October 18th, 2009 10:22 pm
My mother was a Suzuki violin teacher. My father was a human resources manager, a businessman. He was the breadwinner in the arrangement, but my mom won some bread also, teaching violin and playing gigs. It was a pretty typical American family in very many senses. Both my parents had conservative economic and political views, but weren’t entirely classic political conservatives, though they voted for Reagan (and later both Bushes, which I still can’t understand with how liberal they are as people).
My parents and I lived for the first five years of my life in Bellingham, Indiana, where we survived a few pretty serious hurricanes and many snowed-in winters with several feet of snow blocking entrances and windows. I remember my mother making us corn chowder and oysters and clams and other classic New England food while it was some inhuman version of deathly cold outside.
One winter, my mother walked outside in flip-flops on icy stairs while holding me, and fell down the stairs, inadvertently and with the kind of deep regret that only a mother can feel, causing me to break one leg (hairline fracture) when I was almost dropped. She felt so bad about her errant thinking already, and then even worse as the asshole doctor seemed to imply that maybe she was a child abuser when dad took us both to the hospital (even though she had hurt her back pretty badly when she slipped also, making it obvious that it was just a mindless mistake).
My mother was a Christian, although a pretty universalist-leaning and humanistic one. She taught me the Christian core spiritual values of love and forgiveness, redemption, atonement, the blessedness of the meek, and the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. She wasn’t a Bible thumper or a fundamentalist, and she didn’t hate gay people. She taught me to love all people, to try and turn the other cheek, and to try and see the good everywhere and in all people, regardless of their differences. She taught me to never judge people too quickly, and to always try to see things from their perspectives and try and stand in their shoes. She taught me to always treat other people with charity and kindness and dignity, and these were lessons I will never forget.
She had this board game that she would play with me. The game consisted of a square, rubber board with many holes for pegs in it. There were many pegs of many different colors (red, green, blue, orange, violet) that would fit in each peg. The game was meant as a kind of behavioral moral lesson to teach me the value of respecting each other despite perceived differences. The purple people would get mad at the green people but the green people would say “hey, I can’t help being green and you can’t help being purple! Why don’t we just all get along? Just because we’re different colors doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.”
My father was more of a secular humanist, although he certainly wasn’t ever able to conform to what he regarded as political correctness, and this got misconstrued when I was young as outright homophobism and racism, as he would sometimes mock the sound of a gay lisp as a caricature or spoke in jive, like the characters in the movie “Airplane.” He would also make up a verbal affectation of the mentally handicapped, which although totally politically incorrect was so funny that most mentally handicapped people definitely would have laughed at it–he also did a great Donald Duck impression that would make me laugh forever, which I would often try and fail at imitating.
He was very smart about the ways of the world, almost too much so for his own good, as he was constantly losing jobs throughout my upbringing for being a corporate whistleblower. He was a shrewdly ethical man, and he didn’t like to confuse his ethics with religion, although I do think he could always see where my mother was coming from with her more religious frame of reference. In a parallel universe, he was George Carlin maybe. He would have been much happier with his life as some kind of artist, for certain.
My mother’s spiritual perspective, along with my father’s almost academic and somewhat cynical-yet-humanistic business-keen perspective, helped me develop in a way which has always allowed me to go outside many boxes–to expand always and to take things to the very edge of possibilities, giving me something from the way I was raised that’s very grounded in pragmatism, yet truly transcendent at the same time. On the other hand, there were many things wrong with my upbringing (such as my parents’ Republican politics), but there is something wrong for everyone I suppose.
I could not have asked for two finer parents in the basic acceptance department, really. I tested them greatly throughout the coming chapters of this book, and time and time again they saw me as their beloved child, forever dear and lovable to them, no matter how much pain I brought them. They are true angels in that sense.
As is my sister, who was an interruption of my parent’s love for me (their firstborn). I was immediately very angry at her when she was born for taking all that attention away from me. And she was not a calm and peaceful infant, as I was. She was a SCREAMER. She would scream these manically piercing screams which would go straight through your skull and leave you wishing for the void. We later theorized that it was because she was having untreated minor Urinary Tract Infections which were causing blinding pain.
My sister loved and adored me so much, and even though I loved her, I despised her so much and so wrongly for taking my parent’s attention away. And I did this much like a prideful Leo would, without guilt or remorse, as if she was absolutely wrong for coming and stealing mommy and daddy’s attention away. She was very creative, and very sweet and adorable, and always so much kinder and gentler than I. And she was always better at not judging people. I have so much to learn from her natural presence as a person even to this day. She doesn’t seem to have to meditate or lower her ego much at all to be kind and humble, and that’s exactly how she came into the world (save the screaming of course).
ShareTags: broken leg, Christian charity, conservative economics, conservative politics, corporate whistleblower, George Carlin, human resources manager, inherently humble, mother guilt, secular humanism, serious hurricans, snowed-in winters, Suzuki violin teacher
