How This Journey Began

I am going to start with a little early history. I have come to realize what a huge impact my history has had on my life and think it is an important starting point in any honest self exploration. My history will probably be the trend for awhile in these posts, as I think I have processed a lot of my history and have a more accurate view of it now.

To be honest, this is a painful history for me to recount. Writing this was not easy and I had to stop a few times to just process the feelings.

I am the first born child in my family. I have two sisters, one is a couple years younger and the other is about 6 years younger than me. My mom and dad remain married to this day. As far as my experience goes, my family was fairly typical as far as American families go. I know that most people I encounter would even call my childhood “good” from a surface view of it. Little did I realize at the time that typical did not equal good.

My mother was overbearing. My earliest memories of her are of her neurotic behavior. She wouldn’t let us go outside to play without full supervision. She snapped at us for being too loud. Instead of telling us why it was bad to talk to strangers, she filled us with fear by telling us to never talk to strangers but never telling us why. My sisters and I asked many, “Whys” but were often replied to with, “Because I said so.” I remember very often that my mother would blame us for the way she felt. We were always “scaring her” and “making her nervous”. I am sure this sounds fairly typical to most people, but as I said before, typical does not equal good.

She did not loosen her control without a huge fight. I spent many evenings “debating” with my mother about my freedoms. I put debating in quotes because I realize now that it was not a debate. It was an emotional battle. Whoever gave up first lost. My mother rarely lost. The “debates” started fairly benign. I would ask my mom if I could stay at a friends house. She would say no. I would ask why. She would say because she didn’t trust their parents. I would give her the option of meeting my friends parents. She would say she was too busy. And on, and on. She was an expert at twisting and dodging. There was never a chance for me to get a straight answer from her. I began to believe that she didn’t know the answer, but the truth was much worse than that. She knew that if she gave me honest answers, then she would have no choice but to let me do what I wanted. If she let me do what I wanted then she would have been subject to the judgment of her peers and society in general.  She was too afraid of that to ever allow logic to lead her decision making.  She was always more concerned about what her family, friends, peers and society would think to care about what I was experiencing.

School was hell and didn’t help the situation. I could (and may) write pages about my horrible experience in the public school system. I was anti-social, scared every day, and unchallenged intellectually. I spent my evenings in my room alone, tinkering with electronics, writing and drawing. My mother had no sympathy or curiosity for why I was having so much trouble with school. She acted much of the time like it was my fault. My strongest memory of this interaction was when I was being threatened by a couple of inner city kids at my junior high summer school and I wanted her to help me get these boys suspended, her frustrated response to me was, “Do you want people calling you a mamma’s boy?!” The implication was that I relied on her too much to solve my problems. She was yelling at me to “grow up” when she had been responsible for my lack of growth all along. I felt so horrible and alone on those days that I started to develop a hard emotional shell to cope with the strong feelings of sadness.

As I got into my teenage years, and the debates turned into battles. I would request a new freedom, usually something having to do with socializing, and my mother would much more quickly resort to “because I said so” rather than trying to evade. There was no longer much of a cloak of evasions. It was now a clear dictatorship and I was the uprising to be squashed. Our “debates” turned into two or three hours of me trying my best to prove why I deserved my freedom while she berated me. She would get so angry that her eyes would bulge and her voice would begin to give out. I would rarely yell back because that only escalated the situation. Sometimes my dad would come in and say something vaguely threatening along the lines of, “boy, you better watch it”. That was the only time I really feared my dad. Most of the time he was just reserved. Unemotional. A template to the man I would be in my early 20’s.

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Unfortunately I believed my parents when they said I couldn’t afford college on my own. So, I agreed to obey their rules for another few years if they would pay for college. 4 years turned into 6. During that time I met my first girlfriend and struggled hard between the ages of 18 to 23 to loosen some of the chains. I regret not leaving my home when I was 18. I lost 6 years of my life by making the decision to make a deal with the devil.

From 18 to 23 was the era of the 3 hour smack downs. Of course they didn’t ever beat me (but there was always the implicit threat), but rather I had yelling matches with my mom until I was exhausted. It would start the same way it did when I was young, but it would devolve into her bringing up every reason why I was irresponsible and did not deserve freedom. I had a 10 o’clock curfew until I was 19. After that it was midnight.  The curfew was never officially dropped. That was the most “freedom” I was ever able to “obtain” from her.

Finally my mother started to blame her failing health on me. She was overweight, had a brain aneurysm that could burst at any time and always had some sort of ache or pain. She trapped me in the car one day and told me that I was no longer allowed to express my “liberal opinions” in her house. She implied that I was corrupting my sisters and that if I wanted to have free expression that I needed to get out of the house. My dad also pulled me aside during this time and told me to not engage in anymore debates with my mom, because I was hurting her and the family. I felt so rejected, hurt and alone. I wanted to run but I still had college, barely had a job and was feeling pretty hopeless.

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I became a very angry and bitter person because of these experiences. I finally found an outlet for my anger. The Internet. I became a bully. I became a troll. I became my mother. I would have twisted “debates” with people until they were too frustrated to continue. It sometimes felt cathartic but other times I truly felt like I was losing my soul, piece by piece.

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This of course is all a summary and I tried to keep it as short as possible. I may go into more details about my childhood in other posts, but I wanted to give my readers an overall look at where I have come from. I think it will help you understand the decisions I have made since then.

If you relate to this post at all, I think this is a very relevant podcast and will give you a better understanding of why most men have a angry/violent streak to them.
The Roots of Male Violence

I think my next post will focus on how I started to piece together the abuse and wake up from my dream world where typical equaled good.

Tags: early, History, mother