What Mom and Dad didn't--and couldn't--teach me about love, sex, and marriage...

Recently, my Dad became very sick. He got pneumonia and ended up in the hospital for close to two weeks. He's 83, has COPD, so this is no surprise, really....

What is a surprise, to me anyway, is his behavior. He is completely out of control--swearing at caregivers, mouthing off to pretty much everyone, demanding that family do things for him when he snaps his fingers.

And he's not just mean. He's cruel. And he has this weird porn thing that's really scary....

In otherwords, my dad is totally out of control.

What I've figured out though is that he's always been like this. It's not new, it's not "old age dementia" or Alzheimer's or anything like that. It's just what I'd call "nasty." Nasty, though, is an indication of a much larger, lifetime, psychological pathology that I can't really, fully, fathom.

They didn't have diagnoses for these types of things years ago. If they did, you were locked up. Period. It ruined your life. So, people didn't get help.

When I watch my Father now, and his behavior, I see what my Mother had to deal with for years. She married a man-child, one who was stuck in rebellion and anger, who just hated everyone and saw women as his servants.

No wonder he tried to break me. I kept telling him he was nuts and I wasn't going to be his servant.

No wonder he cut me out of his will till I bullied him into changing it.

So, Mom spent a great deal of her life trying to control Dad. If she didn't, I"m sure he would have ended up in jail. And then the illusion of our middle-class life would have been shot to hell.

Thing is, she sacrificed her own sanity, and her children's lives. I now see that Mom had several "breaks from reality" in her life, demonstrated by things like telling me the neighbors had the house bugged, and not to stand by the windows because "people" were looking in.

Between Mom and Dad and their problems, by the time I turned 13, I figured out that I couldn't trust either of them to help me figure out how to live properly. They were too weird, life too bizarre, and nothing like what I saw at my friends' houses. They kept trying to tell me our family was normal, and other people's families weren't, but other people's families were far happier and far more loving than mine.

That's because their Mothers didn't need to control their Fathers at the expense of raising their children properly.

So, I started to raise myself, according to what I could glean from popular culture. Which, now, in retrospect, wasn't the best idea. I made a lot of mistakes, acted a lot older than I was sometimes, a lot younger than I was other times. It lead to a lot of problems, for sure. But I'm not sure I would have made it out of there without taking charge of things, no matter how lopsided and socially incorrect some (maybe most) of my decisions were at the time.....

The other day, when I saw my shrink, I was telling him about my parents. "When a relationship starts out with a need to control," he said, "it's not a good relationship."

Indeed.

What I learned from Mom and Dad--which, for better or worse, is where we learn about love, marriage and family relationships-- is that men are uncontrollable beasts who need to be controlled by a wife who is more of a mother than a partner. Mom used to complain that Dad wasn't a partner. He didn't have the capacity to be a partner.

So, why didn't she leave? Well, she came from a really terrible, abusive, Italian family. There are lots of skeletons in that family closet that I barely know about, but there may have been a similar control dynamic in her family (not to mention child abuse.) After all, Grandma had to leave a rather lucrative life in Sicily to come to America to stop her errant husband from committing bigamy....

Which wasn't uncommon in those days. Lots of women turned their heads to it, as long as the husbands sent money back to Italy.

What a way to live.

In any event, I learned that men weren't to be trusted, but to be controlled. That love was about control--about manipulating your family members to do what *you* believe is right for them. Not that they have any say in any of it--not that they have the will to choose.

I guess my Mother didn't trust me contingent on my Father's behavior. "You're just like your Father!" she'd scream at me. When I am hardly like him.

I'm not a mean person with a really serious mental condition that needs a keeper rather than a partner.

I'm also not my Mother--so needy that I have to marry someone who needs controlling. In fact, I'd rather not be married if I can't get all this stuff straightened out in my head...

You see, controlling someone who's angry all the time is not love. There's no love to be had between two people in that situation. Any love is exhausted pretty quickly, turns into resentment, and more anger, and it's just a bad situation.

