Posted on

Guilt Chestnut Number 5: ‘You Never Call’

In a dysfunctional family few are without blame for the things that go wrong. But there’s one criticism I’ve heard time and again that makes me bristle:

“You never call.”

Mood music:

It’s not just that I don’t call the person who says that. It’s that I don’t call a lot of people. I’ve never been a fan of the phone. I always feel awkward on the phone, especially when there are pockets of dead air. I feel pressure to keep the conversation going, and it all goes downhill from there.

Thanks to modern technology, I touch base with family more than I ever did before. I do it with Android texts. I do it with Facebook. To a lesser extent, I do it with email.

But sometimes the folks I’m reaching out to don’t return fire.

I tried using Facebook to communicate more with my mother, but she unfriended me. She found this blog and it pissed her off.

I tried using it to connect with an aunt I haven’t talked to in awhile. She blocked me.

I’d chalk it up to these people not being ready for Internet communications, except that they do it fine with everyone else.

I figure if I phoned, the reception would be about as icy. But like I said, the phone makes me feel awkward. Ironic, since I’ve made my living at journalism for 18 years.

But here’s the meat of the problem:

I’ve had people bitch that I don’t call this relative or that relative to check on them and let them know I care. But the very people I’m scolded for not calling don’t call me, either.

When my relationship with my mother imploded five and a half years ago, a few family members were left confused and angry that me, Erin and the kids had disappeared from family birthday parties and the like.

They talked about it to a lot of people. But no one ever called me for my side of the story. They just made assumptions.

That’s why, when someone tries to make me feel guilty by telling me I never call people, my first impulse is shrug and roll my eyes. Trying to guilt me is bad enough. Do it with hypocrisy and you’re even more certain not to get the response you want from me.

You’re probably reading this and thinking, “Man, he’s bitter today. That’s not like him.” I guess I am a little bit bitter.

But I broach the issue because mine isn’t a special case. Most of us get slapped with the “you never call” guilt trip from family members.

This is the kind of guilt tactic that doesn’t work. If a person isn’t inclined to use the phone much, they’re not going to change their ways. And, if you’re on Facebook and they’re on Facebook but they don’t use it back when you reach out, that’s about the same as never calling.

That said, I do want better relations with my extended family. When a family member sends me a friend request on Facebook, I’ll never turn them down. I want to use the medium to reconnect with them.

My phone line is always open, too. Those who really want to get in touch with me there know how to get the number.

I don’t believe there’s ever a point of no return when it comes to ending family estrangements. I remain willing.

But if someone chooses not to get in touch with me, they shouldn’t expect me to care when I hear they’ve been whining about me from second- and third-hand sources.

Posted on

Small Victories

Duncan and I took my father on a little walk around Deer Island yesterday. Dad still struggles from the stroke he had last year, but days like yesterday I admire his fighting spirit.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/Mi_Tm_g6KdA

I’ve been reluctant to take him on long walks, mainly because I don’t want him taking a nasty spill on my watch. But it was a beautiful spring day and he was eager, so who was I to argue?

Deer Island is an interesting place. One of the nastiest prisons in Massachusetts history used to be there. Now it’s the site of a massive water treatment plant — the facility credited with making Boston Harbor far cleaner than it was in past decades, when raw sewage used to get pumped into the harbor.

Dad moved slowly, but he was steady. He was telling us about the new tennis balls he just put on his walker. By the end of the walk, those tennis balls were toast, dragged to tatters.

Duncan enjoyed walking on the rocks, and spent the time talking about coordinates — something he is currently learning about.

We had to take frequent rests, as Dad can only take so much at once. But he was determined to go at least a mile.

Dad struggled toward the end, stopping every few feet. When it was over, he collapsed into the passenger seat of my car. But by then, he had gone more than a mile.

Not bad for a guy who needed a wheelchair to get around just a few short months ago.

Sometimes, it’s the smallest victories that count the most.

Posted on

Such A Waste To Lose One’s Mind-Fulness

A combination of OCD and ADD has given me a bitch of a handicap: Living in the moment and being present has become tough as nails. Health experts call this elusive thing I search for “mindfulness.”

