WelcomeTake it like a!
The incompetent childrearers I was stuck with were part of a social surround where boys are told to:
My ignorant parents did not know any better but they could see with their ocular orbs that the child they had brought into the world was too physically fragile to handle that. Maybe once my father tried to teach me how to make a fist?
"Take it like a man" may be fine advice for rearing a future head-butter who, if he is really superior, will win the Harvard-Princeton lacrosse game for Harvard for the first time in 43 years, or for a Volodymyr Zelenskyy who will grow up to start a brutal war → but not for a kid who could have played the role of a Nazi concentration camp inmate (as an adult a jewish man said I looked like that, and I felt it was a compliment). I needed and could have greatly benefitted from:
Take it like a connoisseur!
I needed childrearers who, if I said: "Ouch!" or: "I don't think I like that.", should have responded: "Are you sure it only hurt you that little? Think about it! Maybe you are minimizing how bad you felt? Let's try this again, please? Now, Brad: How bad did it really feel? Don't be shy, now! Let's hear it!" "You're right mommy. It hurt more than that, but people say a boy should learn to "Take it like a man.'" "Well, child, that's for boys who are not sensitive or as intelligent as you. Just ignore everything those people say. They don't know what's good for you. Let me know if you hear any more such stuff and your father and I deal with them. We have to protect you from normal people and the things they do." "I love you, mommy." "And I love you, too. Always remember: you are different from those people. They can't understand you, so you have to watch out for them hurting you, maybe with them not having a clue that they are doing anything."
I needed to have my sensitivities nurtured, enhanced and honed because esthetic connoisseurship was one of my gifts and I should have been allowed to enjoy living and gifted persons can make life richer for everybody especially the less gifted who wouldn't even have the wheel unless some gifted person had invented it, etcetera and so forth. OK. I didn't need to enjoy my giftedness or to enjoy living. But then let us be entirely clear: Nobody needs anything. No person needs to breathe, even. Everything except autonomic nervous system twitches is what a person wants, including to take their next breath or to grind down my sensitivities.[1]
Instead of childrearers who tried to reduce me to being as small as they were, I needed childrearers who either were better than they were or who at least wanted to see me be better than they were. Instead of: "It's no big deal, Brad", they should have been telling me: "It's an even bigger deal than you can yet imagine, Brad". They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born.
Footnotes
- ↑ Things can usually get worser. Read Hanny Lightfoot-Klein's classic book "Prisoners of ritual".
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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