When I first fell in love, with my first husband, I used to get the shakes. I'd get this weird tingling in my legs and hands, and I didn't know what that was all about. I couldn't ask my Mother, because she wouldn't have been able to tell me (I'm sure of that.) If I'd told my Mother, she would have insisted I had some weird medical problem. As it was, I told shrinks about it (rather unqualified shrinks) who couldn't help me figure out what it was about...

It was about feeling a feeling I wasn't brought up to feel. It was about, literally, feeling love in every part of my being.

I couldn't deal with it. I couldn't handle it. I found reasons to get away from it, to go back to the dysfunctional darkness.

Often, when I think about this, I feel really sad. It's taken me many years to figure out my family, figure out love, and I worry that it won't happen again. Men, at middle age, have lots and lots of baggage, and hurt, and while I may be free and healthy and ready to love, I wonder if there's anyone who isn't a mess that I'll have to deal with....

And then there's sex.

Oh, geeze, where to I begin here! Love and sex were separated in my home. Sex as bad, evil, pornographic. It wasn't part of a loving relationship that created family and children and a mysterious, love-bond between the parents. I could never reconcile sex within my relationships. It was "over there"--some dark beast in the corner, there to vex me and torture me and push me to make really bad decisions.

So, I took that beast apart. I went some really strange places, learned some esoteric practices, found out what's pleasure, and what's pathological. I learned a lot about gay culture too, oddly, not that I understand it, but I get it. I also learned about the continuum that is sexuality. That there are practices that couples engage in after long periods of time together because there's power dynamics, and intensity and a whole lot of other things that I can't fully articulate here because...well...they're not only different for everyone...but also to bring them screaming into the light of a non-anonymous blog would do a real dis-service to the depth and profound experience these practices can be for two people who are terribly in love and have a degree of trust that they don't have with anyone else.

Oddly, you *can* have that trust with another person, without that person being your life-partner. It just makes it a little less painful if there's the knowledge that the person's going to be with you over the long haul.

Because, when you know they're eventually going to go, it hurts like a motherfucker.

And you fear that you may never have that trust again with another person.

Knowing what I know about sex, I know I'm a very special woman. I've learned things that would make many women turn away from men, and would make men question their sense of what it means to be a man. Men aren't used to giving themselves wholly to another, and I expect that from a man. Because he will be lucky enough to have me give not just give myself wholly to him, but who will allow him to go places he was never able to go before....

But I'm not about to reveal this to just any man. That would be to degrade everything I've learned--to put it in the simplified purview of pop culture. And it can't be there. It's there enough, and makes people freak.

Not just that, but people of my generation--known as "Generation Jones" or that wasteland between the Boomers and Gen X--have a bloody hard time talking about sex, and accepting that there doesn't need to be this awful duality between "dirty" sex and "normal" sex.

Because it's all normal. It all depends on the context--and how you treat yourself and your partner in the process.

Gen Xers are far better at communicating about sex. And have a far better time respecting one another. I get so peeved that my Generation suffers the legacy of the Boomers so damned much.

Still, that doesn't mean I want to have sex with whomever just because he happens to be able to communicate about it and I happen to be horny. That's just dumb, and really doesn't give the right context to what sex means to me.

Keeping that beast caged, though, is a real pain (in more ways than one, I can assure you.) But better to be caged than completely misunderstood and trivialized.

So, I just don't know what's going to happen. I can't control men, and they can't control me either. I can't fix their hurts--even though I've fixed mine. I can't put myself out there and have sex on the odd chance that someone might fall in love with me. And I'm not a "service provider" or someone's mother or jailer or anything of that sort.

I am, however, very, very special. I've worked hard to get here.

We'll see what happens....



Note: this will be cross-posed to my locked livejournal account. I"m looking to phase out this blog for a number of reasons, to the locked account. Will post more on how to find me there in a couple of days....