12:10 p.m. - 2008-06-11
I'm not a rock... I'm not an island... Or, Paul Simon's irony rings true
um, wow.
I find it amazing just how deep and lasting emotional pain can be. While trying to make a heartfelt comment of support to another diaryist who went through horrific physical abuse, all I could feel was the incredible pain of the emotional isolation I experienced from my parents.

I feel like such a jerk feeling pain for being ignored while she felt pain from being punched and kicked - as well as being yelled and screamed at with irrational, hateful epithets.

Yet...

Yet, I still feel the pain. Writing this brings tears to my eyes. I haven't cried (from depression) for quite a while. Yet, here I sit with a quickly emptying box of tissues and a mounting pile of soggy, balled up tissues. Why?

I remember reading a book, some spy thriller, in which the horrible Soviet scientist / interrogator used an isolation tank to gain the knowledge hidden within the mind of the hapless woman who was given the information that she knew she couldn't reveal. The woman went insane from being totally isolated from the physical world and her physical self. The emotional pain was too great. I could relate to that. I didn't understand why at the time, but I sure can now.

When I first talked in my group therapy about how detached my parents were I was embarrased. I still feel embarrased. It doesn't seem like it was so bad. Yet it hurts bad.

okay.. the high school sabbatical story.
In my senior year of high school I took 3 sabbaticals. That is I just didn't go to class for at least two weeks straight. The second time I had been out a little more than 3 weeks when my mother tells me after dinner, that she got a phone call from the vice-principal that I hadn't been attending school. She asked if I was going to go back. I mumbled a bit and told her I would. She gave me a note to give to the vice-principal. It said something like "Piltdownman will be coming back to school. signed PiltdowMother" That night after retiring for the night, I heard my parents talking in their bedroom. PiltdownMother mentioned to my father that I hadn't been going to school. I heard a short bit of quiet muttering, then PiltdownMother said that she'd written a note and that I'd go back to school the next day. That was all I ever heard about my missing 3 weeks of school.

That's it. I never heard one word from PiltdownFather. Not another query from PiltdownMother about my attending class.

At first I was thrilled. "yay, I'm not in trouble..." Then I felt like shit and didn't really understand why.

The times when I was out at night doing something with acquaintances other than my usual small group of close friends, I was amazed how they had to call home after eleven o'clock. They had curfews. Their parents waited up for them until they got home - no matter how late. They were so sheltered.
I thought I should feel so cool that I had no curfew. My parents would nod their heads in agreement when one would say that there was no reason for them to stay up late. If "something happened" the State Police would let them know. There was nothing my parents could do. Besides, it would be better if they were rested and had their sleep if something ever did happen.

***

So why does absence hurt so bad? Why does the pain keep coming back?
I know the answers. These are really rhetorical questions. But I still think it all sucks.

Now I choose to put that pain over there, and to live without it here within me.

***

Something else... related, but not quite the same.

PiltdownFather has an addiction to porn. Piltdownman also deals with an addiction to porn. Piltdownman has overcome his addiction and the debilitating shit that goes along with it. PiltdownFather surfs the internet for all kinds of yucky stuff. His first computer was a windows box that he got so junked up with malware that the only thing to do was to totally wipe the hard drive and rebuild the system. That didn't work for long. It would soon be junked up again. Piltdownman and the PiltdownBrothers did their best to clean the shit off his system, but it just kept coming back... So the kids (moi et le fraternite' de Piltdown) got to slog through and see all the wonderful things that PiltdownFather looked at and read to get off. At the time I didn't think it so bad. PiltdownFather always had some form of porn hidden away. Not a lot, but some, and always hidden away. (for all you parents out there -- your kids will find everything your ever try to hide from them... everything) The pc maintenance was going on soon after Piltdownman had dealt for the first time with his own internet porn addiction. So I didn't think it was "so bad". I even helped him hide it from PiltdownMother.