Mood music:

Here’s what happens:

When the OCD runs hot, I develop tunnel vision. I focus in on the task I’m either doing or thinking about. That’s good if you have a major work project to complete. It’s bad when someone is trying to talk to you and your brain is weaving a hundred schemes.

When the ADD picks up steam, I lose my focus. I’ll start thinking about a song I heard that day or how good it’ll feel to get into bed with a book. All while someone is talking to me.

I thought I stabbed this problem in the heart and killed it. On further reflection, I’m finding that the same problem has simply changed bodies like Dr. Who.

That in itself is still good, since the old persona was intense fear and anxiety that often incapacitated me. I broke out of that shell and life has been so much better as a result. But my current troubles are still painful.

Dealing with this issue has become the main focus of recent therapy sessions. I started bringing up the issue with my therapist because I’ve been realizing how unfair and hurtful zoning out can be at home. I don’t want to be that guy. And yet, for the moment, I am.

It’s not just a problem at home. Anywhere I go, when people are talking to me for anything longer than five minutes, I start to enter a fog. I still capture the main points of the conversation, but it requires heavy effort — effort that can be physically painful.

In recent weeks, I’ve considered what this handicap could cost me. My first reaction was to feel scared. That has settled into a low-grade anger.

Anger that I can’t just fix my brain and be done with it.

Anger that I have to do more therapy than usual.

Anger that the whole thing is exhausting me.

But that’s life. I have a problem, and I intend to beat it. And if I can’t beat it, I intend to figure out how to manage it.

At my age, I’m really not sure how much more I can fix. But even though I haven’t achieved perfection up to this point, the journey has been a beautiful one, full of experiences I never could have had a few years ago.

What lies ahead could be unpleasant. But as with past challenges, I may find gifts buried beneath the ugliness.

Art by Bill Fennell
Posted on

I’d Like To Blame My Parents, But…

I’ve been frustrated lately over my inability to balance how I express emotions. Forget balance — I suck at emotion, period.

Mood music:

With my kids I get too emotional at times, showering them with kisses and telling them I love them a lot more than they probably care to hear. Duncan’s refrain is usually, “I know already, Dad!”

With my wife I’m not emotional enough. When times get difficult — and even when they’re going well — I tend to clam up. I share my feelings in headline form or I don’t share at all. That’s pretty whacked considering all the opening up I do here.

I’ve been trying to solve this puzzle for years, but I’m no closer than where I started.

Sometimes I get really angry with my parents for this.

My mother was the smothering type. She wanted me close by at all times when I was a kid, and would get in my personal zone at the wrong times, hugging me when I wanted to be left alone. I don’t entirely blame her for this. She lost another child, and she was clinging to what she had left with everything she had. The effect was suffocating, and I ultimately rebelled.

My father, on the other hand, had no clue about expressing his feelings. Whenever I hit a milestone (in adulthood the milestones were promotions and raises at work), his response was always a detached, “That’s it?” If I expressed fatigue over life’s difficulties, the response — instead of relating his experiences and how he pulled through the tough stuff — was always, “It’s good for you.” My paternal grandmother was the same way. As the tired old saying says: The apple never falls far from the tree.

In the area of emotional balance, you could say I lacked role models — which is why I want to punch the walls a lot lately. I’m in my 40s and need to figure these things out with no prior experience. I think my trouble expressing emotions is why I started writing this blog. I can write my feelings and share just fine. But in face-to-face conversation, I flounder.

Some people would dismiss this as unimportant. No one is perfect at this, after all. Like everything else, this is life.

But I’m really starting to worry about doing to my wife what my parents did to each other. I’m worried that I’ll do to my kids what my parents did to me — ensuring that they grow up to start another generation of dysfunction.

But here’s the thing: I’m a grown man on the fast track to middle age. Too much time has passed since I left home for me to keep blaming everything on my parents. They did the best they could with the tools they had, but fucked up a lot. All parents do.

I’m a big boy now. It’s time to take ownership.

