Welcome
"Jesus, tendered shepherd hear me, bless this little lamb tonite. Thou hast warmthed and clothed and feed me. Listen to my evening prayer. Good nite. Sweet dreams. Sleep well." (Prayer (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) had to say to his parents, each night, on going to bed; I slurred the words to get it over with)
"Because my parents threatened me, I am a threat to myself and to the things I value." (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
"They put me off at the wrong stop when I wa born." (Doug Schaff)
Yes, my reader, this really happened to me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) when I was about 5 years old. The house was not so upscale not my mother so well dressed. My mother[2] was only carrying one small suitcase, maybe like an attaché case. The words were not so articulate: I probably didn't think any words but was just intimidated; my mother was not that educated (5.5th grade lavel?), and I don't think she said any words either. My father did a voiceover: Warning me what was going to happen unless I told my mother I loved her.[3] ☠
Faced with the imminent threat of abandonment[5], of course I capitulated. They won a Pyrrhic victory. They had exposed their monstrous inner core (of which they themselves possibly were unaware → did they have any self-awareness?). Obviously they did not appreciate that the words they got out of my mouth did not connote when they denoted, but were just a bone offered up to try to ward off as if an attacking dog. I have no memory what happened next. I must have given them enough to appease them.[4]
I fought back in the few ways I could. By extreme good fortune, I was unable to blow my nose. Sucking the mucous in made a noise they did not like, so I was able to tell them what I felt about them by sucking in my snot. Also when we visited my grandmother's house I would work on chiseling a hole through the basement's concrete wall. It wasn't very big but my grandfather did not like it. These people never apparently "got" the message.
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) early on learned to be ashamed of myself and to not trust anybody. But the lesson I most deeply absorbed is that every person might harm me, starting with the woman out of whose birth canal I must have emerged into the troposphere. While probably few were likely going to stab me in the back, nobody was going to "have my back". For me, it was always going to be, later if not sooner: Jeder for sich und Gott gegen alles (every man for himself and God against all; Werner Herzog) → for short: Or else!.
We know from psychoanalysis (D.W. Winnicott) that a small child needs a "holding environment", which is normatively provided by a nurturinging mother. What was I to do, especially since I did not have a safe house to flee to?
One thing they should have done
* * * * * * *
Technical note: Theoretically I cannot blame my parents for anything they did to me. They were themselves victims of American childrearing practices: The American Dream. The United States of America is ultimately responsible for all the harm they did to me, transitively, via all the harm it did to them.
* * * * * * *
How much did I dislike my parents? I will probably never know, because I was not allowed to have my feelings about them. They should have humbly and sincerely inquired why I disliked them and, further, whether perhaps I myself didn't fully appreciate how much I disliked them, and then, of course, taken action to remediate themselves. "We sincerely apologize for the hurt we have caused you. We pledge our sacred honor to try to do better going forward...."
One clue I have, as I may have written elsewhere, is that they always wanted me to blow my nose but I snorted my snot in.* That was not a good idea since the mucous in one's nose might contain germs which could hurt me not them, but, they had [whether by autocratic intent, or ignorantly, due to their having been ignoranced by their childrearing and the social surround of their adulthood...] ignoranced me, so I didn't think clearly about my own well-being. Snorting my snot was one of the few things I could do to them in responsse to the many things they did to me which I did not like, where they did not succeed in coercing me.
*+2023.05.10. Irony: The nasal polyps surgery turned ou to be sugnificantly more serious than the removal of polyps 10 years previous: "real surgery", the anesthesiologist told me. Part of my post-operative instructions are that for two weeks I should not blow my nose, but I can "sniff in" to help clear congestion. Sic transit gloria parentium.
I could get away with them ideating, and probably also deceiving myself, that I was incpable of blowing my nose, which they could not do anything about. If they had got the notion in their behavioral comportments that I was being disobedient: wilfully refusing to blow my nose, they would have punished me for that. I had succeeded in frustrating them: them, although I could not get the full satisfaction out of it of clearly understanding that I had succeeded in deceiving them, and in a very small way, got them to be like little black Sambo and his tigers: chasing their own tails into self-destruction.
Therefore: I propose to hypothesize that I really, deeply hated my parents. But, again, they deprived me of getting what little pleseure i might have got out of them for this, and, had I clearly understood what was going on, I mught hae been more able to manipulate them to my benefit. Odysseus and the Cyclops telling his fellow big dolts: "Nobody hurt me!" "Are you hurt?" "Nobody hurt me!" Call me "Nobody"! (Exodus 3:14) Would/could I have liked parents who merited to be liked? I will never know because, again, the ones I got stuck with by fickle For-tuna ignoranced me.
"They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born." (Doug Schaff)
After many decades of forgetfulness, I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) have finally remembered one good thing about my mother-bitch, besides her idiot savant artistic talent: She would wash her face in the bathroom sink, in cold water, after lathering up her hands with soap. At least she did this when I was a small child, before she became an alcoholic. [Might this be a false memory, or something I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) am just cooking up in 2022?]
