good and truly ourselves.

The imagination deepens and prolongs the pain. It makes my memories of childhood more insistent and hurtful. But this is my imagination. This is me, my nature. (I will not entertain the suggestion that the difference between Monet and a house-painter is that the former studied in a studio, while the latter never had that chance. Our imaginations are as much an innate part of us as our skins.) I would not – at this time, in any case – want to be dull and unimaginative, so as to take the edge off the pain. I’ll take what I was given for a personality, imagination and all. If life has not been entirely fun, it has certainly not been dull, either.

Resignation

Okay then, I was depressed, anxious and somewhat dysfunctional, the rancor was overflowing. I ended up in the wrong career as a result of the struggle just to go on living. But what matter are these details? I was always the person I was born to be. T and E did not form my personality and they did not change it. I was not frustrated by them in who I am and what I could do. They did not stymie me. For better or worse, I turned out pretty much as I would have. I have lived my life, on my terms, doing pretty much all I could, in light of a personality that was largely God-given. And the game isn’t over yet.

Bad parenting, then, like thoughts and feelings, is only an add-on. It is only something that happened to us, and its effects are dependent on our innate personalities. The key is us, not them. We make the effects great or small. We get past them, or don’t. We determine to hang on to the past or chuck the whole works as some bad business best left behind.

As I said at the outset, I have mellowed with age. The Old Pain used to wear me out. Now I have come to understand that it could all have been extinguished by a handful of crackers or a little bit of ice. What do we have but our energy, our capacity for love? And yet we spend it wildly, like drunken sailors, oblivious to the fact that we could lose it all in a heartbeat. For our own well-being and peace of mind, we must try to be a little more loving.

As I said elsewhere, I would not live my life over again – not with T and E as parents – at least not if it included my 20s. But I can say without reservation that I would not now change the parents I had. If my life has been hurtful – it has – it has also been rich. If I have been a little crazy, I have also been intensely alive.

Beside the immensity, the complexity, the sheer magnificence of our personalities, the little fancies we carry through life are like puffs of smoke before a hurricane.

Why parenting matters

Well, then, if nurturing does not affect the personality, why bother with parenting the little sprites? Why not just feed them and change them and let them fend for themselves? Why put oneself out for nothing?

Here is Mr. Pinker’s take on that:

“Parental behavior can make a big difference, not on the personality, but on the happiness of the kids. A parent and child have, or should have (are you listening T and E?) a human relationship. One person’s behavior to another has consequences for the quality of the relationship between them.” And later, “Children, complete with memories of how they were treated, have a growing say in their dealings with the parents.”

Children should be treated well to allow them to grow up with good memories. But having a carefree life is not the important issue – no life is carefree: it gets you one way or the other. The important thing is not that I was stuffed full of bad memories, but that T and E and I did not have a relationship – which we most certainly did not. And, I might add, that was their fault, not mine. I would have gladly given half the income of my life as payment for having a loving relationship with wonderful parents.

According to Mr. Pinker, then, you want to raise your children with love and nurturing so you can have a pleasant relationship with them later in life. But I can think of another reason to be a good parent – you might have a kid like me.

When I was in my mid-thirties, beaten down and over-burdened with depression and sheer pain, floundering around in a stew of misery from a hurtful past I could not shake, I made a call to T and E in a (futile) attempt to get them out of my life once and for all. Both were on the phone. “I want you both out of my life,” I said, bluntly. “What’s going on?” E asked. “We’re sorry if we made any mistakes,” T said. “You have six other kids,” I said. “Pay attention to them and let me alone.” “Oh, no, that’s not the way it works,” T said. “You do what you have to do, Patrick,” E said. “You’re hurting us,” T said. “You’re hurting us.” I hung up.

This sorry exchange took place many years ago. At that time, the estrangement lasted only two months. All the same, I still think that if I had a kid like me, I’d kill him.

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Email Pat O'Regan: Patxtra@aol.com

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