Posted on

When Difficult Kids Turn Out Alright

Readers know by now that Erin and I have a big challenge — helping our second child manage ADHD. He’s often difficult. Fair enough. I was a difficult child, too.

Duncan is actually tame compared to the 8-year-old me. He’s never filled up my gas tank with a garden hose. He’s never lit his plastic toys on fire, nearly burning down the house in the process. He’s never stolen money from his Dad’s wallet. He doesn’t bring home revolting report cards. That stuff was all me.

But it’s easy for me to forget those things when I’m the parent. When Duncan leaves a path of destruction around the house, causes scandal in the schoolyard by telling classmates Santa isn’t real or earns a note home from a teacher concerned that he’s not playing well with others, all the worries start about where he’s headed in life.

But I have hope.

Erin found a blog post from Rick Ackerly — a nationally recognized educator and speaker with 45 years of experience working in and for schools, dealing with kids of every harrowing stripe. It’s about how difficult children often grow up to be enormously successful adults.

He writes about an encounter he had on a flight with a CEO and three other high achievers. They talked about how they were bratty, rebellious children, and how the resulting experiences proved more valuable than a college education. He then says:

I put these stories together like this, not to try to convince parents and other educators that being bad is good, nor that one should hope for a difficult child, but to remind us of three critical education principles:

1) Difficulty, conflict, struggle, mistakes, disappointment and failure are where most learning comes from—usually the most important learning.

2) Difficulty is the life we are preparing our children for. We naturally hope that our children will be happy and successful, but that is a mirage–and we know it. The life they will get is a life of challenge, and the best preparation for challenge is challenges. When it’s harder for us, it might be better for them.

3) Raising difficult children might interfere with the rainbow life we were hoping for, but it might be better for the world. Remember Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, the willful child who started a charter school in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods when she was 23 and now at the age of 30 is running the thriving, vibrant Academy for Global Citizenship serving 250 students, 81% of whom are low income.

Someday I want to be on a flight from Chicago to Decatur with the Spanish teacher, the CEO, and your formerly difficult child.

Having a difficult child may be difficult, but it is not the worst thing that could happen to you.

If you haven’t seen his blog yet, you need to do yourself a favor and bookmark it. Every parent should read his work.

One would think I don’t need such reminders. Despite my rough patches, I turned out fine. I have a beautiful family, a successful career in journalism and I’m in the best health I’ve been in for years — despite all my self-destructive behavior.

But as I said, when you’re the parent, you forget and need lots of reminders.

Thanks for that, Mr. Ackerly.

sticker,375x360

Posted on

Things Kids Say, February Vacation Edition

The children and their friends have been giving me an earful this week. Silly little buggers always forget that I take notes.

Mood music:

“I demand my rights as an American!” Duncan, after being told he can’t watch TV before school (in this case, the Friday before vacation)

“Good luck. You’re gonna need it.” Sean, wishing one of Erin’s friends well in an important business venture

“Who do you think I am, Rosa Parks?” Sean’s classmate Nick, after I evicted him from my favorite living room chair

“All kids are stupid. Parents know this, but tell us we’re intelligent to make us forget we’re stupid.” Nick, a few minutes later, after I commented him on his whit and intellect

“Wow. It’s just like watching a 3-D movie.” Duncan, walking around the house wearing the 3-D glasses he got when we went to see “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”

Duncan in 3-D

What Sean said: “Duncan nearly killed me just now.”

What really happened: Duncan kicked Sean in the ankle — and missed.

What Duncan said: “Sean just tried to break my arm!”

What really happened: Sean poked him in the arm.

“Everybody knows that.” Duncan’s classmate Gabby, after Sean tried to embarrass Duncan by telling her that Duncan wants to marry her when they grow up.

“Get out of the way, Lando! For crying out loud!” Sean, temper flaring, during a particularly difficult Wii game of “Star Wars: The Complete Saga.”

“But it doesn’t feel hot.” Duncan, after putting his hand on a hot pink electric mixer we saw in a store.