And now (+2022.11.16) I think I may remember another good thing: I think I recall my parents said they never spoke "baby talk" to me, which would be very good. Not: Itchy, kitschy your little wee wee, coo! Best guess: While I had no sexual or a fortiori erotic lexicographical landscape at all, I urinated not tinkled, neigher was there any "baby talk" nomenclature for: rectal enema. Orthogonal to all of defecating, shiting and, question mark: pooping, as elsewhere noted here, I "concentrated".
It is not accurate to say this woman was intrusive. A person who is intruding acknowledges there is a boundary and that they have crossed it. My mother had no boundaries regarding me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]). I was as much as part of her, probblby moreso, than her own anus, because it seems she tried to deny she defectated but she had no qualms about foregrounding anything about me she could discover. She did not intrude; she did not accept that I was not part of her.
The price I pay for having had a defective mother, to whatever extent it was her fault or the fault of her social surround (the pathetic: "The American Dream" propaganda), never ends so long as I have not yet ended. I have nasal polyps again. I tell surrogate person: "I am frustrated and frightened." Response (not verbatim): "When you don't like something you try to make everybody else miserable.", i.e.: I am in the wrong for complaining about being wronged: here.
Nobody is going to be the mother I did not have who would have comforted me not abandoned me to Nurse Ratched that one morning when I was about 8 years old and the doctor for some reason or lack thereof decided to get a blood test out of the middle of the back of my lower arm with a long steel needle (painful for me to look at this picrure) and mother bitch and my clueless father just sat on a bench on in the waiting room on their four couch potatoes while she took me away to do it to me. I was terrified. So what?
And those St. Paul's School teache[r]s, those loving mother ("alma mother") phony wannabes, who Inquisitioned me: here. I will never know where my infant to toddler [less than...] life went wrong. For Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, it was an early childhood heartless and perhaps unnecessary(?) hospitalization that lasted 2 weeks. Was there a point source trauma when I was somewher between 11 months and 2.75 years old? Or was it what I seem to recall Dr. Winnicott called, descriptively enough: "cumulative trauma" → "just" a long series of small hurts? It does not end so long as I have not yet ended, and I read somewhere in The New York Times yesterday a physician who said something like that no matter what people say, nobody really prepares to face their dying (nobody faces death because death is either nothing or going some place "else").
It took me two days to face up to my nasal polyps. Hopefully they will be "no big thing", and like the last time they wil be a able to be surgically removed as an in-office half-hour long tolerably unpleasant procedure and my nose will not be plugged up for me to be in unbearable living suffocation for recovery.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa up yours. I am frustrated and frightened. I was childreared to be ashamed of being hurt so that I would not bother other people's dogmatic slumbers by complaining about it. Unlike many times in my life, I faced my shame and voiced what I felt: And I got smacked down by being told I wa the problem, not that the world had caused me to have a problem. At least this time I can say; I tried. I asked the world to be the mother I never had and it "replied": we made your bed, so you can lie in it; please keep it to yourself you ingrate child!
 My (BMcC) stalag picture. SSS number: 18-11-46-503. Stone wall topped with sharp pointed shards surrounds institution for wayward orphans. My childhood took place inside invisible walls of ignorance and societal negligence. My parents may have meant well, but they did not know how to raise their child and their so-called society did not help either them or myself. What they did find and paid money for were self-righteous prigs in the guise of an Episcopal school that valued lacrosse above their Savior on a cross. IHS. |
 BMcC celebrating his 5th birthday in his high chair. I have been told that 5 year olds do not normally sit in high chairs, but there I was, jammed into one. An Agnes Dei cake? Happy birthday, kid! |
Counterfactual: Let's rewrite all this shit. My mother was still an ambulatory schizophrenic but she had grown up in old wealth tutored by a loving old lady who was down on her luck Russian aristocracy, so she had been pampered like a pet poodle all her childhood and grown up to be a shy cultured flower. My father [General Turgidson?] was still away from home much of the time but he was a wing commander in General Curtis Lemay's strategic bomber command, always preparing to drop a hydrogen bomb Moscow at a moment's notice, and later pointlessly circling the North Pole in Operation Chromedome all the time. With her innate artistic ability my mother would play with me all day, enchanting me with all sorts of Dr Seuss-like little pictures and other things, like she would use scissors to make paper fantasy flowers for us to "water" with a construction paper watering can.... She would tire easily from the after-effects of her childhood polio, but we would have a very sweet pet cat who would gently play with me while mommy napped ["Meow!"]. And maybe we'd have a harpsichord so I could try to play Bach like aunty Wanda? If my mother had no boundaries, and I had no playmates, and we were both alone together all the time, what's wrong with pleasuring yourself or even a little incest, aunt Anna? I would never have had reason to call my mother: "mud". She would have richly earned "mommy". Except for seeing my father's head when he came home occasionally for a couple days, I would never have known that males got haircutted. "School"? What's that, mommy? Please read me the story about Gregor Samsa again, mommy! She might have a drink or two of Napoleon XO with my good nanny each afternoon, and let me taste it too... But never a real alcohol problem since we could always listen to aunt Wanda on the Victrola. And she and I would have lived happily ever forward.
As I have not forgotten my IBM manager with the "How to stuff a wild duck" poster on his wall told me: "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride."
| No person or social formation (e.g.: government) should cross the line beyond which a person's body and/or soul is compromised. Show respect! Keep your distance! Request permission and pass inspection before approaching! |
  Also impeded by CSS |
