Of Men and Women ... and a Real Mother's Day

I've been thinking a lot lately about men and women ... and how little I really know. I don't think of myself as "sexist" or especially biased. But I wonder ... here's why I'm thinking this way.

I come from that wonderful generation raised in the 50's and 60's -- ancient history to our children. Maybe even irrelevant to our kids -- except sometimes as bad, bad examples of all that was wrong with America. For them, we are easy to dislike in ways that go beyond the normal distrust of one generation for another.

We are the generation of the racist, the sexist, the capitalist, and the war-monger. We are the bad guys. Watch television for a week -- see how these roles get played out again and again as the source of so much of what is wrong with the world. Maybe this is true. I don't know.

Sometimes I suspect that it is a little over-simplified ... a little too easy ... even a little too smug.

But this is really background to what I've been thinking.

I've been thinking about my Mother. She is 91 years old. She has just put her husband, my Father in a nursing home because his Alzheimer's and Parkinson's have gotten so bad, she could no longer care for him. She could watch over him ... count his pills ... change his diapers ... and even still cook the occasional meal for him ... but when he began eating a paper napkin at the dinner table -- mistaking it for a slice of bread -- that was too much. She had gone beyond what she could understand and endure.

Who could blame her? She'd already done more than anyone could ask.

Now understand for a moment just how much I respect and admire this woman. And trust me when I assert that there are very few of us who are as sweet and loving as my Mother. No, I don't just say that because she is MY Mother ... I say that because I have watched the years of love and patience she has put into her relationship with her husband.

My Father is not a kind man. Though his generation can be tough, rough-edged and even abusive as a matter of course, my Father is beyond that. And his illness has made him no better. He is and was controlling and manipulative in a way that few people will ever experience in their lives. He casually derailed the lives of the people closest to him. He was relentless in the pursuit of "his way" or no way at all.

The point is that my Mother survived all of that abuse.

No ... she is not a perfect person. She has flaws and imperfections. She is scarred by the mistreatment she endured. In many ways, she is not a whole person and this is a terrible, terrible loss. But she HAS endured ... she has survived for nearly a century with her kindness and good will intact. She can still love without bitterness or guile. She cares for me ... for her brother and sister ... and for the people around her.

What man could survive with that much love intact? The men I have know -- myself included -- would long ago have lapsed into bitterness and self-centered regret.

This woman is a hero of love.

And here is the point. Though I have styled myself as different from my father ... as someone who treated women fairly ... who had no part of sexism (and the other -isms as well) I wonder how different I am under the surface.

When I look closely ... really closely I can see the unconscious teaching that was passed to me as a child. Interestingly, it didn't all come from the "society at large." The worst of it was in my family. I learned to think that my Mother was less capable, less intelligent, less wise, less competent, and even less useful than ANY man. I breathed these things as the very air of my family, so that by the age of ten I was speaking them aloud, in my family and in public. Imagine just what that must have been like!

When my mother said something, actually complained to my father, the very man who had taught me all this unkindness chastised me for not "respecting" my mother. I hardly knew what to think. But I knew an order when I heard one. And the unkindness moved out of the public realm and became a shared secret between me and my father ... reserved for a kind of private understanding, layered over with the appearance of care and concern for my "poor mother."

I learned that my Mother was somehow flawed ... to be taken care of ... and cared for in a way that was guaranteed to reinforce her supposed lack of competence. When my father retired, he insisted on driving her to work every day until she forgot how to drive and found herself relying on -- depending on -- him for the transportation she needed to fill her most basic needs. No more, "I'll be right back. I need to run to the store for a gallon of milk." Now it was, "I need a gallon of milk. When can you drive me?" She had completed a circle, going from the first woman on the block to drive -- demonstrating her husband's generosity -- to the first woman on the block NOT to drive -- once again demonstrating her husband's "generosity."

This is subtle. You may disagree with me. Many people have. I submit that you would be wrong. My Father made sure everything went through him. I know, because I've had a long hard look at what he bequeathed to me as a legacy, at what he passed to me as a way of thinking about women and the relationship between a man and a woman. It is not pretty.

So yes ... we are an interesting generation filled with flaws. What generation isn't? But these things weren't floating in the air like polio or influenza, waiting to infect us, as unsuspecting innocents. They were passed on personally, in this case Father to Son, and they can and must be dealt with in the same way. I can say "no, thank you" and stop the legacy, the old inheritance right in its tracks as I look at all the things I learned, took on, absorbed ... and want no part of. Period. I'll point no fingers at "society," only at myself.

This is my Mother's Day gift.

How Do You Know What You Want?

Or what I learned from the most important people in my life.

Please don't laugh at me ... or at least not too much. I know that it is a silly question to ask, especially for a man my age. Surely by now I should have the answer to that question. Most of my friends and colleagues have.