“Duncan, I took care of it for you.” Madison, the 3-year-old niece, after punching Uncle Bill in the arm for threatening to come get her. Duncan, Madison’s body guard, usually does the punching.

“Duncan, come take care of this.” Madison, a few hours later, after Uncle Bill playfully threatened to catch her again.

Posted on

In Marriage, Communication Gets Tougher As You Get Older

I’ve never been good at the Valentine’s Day thing. Maybe I’m fulfilling the male stereotype, or maybe it’s because I feel more pressure to express myself. I do fine with written words. In person is another thing. When the holiday passed I Iet out a big exhale.

Mood music:

The fact of the matter is that I have a lot of love in my heart right now. I don’t need a holiday to feel it, though Valentine’s Day is as good a day as any to express it. And as my cousin Faith put it, there’s nothing wrong with setting aside a holiday for the good things in life, like love.

I’m in love with Erin more than ever. She gives her family everything she has and props everyone up when they’re having trouble standing on their own. She makes the kids’ Halloween costumes from scratch every year. She started a successful freelance business from nothing. The person she is makes me want to be better still.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten much better at communication. In fact, I’ve gotten worse. So has Erin. This shouldn’t surprise any couple that’s been together for a lot of years. When you have kids everything becomes about them and it’s easy to forget that the family started with husband and wife.

Some married couples stop talking about these things and drift apart. Erin and I have decided it’s time to face the issue head on. Not because we’re mad at each other, because we’re not. Ours is not a marriage in trouble. But we know that when a couple stops communicating long enough, the relationship can deteriorate. Since we love each other, we’re not going to let that happen. Pure and simple.

We’re accepting that as we get older, we need more maintenance. That goes for how we talk to each other and how we connect on a spiritual level.

We’ve both changed a lot. That has contributed to the communication challenge.

Recovery over addiction, fear and anxiety has been a miraculous, beautiful thing. I thank God every day. But when a man changes, a whole new set of problems arise.

It’s a confusing, frustrating thing when your spouse acts one way for a bunch of years and then, suddenly or not so suddenly, ceases to be the person you married.

I’d like to think I’m still the guy she married in the most fundamental ways. My heart and most of my passions haven’t really changed. But as the priest who married us said: “You marry the person you think you know, then spend the rest of your life getting to know each other.”

As far as that goes, I’ve been a moving target, tough to nail down.

Erin used to get anxious in big crowds. Now she’s a lot more at ease. She used to struggle to show patience toward my often dysfunctional family. She’s better at that now than I am. The prospect of public speaking used to rattle her. Now she’s got a couple talks behind her and many more ahead. While all that internal growth goes on, she gets more beautiful by the day. She’s always been beautiful. But lately it distracts me. Call me sappy, but there it is.

Still, those changes, while awesome, require me to rethink how I communicate as an older spouse.

And so goes this adventure called marriage. Truth is, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Besides, as my friend Linda said the other day, love endures.

love

Posted on

Playing Chicken With The Wedding Train

It’s a common pain in the ass when a couple is planning their wedding: Someone threatens to boycott the event unless so-and-so is uninvited.

Mood music:

In the run-up to my wedding in 1998, a close cousin pulled this when he got into a fight with my aunt — his mom. She went to the wedding and he skipped it. I haven’t seen or heard from him since then. Erin and I were paying for most of the wedding ourselves and were determined to keep the guest list small. That led to all kinds of hurt feelings about this one or that one being invited while someone else was excluded.

At my sister‘s wedding in 1996, a whole section of the family — led by my mother — boycotted the event because they were not fans of the groom. That they were ultimately right about the guy is beside the point. They could have given her love and support anyway, but chose not to. I don’t really fault them in the end. We’re all human and our emotions often get the better of us.

But to the couple getting married, this sort of bullshit is the stuff of terrible anxiety and lost sleep. They’re trying to make their loved ones part of their special day, then someone decides to make it about them and start dictating the terms of their attendance.

A bright exception was my cousin’s wedding last summer. A lot of family members who aren’t on speaking terms stuffed their attitudes in their pockets and behaved on what turned out to be a wonderful occasion. At the time I gave my mother a lot of credit for being cordial on that day.