Then PiltdownParents got a very high-speed internet connection. It was impossible to keep the malware of the pc. So we had them buy a Mac. No more adware. No more trojans. No more viruses. Just a lot of porn. And more porn and more porn. Even with the complete lack of Mac-based malware, PiltdownFather's computer would regularly get locked up. It would be too much spam in the inbox or overload of memory and just too much crap from disgusting eastern european or russion web-sites that entice with "free" (PiltdownFather loves free, hates to pay for anything) porn. Since it was now a Mac that was gunked up, and only Piltdownman amongst the PiltdownKids knew anything about a Mac, I got to scrape the shit off the screen and clean up his system.
Eventually I realized that this wasn't good.

At the urging of my counselors I stopped doing this. Wow. I felt a lot better. A few months ago the wife and I went to see the PiltdownParents for dinner and I got hooked into cleaning up "just the email". The aftermath of that was bad. It took me a couple of weeks to link seeing all that shit that PiltdownFather was looking at with the deep depression I was dealing with.

Yes. It hurt to come to terms with seeing and acknowledging that my father was an internet porn addict.

But what am I to do?

First of all, and the PiltdownBrothers agree with me entirely, is that I am not to deal with anything on that computer again. Secondly, I am to confront PiltdownFather about his addiction, tell him how much it hurts me, it hurts PiltdownMother, it hurts my brothers and their families. I'm to tell him that his feeble attempts to hide it from us have been ineffectual, that even though PiltdownMother is 90% blind she still knows he's been gazing at pictures of porn and other assorted disgusting things.

No confrontation has happened yet.

My eldest cousin on PiltdownFather's side has a birthday just before mine, and her son, who lives on the southern side of the center of the universe, was having a party for her. I absolutely adore eldest cousin. She is beautiful, gracious and I've always looked up to her. In the interest of not ruining this little family gathering I did not confront him before this.

In the interest of keeping PiltdownParents' concentration away from me and my birthday I did not communicate with them at all for several weeks. (PiltdownParents are getting old. They forget a lot of things, senility is creeping up on both of them.) My birthday seems to have slipped their minds this year.

Then PiltdownFather had a melanoma removed from his head. The doctor thought it was just a little thing but ended up removing a quarter-sized chunk out of his head. With PiltdownMother's near blindness, both of their impending demtia, PiltownFather's Parkinson's disease and his stubborness, their tending to the wound was problematic and of course it became infected. So... no confrontation.

Then it was PiltdownFather's birthday. Who knows? It might be his last. I didn't confront him.

Now what?

My counselor explained why it would be so great for me to confront him and put this behind me. It would be a changing of our roles. I would be the one in control. Sounds good. But I not sure that PiltdownFather has the mental capacity anymore to understand. His ability to even try to use the computer is rapidly evaporating.

Is the confrontation worth it?
I doubt it.

His infirmities are making his porn addiction a moot point. Besides, is it my responsibility to tell him that my sister-in-law is disgusted by it? Is it my responsibility to tell him? I don't know.

At this point I'm more worried about how to get both of the PiltdownParents into Assisted Living. One is blind, has a bad heart, and bumbles around due to neuropathy and numbness in her legs and feet. The other is going downhill with advancing Parkinson's disease, melanoma, bad hearing (his hearing aids irritate the wound on his head), and increasing social withdrawal. Neither is really physicaly capable of taking care of themself. It's only their stubborness and insularity that is keeping their "retirement community" from recognizing just how incapable they are. They were offered a nice two bedroom apartment in the Assisted Living facility last December. The PiltdownParents both were adamant that they would absolutely not do that. Absolutely not.

Why not? Because Assisted Living costs more. They don't want to spend the money. Why not? Because they're cheap. Also, because they take enormous pride in having a nest egg for their sons to inherit. Being cheap, making their lives miserable, yet having a big estate is what they want. They're both terrified of death, but they still want to go knowing they left a lot of money to their kids. (But not to their daughters-in-law. They don't like all their daughters-in-law. And not to their son's step-kids -- they're not real family.)

So I'm left with parents who were emotionally withdrawn, yet now are incredibly clingy and needy, and I am profusely ambivalent. This post has no tidy means of closing which is due to my great ambivalence and fatigue from writing about all this.

ttfn

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