Cheap Elevated to Cruel

What kind of mother does not buy milk for her children?

She would have to be desperately poor, right?

She would first have to sell the house.  And then the furniture.  And then her wedding band.

She would demand that her husband buy milk; or threaten to divorce him, taking the children, and filing for alimony and child support.

Wouldn't she?

Or...she could make the entirely reasonable decision to not have children.  Perhaps she cannot afford children.  Or perhaps she does not want children.  Either way, the decision to have children is just that – a choice.  And if you make the decision to have children, at the same time you make the decision to take care of them properly.

Or...she may not give any thought whatsoever to whether she wants children, or whether she is well-suited to parenthood.  She certainly does not consider whether the man she married, a truly angry and contemptuous soul, would make a good father to her children.

Ultimately she has children per customary expectations, and perhaps for her own selfish vanity.  Certainly for her husband's vanity.  And yet she decides that providing milk for them to drink is a bridge too far.  An expense she is unwilling to bear.

When I was a kid, there was always beer and wine and Scotch whiskey in the house.  But there was never any milk.  This was not neglect; it was a conscious decision.  It was simple and genuine miserliness.

It was cheapness elevated to cruelty.

By any standard, my parents were incredibly affluent...

I am five feet six inches tall.

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The Transaction on the Table

Finding Unconditional Love After Forty and the Explosive Outcome

I met Mira in 2011.  We fell in love.  Nothing unusual about that.  I will save our story for another post, but the experience was new for me.

Prior to Mira, the people who "loved" me, loved me conditionally.  You might even call it transactional love.  But I think most people understand it as conditional love.  If they think about it in those terms.  And of course, most do not.  But most people do understand unconditional love.  And because of that, they can infer what conditional love must be.

Of course, it's not really love at all, is it?

Anyway, conditional love was all I had known.  This certainly includes my parents and later friends and girlfriends and later still my ex-wife.  Yes, they all supposedly loved me.  But there can be no mistake about it, it was conditional.  Conditional on what?  Well, whatever it was they expected.  And if I did not meet their expectations, well there was a price to be paid.

After all, there was a transaction on the table.

So Mira was the first person, ever, to love me unconditionally.  And this experience, this continuing experience, gave me the strength to say to all the others, primarily my parents:  No more.

See, now that I have experienced unconditional love, now that I know what real love is, I will not tolerate anything less.  It is sad that it took me so long to get here, but there it is.

Several years later, my parents, with typical impunity, tied their supposed love (well, our relationship anyway) to their irrational expectations, including my acceptance of their betrayals and their lies, and of their sheer nastiness and spitefulness and venom.  But by this time, I had the strength, or rather the experience, to say:  Oh no you don't.

The effect was explosive.

So be it.

I belatedly accepted their conduct and bad faith for what it was:  A termination of our relationship.  Which has been very hard for me.  I still have trouble dealing with it.  But for my parents?  Well, they have other children.  And their own self-righteousness.

Now my parents love their other children conditionally as well.  It is the only kind of love they know.  But I guess my siblings are more willing to tolerate it than I am.  And no doubt it helps that they have certainly done a better job at meeting parental expectations.

Me, I have always been a bit of a black sheep.  Even more so after depression set in almost immediately after completing college.  Thirty years later, I am finally coming to understand it all.

But without Mira, I would still be trying, and failing, to meet their expectations... their conditions.

The transaction on the table.

Their table.

So I crafted a new table.  And around my table, there is only unconditional love.

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On Child Abuse and Depression

Last month I quoted an article about child abuse and PTSD.  The author, Susanne Babbel, makes the point that child abuse can lead to a number of psychological and emotional disorders in adults.  It reminded me of the Herbert Ward quote:  Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime.  I think this is true.  It certainly has been for me.

To whatever extent I can, I try to leave my siblings out of my writings here.  But all three of us have suffered mental health issues in adulthood.  What are the odds of that?  One out of three might be statistically about normal.  Two out of three might be a high statistical outlier.  But three out of three?  That is something altogether different.

I only mention this in order to assure the reader that I am not some shallow ingrate with daddy issues.  The kind you occasionally find on the very popular subreddit, Raised by Narcissists, and on other similar sites.

I don't think I am.  In order to maintain my relationship with my parents, I was able to set aside my issues for more than thirty years of adulthood.  The issues were there, but I had put them behind us.  It was only my parents' renewed misconduct along with their reinvigorated attitude of self-righteous impunity that belatedly led to our estrangement.

The sad reality is this:  Behind the veneer of respectability lurks a common and wholly unrepentant child abuser, who longs for the day when he could simply beat his children into submission to his will, however irrational it may be.  And it has always been this way, I just did not want to face it.  I mean, who wants to face that?

The final break was eighteen months ago now.  I question my actions every day.  But I should not.  My actions were really only reactive.  My parents' conduct and attitude terminated our relationship.  I reacted in the only way I could to protect myself.  It was self-defense.  And further, estrangement finally allowed the pain of my childhood and the reality of our ongoing relationship to come to the forefront.

And what this has done is made it clear to me where my lifelong battle with depression originated.  As Babbel suggests in her article, I have suffered with depression and relationship problems all of my adult life.

For some people, perhaps most, depression may be the result of a chemical imbalance.  But for me...well, I know the source of my shadows.

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