After the wedding my mother called and asked if we could try to heal the rift between us. Since then I’ve invested a lot of effort and emotion into doing so. Along the way, I unblocked her from Facebook. Trust me: It took a lot for me to do that.

She found this blog, as I intended. I knew it would be hard for her to read, but I was hoping she could get past some of the more unpleasant childhood memories I shared and see the bigger picture — that I had forgiven her and taken responsibility for my own mistakes; and that my head was in a much healthier place then it was the year our relationship crumbled. That’s the whole point of this blog, really, that a person can overcome a lot of ugly emotion and turmoil and discover real joy.

Unfortunately, she missed all that stuff and zeroed straight in on what she saw as my distorted picture of her. Over several conversations and blog posts directed right at her, I tried to steer her toward the right perspective.

But like she has done so many times before, she emerged with a picture of herself as the victim of someone else’s torment. First she unfriended me on Facebook. Then she called me and suggested that I was a deeply disturbed mental case in need of emergency treatment.

And now we’ve come full circle:

My sister is getting married again and my mother has threatened to skip the wedding unless me, my wife and kids are excluded.

Like so many times before, she is making it about her grudge instead of someone else’s happiness.

It’s sad. I feel for her, because I want her to be in a better mental place. But I guess that’s not going to happen.

I’m going to have to put this relationship back on ice. I don’t regret trying, though. It’s better to try and fail then to do nothing.

Still, the whole thing is sad.

Posted on

Celebrating A Lost Sibling

My brother died Jan. 7, 1984. On this anniversary, I find myself grateful that he was in my life. He left a positive mark on me and left plenty of amusing family stories.

Mood music:

I’ve already written plenty about the darker side of dealing with his death. You can read about it in “Death of a Sibling” if you’re interested. In this post, I just want to celebrate a few things:

1.) Michael is lucky because he was recently joined in Heaven my our old neighbor, Al Marley. They must be trading some rousing stories about all the ocean adventures they shared.

2.) My kids are at an age where they can appreciate stories about their uncle Mike, including the yarn about how he switched the hot and cold water pipes in his hospital bathroom during one of his asthma attack stays because he was pissed at the medical staff.

3.) I’m at a point in life where I no longer have to obsess about how his death shaped the man I became. I’m fine with who I am and how I got here doesn’t matter as much anymore. The important thing is what I do with the future.

I do think he would have been amused as hell by my attempts to copy him after his death.

He probably would have been amused to find me hanging out with Sean Marley and listening to Motley Crue and Def Leppard. He would have noticed my widening girth and got on me about it. Despite his asthma he was a fanatical weight lifter. He’d be on my ass to join a gym. Just not his gym. Me hanging around his gym would have been gross.

Right after he died, I did join his gym, Fitness World. It was just down the street from our house, a short walk down a side alley. I wasted no time trying to be him, and lifting weights in Fitness World was as good a place as any to start my charade. I lasted maybe a week. Everyone there expected me to be him. I should have figured out then and there that there could only be one Michael S. Brenner.

Later in my teen years, he might have punched me in the face or broken my other middle finger (he had broken one of them in the back of my father’s van one day when I flipped him off) for wearing his leather jacket. It was a true biker’s jacket, with the zippers on the sleeves and scratch marks from a few falls he had off his motorcycle. He was one cool-looking motherfucker in that jacket. But when I put it on, it was two sizes too small. I wore it anyway.

He might have been jealous of the palace I made out of the basement apartment at 22 Lynnway. At the time of his death the place was being renovated and the plan was for him to move in there. Instead, my father rented it to a guy who was nice enough but always seemed to be fighting with his girlfriend. Since my bedroom was in the basement level at another end of the house, this often pissed me off. Sometimes I heard the make-up sex, and that pissed me off even more. It’s hard to get lost in your quiet, dysfunctional mind when people are making a racket on the other side of the wall. The guy moved out by late 1987 and I moved in.

