Periodically, I get asked why, at age 86, I’m still writing blogs. Usually the person asking is in their sixties or seventies. It’s a question that just keeps coming up again and again in spite of the fact that 62% of my blog viewers are under age 34, and 55% are using mobile devices—all of which says a lot and is very satisfying for me. But the older age of my questioners makes my answer easy. I just say something along the line of wanting to keep my gray matter working, lest it slow down. Older adults understand that response and seem to be happy with it. There’s truth in that answer. But actually, it’s a brushoff.
To understand why I still write, you’ll first need to understand my life as a child and adolescent. I was the elder of two sons, three years apart, in a profoundly dysfunctional family. My mother was a flaming narcissist and, as my brother said over her grave, “a mean lady.” My father had divorced her two years into my life—a rare act in the 1930s--and then remarried her when he realized my younger brother was on the way. I cannot remember a single week in my entire life before leaving for college when there were not emotional fights and tears. My father actually attempted suicide once. When angry, he broke plates and cups on the floor, then went off hunting with his dogs and a Black buddy, in season and out. Of course, there were significant consequences of all that to my life. To protect myself, I learned to become deceptive, a tool which I have mostly unlearned. My language skills were always the best tools for self-protection. Whenever possible, I retreated to books—books of all kinds—in my search for new language and new ideas. My brother lacked my language competencies. He wasn’t even a good liar—the primary tool for avoiding our mother. Instead, he was the family scapegoat. The two of us had little relationship. Always in trouble, he was sent off to three private schools in his junior high and high school years. Two, out-of-state, before my dad finally shipped him off to the army at age eighteen. The differences between my brother and myself were also instructive. It was one more driver of my language and relational learning. With my background in psychology, I now understand that he was an attachment avoidant and I was a low-level anxious avoidant—a dysfunction that, calculatingly, I worked on changing throughout the first 10 years of my adult life.
What’s obvious, and also profoundly frustrating, is that my mother was my teacher--and an exceptionally capable tutor. Attendance in her school was compulsory and I spent 24 hours a day figuring out how to win the top grades. My best friend recently described that learning as highly reflective. Continually ruminating, I spent all those years attempting to outsmart her. It was language, I kept confirming. It was always the best tool. I worked hard at becoming linguistically effective, eventually escaping, marrying a wonderful woman and moving to another world. It turns out that having someone believe in my failure enabled my success. My friend, also said, laughing, that I would have been a superb Courtier in the Court of Elizabeth the First. I’d be able to manage all the politics and come away rich. My brother, in significant contrast, decided that the best way to manage our mother was to escape. And he spent his years at home attempting to escape her clutches—usually failing. Elizabeth’s henchmen would have tracked him down and murdered him. Essentially that’s what happened. It just took my mother 70 years...
