I was thinking this morning about old grievances. Why? I have no idea. I was thinking first about all the good things and people in my life and then I was suddenly ruminating. You know ruminating, don’t you—that thing you do when an idea or a situation or a person, whatever, you just can’t swallow but you just can’t chuck it up either so you pass it back to some other part of the brain and just chew on it for a while. Some of this stuff you can pass on, but others it just keeps cropping up and you just chew on it some more. Reworking and reworking those old grievances. That same old shit. Always the same cast of characters in different guises.
I should of, I could of. It’s usually failures of all kind.
With my parents it was like living in a war zone. The marriage had put black-up curtains on the windows. You could hear the distant sounds, and not so distant sounds of straffing. B-52’s were coming in low over the houses. You could see the shadows in our yard.
I got to thinking about how I spent my formative years in this environment, and how my parents made peace and I in my marriage have found peace. The war is over, an armistice has been declared. But hostilities can rear their ugly heads. A situation, a misspoken word and that indigestible piece of grass comes up again for chewing.
Maybe these feelings are never very far from the surface. Maybe that is the subterranean self which lurks like some psychic koi.
I suppose its the feeling for children that there is nothing they can do. Helplessness, and that they have no right to happiness when their parents are so miserable.
My parents coming to terms with each other and themselves, even long after I had reached adulthood, freed me from a bondage worse then an addiction. The need to be miserable. The need to be a victim. Truly freed me, in a way that I would never have imagined. Maybe It would have happened eventually, but if it had happened in my seventies or eighties, I think I would have felt like it was a little anticlimactic. You know, like “So what?”
This warring house made me so sad. So sad. The war seemed ancient. And I suppose it was: Who do you love? Who do you love? If you loved me you’d…If you truly cared you’d…But there are no rules in love. Everyone loves in the only way they know how and the way most of us know how is the way our parents did it. The big tug of war.
The experts, God love them, say that children feel responsible when a marriage breaks apart. Let me tell you. Children feel responsible if the marriage stays together too. Kids feel responsible. We’re all here on this planet and none of us is separate from the other. The collective unconscious rules, especially under one roof. Kids are caught in the gravitational pull of their parents, either thrown away or drawn in closer, eclipsed and then sometimes effaced.
Enough of this solar stuff. You catch my drift.
Kids grow up in a house like this, and some of them, like me, always feel inadequate. They are always trying to measure themselves against other people, maybe in an absurd attempt to feel worthy. And of course, its not the positive feedback they crave. Its the one who says. “Yeah, you’re right. You aren’t worth shit.” You could do a blind taste testing sort of thing and have these positive folks lined up from here to Timbuktu, and the negative line just barely reaching across the street. Guess what our character will want to do? Interview all the folks on the negative side. “How did I let you down?” “Tell me what I did wrong?”
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to go around and ask “What did I do right?”
Now, you’re probably wondering, what the hell does all this have to do with the ruminating cow at the top of this blog. There’s a link, tenuous, but there.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 