He might have been annoyed when I decided not to pursue a career in drafting. I wanted to be a writer instead. The poetry I was writing at the time would have sent him into fits of laughter. It would send you into fits of laughter, too.

He was going to be a plumber, and he might have shaken his head back and forth in disgust at my inability to do anything useful with a set of tools.

What he would have thought of me in the 1990s, or of Sean Marley, for that matter, is probably not worth exploring. Had he lived a lot would have been different. I don’t know if Sean and I would have gotten as close as we did, and had that been the case, his death in 1996 wouldn’t have sent me into the self-destructive nosedive I found myself in.

He probably would have been pleased to see me get my demons under control in the last decade. He might even appreciate my decision to be open about it in this blog. But he might not have told me so.

One thing I’m pretty certain of: He would have loved his nephews, and they would have loved him.

Today, I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I’m blessed with the best wife and kids a guy could have. In my work they pay me to do what I love, which is pretty rare. I have many, many good friends.

Michael is probably staring down, approving of it all.

Posted on

Hey, Mom, Read This

I got a call from my mother this morning. She says she’s been reading every post in this blog and that she’s very worried about me.

“You have a beautiful wife, two healthy kids and a wonderful job, yet I read your blog and see someone who is very unhappy and disturbed,” she told me. Incredibly, she was worried that I might try to hurt myself someday.

Nothing is further from the truth. Which brings me to this post.

She commented on my last post, suggesting I’m still suffering the effects of massive doses of Prednisone during childhood. She wrote:

“When you were really sick in the hospital you were put on one of the highest doses of prednisone they give. Low doses make people have ocd tendencies while on the drug. High doses are 100 times magnified. Thus your many loud memmories. Ask any doctor what this drug can do. Having said that I will note that we are all very happy you came through the physical problems. However I think this drug is still making you sick. Even though you have not taken it for a very long time. I have taken moderate to high doses (not nearly what you took) and came home from the hospital like a crazy just let out of the mental hospital. I cannot even imagine what it did to you. But I am not convinced that this drug ends with the end of the prescibed dosage.”

There’s a lot of truth in there regarding the lingering effects of Prednisone, but that’s a topic best saved for the next post.

For now, I want to tell my mother that the reality of this blog is the complete opposite of what it’s really about. In an effort to set her straight, I’m asking her to read the following posts…

First, some words about how having the occasional bought of depression doesn’t mean a person is unhinged or even unhappy. Depression has it’s emotional components, but a lot of it is about basic science and brain chemistry: things that can be managed with the proper awareness and treatment.

Read:

A Depressed Mind Is Rarely A Beaten Mind

Depressed But OK With It

Beauty And Gratitude In Every Bad Thing

A Link Between Prednisone, Mental Illness

This post where I tell people there is no reason to avoid or be ashamed of therapy

“The Engine” where I compare mental illness and the treatments do the engine of a car.

Next, some words of encouragement I try to send people, especially kids, going through what I’ve experienced, the goal being to give them hope and inspire them to take command of their lives — not sink deeper into despair:

A Letter to Addie, a Child Fighting OCD

Mister Rogers’ Mother Was Right

Message for a Young Friend

Finally, read these posts because they are all about me making it through the rough stuff and reaching a point where I am a much happier person who loves to experience things I used to fear:

The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story. About the wife who saved my life in many ways.

Snowpocalypse and the Fear of Loss. The author remembers a time when fear of loss would cripple his mental capacities, and explains how he got over it — mostly.

Fear Factor. The author describes years of living in a cell built by fear, how he broke free and why there’s no turning back.

Prozac Winter. The author discovers that winter makes his depression worse and that there’s a purely scientific explanation — and solution.

Rest Redefined. The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.

Outing Myself. The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.

Why Being a People Pleaser is Dumb. The author used to try very hard to please everybody and was hurt badly in the process. Here’s how he broke free and kept his soul intact.

Hopefully, you’ll walk away with a new perspective. This thing is really about overcoming obstacles and learning to put ongoing challenges in their proper place.

If you don’t feel that way after more reading, we’ll simply have to agree to disagree.