Blog 8 The Dichotomy

My father is actually a great guy. Most people who met him after they were adults especially. He’s funny. I got much of my sense of humor from him. He’s always supported me financially long after any normal person should expect. For him it is just what a family does. I’ve alway respected people who can just put their head down and work, because it was not something of which I was capable. My mouth got me in trouble. To be fair, when dad worked at the state he too was written up for comments. He laughed about them at the time, but when layoff time came, he had a target because of them, and he told me he’d learned his lesson.

He could admit fault, and has. We’ve talked and it helped me understand. If I had to pick the two biggest personality traits that caused strife, I would say his temper, and he can be aloof. Naturally, they are my issues too.

I used to get triggered by many things as a young man, and I’d rage in private, and I never knew why. Of course, I know now why, but then it was just unfocused rage. My son was born in February of 1995. It wasn’t long after that I got pissed at him the first time and I exploded in rage. He of course started crying at the top of his lungs, and I saw fear in his eyes. I hugged him and immediately said sorry as I found myself in tears. I vowed then I would not do that again. My answer, like always, was to sit around and do as little as possible, and wait to see what broke first. In this case, it was my first wife who broke first. Being afraid of effort, I am a horrible husband when it comes to doing work around the house. I admit it. It was a fault, but I didn’t understand it. But this was the kids, and she sensed it was more serious so she insisted I get counseling. Living with 2 big babies couldn’t have been easy for her. Regardless, this is when I started counseling. Counseling helped me in a way I didn’t expect, but it changed my outlook completely. The counselor started talking about the motivations of young children, and how almost everything they do is trying to emulate something they’ve seen or heard you do. They just don’t know how to do it properly. For example, both the kids had a habit of flinging anything off the coffee table right around dinner time. The counselor pointed out that it’s because they see mom and dad clearing the table getting ready to eat, and they want to help.

You can argue whether that was their motivation or not. Things like this helped me start thinking objectively. I will never know what the real motivation was, but it didn’t matter. The first thing I needed to do was to fix my reaction to the incidents. That explanation was plausible enough, I saw my kid’s behavior differently. The next time one of them cleared the coffee table with a proud shit-eating grin on their face, I was able to believe good things. They weren’t personally trying to piss me off. They weren’t trying to piss anyone off. They just wanted approval, love and affection. Well THAT motivation certainly hit home.

I still wasn’t ready to punish them with any sort of rational thought. Bad habits die hard. Throughout their life my instinct was to overpunish. Even after counseling. My 1st wife, even after she was my ex, was very even handed, and she was there to say no when I was being an asshole. Like my father I can be intense.

The next step in my recovery was the next time there was a clash at work. I was only a witness this time, but recognized some of my behaviors in the participants. Some behaviors that got me in trouble in the past. When my manager was finished taking my statement on the incident, I begged her for Anger Management training. Back then Anger Management as a corporate course was still fairly new. I was working at Weyerhaeuser at the time. Even what you’d think was an old fashioned, redneck corporation was promoting and funding Wellness Programs. Some of the stuff that they are cutting these days.

This class literally changed me as a person. By then I had a tendency of overthinking everything objectively, and objectively it made perfect sense. The main thing I got out of it was conduct yourself in a manner that is productive in conflict. Your first goal shouldn’t be to win, no matter how right you are. Your first goal should be to deescalate the situation. Few issues get resolved at Defcon 1. It doesn’t mean appeasement. It means keep your voice calm. Keep your demeanor calm. Both your voice, and your demeanor can quickly escalate a situation, even if that isn’t your intention. Stay calm.

This was only the first part. It talked about escalating questions. Hyperbole is not your friend. For example, in squabbles with both wives about how much I do around the house they both have gotten frustrated and went to the, “You don’t do anything to help out!” Now we both know I didn’t do absolutely nothing. But I also know in the back of my head that she’s right. So now I get defensive and start listing the few times in the last week I did something around the house. Of course, I’ve just proved her point, but she escalates into a mocking response, “Oh, you must be exhausted, should I get your slippers?” Full disclosure, just because who I am, they both learned a war of words is usually a pyrrhic victory at best.

I had anger management training towards the end of my first marriage. Albeit, too late to save it. However, it certainly has helped in my current and last marriage. I haven’t raised my voice very many times in the last 15 years or so. Carol, as some of you know, is a fireplug and I’ve become the most annoying person with whom to fight. After my training, if she went to the ‘you do nothing’ comment. I do not take the bait. Instead I calmly point out that we both know that isn’t exactly true, so addressing would be pointless. I’d then move on asking specifically what she wanted me to do. One task was to empty and load the dishwasher. As we had conflict about what to do with dinner dishes because afterwards we were both tired. I.E. didn’t clean up dinner at night, just cleared the table. One of her pet peeves is a sink full of dirty dishes. One of my pet peeves is no counter space because of dirty dishes. Of course, if I only utilized the left hand sink the way I wanted to, it wouldn’t be an issue. But that is the third rail of this discussion, so Carol gets her way with the left hand sink. We compromise with a promise to stack, and maintain as much as possible to try to keep the right hand sink mostly empty, and keeping an eye on counter space.

There is now doubt in my mind dad would have been a very different father if he had access to these resources, or the knowledge to even seek them. We didn’t try family counseling until after I’d graduated high school. There had been so much water flow under the bridge it wasn’t effective the two sessions I remember. Some might wonder why we didn’t stick it out. Why give up so early in the process? The answer is my mom. The two sessions we had were with two different counselors. She didn’t like what they had to say, because he suggested there were more issues rolling downhill than uphill. For instance, I would often go to a friend’s house and work harder on his dairy farm than I ever would at home. This used to confound my mother to no end. Why would you work there for free? We all know I was getting paid in appreciation and respect. And, to be fair, a fuckton of beer when the job was down. This was a windfall to me at the time.

But mom would often say I should want to do this work out of the goodness of my heart because they provide a roof over my head, clothe and feed me. Which is the basics of what a parent should do. That’s the base minimum of what a parent is required to do to not get fucked with by CPS. She turned her base responsibilities into a transaction. That’s fucked up no matter how you look at it.

Anyhoo, the one counselor she hated, the one that caused her to quit scheduling appointments. I liked him. He was blunt, and to the point, with a rye humor. He said, “Maybe we could quit worrying about motivations. I mean, all three adults in this room have jobs, and we aren’t doing it out of the goodness of our hearts.” When he said that, I saw mom’s face just tense up. She wanted to just scream. She had no concept that she could be wrong. She was never uncertain, but seldom right.

My mom didn’t work until I was in junior high. Up till then she’d pretty much been a domestic engineer, or housewife, as was the nomenclature of the time. I am fully of the belief that she resented me for having to go back to work. We made some big changes when I was in 6-7th grade. The motivation for this is in dispute between my father and I. My next blog I will logically lay out my side of the dispute, and perhaps it’ll bring some more understanding.

For now, I have to go clean out the right sink because the left sink is fucking full