They have wonderful homes, filled with family, moving just now from the second into a third generation. They have plans for their retirements. They have relationships and friendships: some have lasted for years and years, while others have been created and re-created with varying degrees of success, sadness and joy.

They are successful and happy. Not perfectly so ... but they are "successful."

I am not.

I'm not going to complain about the failures in my life. My children -- bless them -- could catalog my failed relationships in gruesome detail. They probably DO behind my back ... and quite regularly. I'm sure that my ex-wife -- bless her -- counts these disasters as proof positive of her former husband's failures as a man and as a human being. She has some point.

But at my age, the heart doesn't do too well with half-truths and near-truths. Even that old standby: self-deception doesn't work so well any more.

I don't know what I want. And that is pretty embarrassing.

Let me explain.

I was raised in an abusive household. And for me, that meant many things. There were physical threats and intimate moments of domination. There was manipulation that presented itself as kindness. There was the daily experience of being the ornament to another's life ... to someone supremely confident that the world was only about and for him. You can imagine the kind of man-child this created.

And of course, I grew up in an environment where my wants were superseded by another's almost immediately.

It didn't matter what I wanted. A new jacket. A new baseball. The clothes I wanted to wear that afternoon he threatened to beat unless I wore the clothes HE wanted me to wear. How to walk. How to talk. How to cough. If I liked it, it was either wrong or it had to be taken away to be modified, improved, or changed in some tedious, dreadful way.

My father -- as they say -- had control issues.

So now, before we all jump to the business of therapizing, let me say two things. First: I'll keep the messier moments of grieving to myself. Second, I accept the responsibility for cleaning up this legacy. So -- for the moment -- I'll have no more to say about this particular brand of cruelty. Except perhaps to note that at 91 and riddled with Alzheimer's, his personality has not improved. It has refined.

Pity my poor mother, his full-time caretaker and wife of 65 years.

What I discovered late in life is that I didn't learn much about my heart ... about the things that really moved me. The things that touched me ... that gave me life ... that gave me heart and made me a human being, in the richest fullest possible way.

I was a shadow person, an imitation of life.

I didn't know what I wanted because I had never learned how to "listen to my heart." And I had some reason to suspect what I thought was my "heart": a series of failed relationships; a history of painful disconnection from my children; a series of mediocre career choices. For the longest time I thought that the mistakes I made in my life were because I had followed my heart.

But I hadn't. I was following some silly half-baked construct of a human heart. I was following something that I had learned to "make up as I went along" during all those long years of being the only child in a much too tightly interwoven family. I was ignorant.

My true heart wasn't in any of the foolish things I'd done, because I HAD NO TRUE HEART.

Now I don't think that I'm all that different from most of us. We probably all aren't entirely satisfied with our lives. We probably haven't raised our children perfectly, or guided our careers to the safe-havens of professional and financial security. I suspect that life is tougher on all of us that we would like to talk about in public. So my experience isn't uncommon. What was uncommon was the amazing stroke of good fortune I had in my 50's.

I found kindness. Pure, sweet, gentle, patient kindness. And it came out of the blue too. I got very, very lucky in friends who saw me better than myself.

How did they do that?

They were patient with me. They listened to me. They coaxed me. They prodded me. They told me deeply unpleasant things about myself looking me in the eye with kindness. They loved me. They loved my flamboyance and my silliness. They made times and places for it to come out and dance. They cherished and celebrated this crazy part of me. They cared for me. And they had faith in my heart.

The one organ I had all but given up on.

Somehow ... I'm not sure how ... they saw into my true heart and helped me see into that place too. They did it with kindness. And I am still a little stunned with all I have learned from these friends and helpers.

As a way of saying thank you, I thought I would pass along what I have learned from watching them ... from being at the receiving end of their kindness. Believe me, few folk have been as big a mess as I was.

Here are the Three Rules I learned from my friends and helpers.

Rule Number One: Look for the delightful. Every person has in them a quality, attribute, personality trait -- call it what you will -- that is close to the core of who they are. Look for this ... cherish it ... think of it whenever possible when you are with this person. You will honor them deeply. This will change their live ... and yours.

Rule Number Two: Tell the truth with kindness. Not everyone is their best self at all times. Heck, who can be? But there is something about telling the truth -- especially if the conversation is about a failure or weakness -- to a person with kindness that makes all the difference in the world.

Rule Number Three: Move the center of your conversation to the other person. Move your heart to their place ... to what this wonderful other human being is feeling. Be gentle with this. There's no need to go all messy and emotional. It's not always the right time and place for great emotional contact. Sometimes, just holding an awareness in your heart will make all the difference in the world.

Those are my three rules. Try them ... try them for a month ... try them for a week ... and let me know what life is like afterwards. I'd love to know. Seriously.