On Paternal Approval.

It was an offhand statement, a genuine question. Something so obvious that it never occurred to me. It’s part of the problem of being so intelligent, sometimes you get so wrapped up in analysis and the reasoning, that sometimes you forget the entire point of analyzing is so you can move past things.

For the most part, I understand my negative disposition towards my father. It’s not like I was born this way, it evolved. As a child, I didn’t know any better, much like a lot of kids. I just wanted the attention of my parents. My mom satisfied this most of the time. She was my best friend when I was a kid. Total momma’s boy. My dad, on the other hand, it was always on his terms that we did anything. I remember so many times being told the news was on. This isn’t to say we didn’t do things together. But as a kid wanting attention, given enough rejection, I eventually just stopped trying.

I distinctly remember being fourteen and trying to form a bond with him. We were out in Arizona, driving from.. shit, I can’t remember offhand. It was near when I started my first journal. I was getting comfortable and said something, I can’t remember. Pretty tame compared to what I might be capable of now. I was greeted with, “You may be able to talk to your friends like that, but I’m your father and you can’t talk like that to me.” Or something like that. So thinking “that was it”, I gave up. Feeling the last chance for bondage had passed, I gave up. I doubt he even noticed.

Something else I haven’t completely deconstructed is why I emotionally detached myself from my mom. Somewhere in puberty, I realized it “wasn’t normal” for boys to be close to their mothers. In essence, I shut down. My dad wasn’t on my radar at all, I didn’t talk to my mom at all. Occasionally my sister would talk to me. But otherwise, my inversion peaked somewhere between middle school and my junior year of high school. Even then, I identified as a loner, a rebel without a cause, not normal, and not somebody the masses would ever accept. But that’s a whole other story.

I know what it’s like to have no friends, to have nobody. Talk all you will about having a normal “family”, but I had nobody for emotional support, assuming I even bothered to express my emotions.

The turn from indifference to the vehemence occurred sometime after my rebirth. In deprogramming myself, I ended up giving myself a bit of a psychosis in the process. Follow, if you will. A large part of that process was identifying when my “inner critic” was putting down. The vast majority of the time, it sounded like the metamessages that my father was placing on me. Those invisible, typically unsaid expectations and values. I would metaphorically take a brick to those voices. Sounds crazy on paper, but it fucking worked. I was able to talk myself through a lot of things that would have shut me down previously, and do it with my head held high.

As an unfortunately side effect, I’m guessing I began to transfer all my aggression against self-criticism to my dad. That is, blaming him for everything that’s wrong with me. It makes sense.

So when Jessica Emsley asked me, “Why do you hate your father?” I had to pause. It didn’t even occur to me that I did. I gave great pause indeed, because I’ve been trying, really trying, to be nice to him. I’ve reached that point where I recognize what a flawed person he is. I recognize that I’m smarter than him.

But I think there’s something more than the transference. Something simpler. Deep down, we all want parental approval. It’s easier to say, “Fuck you, I don’t care what you think” than to say, “I actually care what this person thinks of me.” That’s the bottom line. My sister and I are just fucking failures in his eyes and we’ll never amount to anything. There will always be something we’re not doing, because clearly he thinks he has all the answers.

I resent that because he’s never, ever shown any happiness in his life. If he think education + family + children = happiness, he is NOT a shining example. I don’t recall ever sensing any joy in him growing up, or any other emotion for that matter. He was always seemed mildly disinterested in us, as if it’s the Woman’s Job to raise the children. He champions the family unit even though we were never that close as a nuclear family. I can not remember one thing all four of us ever did together. Not one thing we ever shared. It must be a massive delusion in his head. His kids haven’t followed the idealism, his wife of thirty years left him.

Yet he still tells others to have kids because it is a “unique life experience”. Really, where the fuck were you for that?

So to answer the question, I don’t think of it as anger or hate. In fact, I kind of pity him.

No, it’s more resentment. It’s hearing those messages, something hidden, sometimes in plain sight, that I’ll never measure up. Because I’m “too old” that “life is passing me by” that “all my peers have moved on”. Thus reenforcing that he doesn’t actually care about me, he just cares about some conception in his head that he can show others. I can talk a big talk about how I know better, that I know my self-worth. But again, we all need parental approval. My mom and her mom will tell me they only care that I’m happy, and those friends in my life will say the same thing.

And I understand that he cares on some level. We had a conversation about how we don’t have any other family in this state. He said that he’d reply to other people, “He’s my son, why wouldn’t I live with him?” I would never admit it at the time, but that meant a lot to me. We don’t have any other family around here, our family is scattered around the country. That’s the closest I’ve gotten to approval. Unfortunately, on some level, his general lack of approval will always bother me.

This is semi-related, so I’m going to tag it on at the bottom. Thinking about all this got me thinking about my next nanowrimo novel. I originally had two ideas in my head. One, I was thinking about all the funny work-related stories that have happened over the years. Two, I was thinking about the romantic arch between Jessica Emsley and I. Change some things around, drum up some drama, BAM, instant tear-jerker. Now originally I thought A. write them separately during the same month or B. COMBINE THEM INTO A ROMANTIC COMEDY FOR THE AGES. After all, my last nanowrimo was pretty much written around the primary romantic arch.

I’m glad I got over this fear of writing the same thing, of repeating themes or ideas. There’s a reason feelings and ideas come up over and over again in my fiction. Trying to never, ever use an idea that I’ve used previously is retarded. Last year’s nanowrimo felt so comfortable because I’d done it twice before. (Though, the two previous were really two parts of the same story.) With this in mind, I’ve noticed something missing in my nanos: the family element.

So far, I’ve used external elements to show my characters. Effective in showing the psychology of the characters. However, the actual root causes are only hinted at. That is, I’ve never fully documented the family dynamics. This is setting itself to be a massive, MASSIVE undertaking, something I wouldn’t be able to doif I weren’t a nanowrimo veteran and FULL OF AWESOME. It’s going to be a complete deconstruction of my personality. If I do it right, I’m going to delve into some things I’ve never really talked about in depth before. I’m talking some serious shit. SERIOUS SHIT.

Like a giant turd with angry eyes!

Ahem.

As for romantic subplots, I’m thinking of talking about them in the context of a Kiss List. Whether I’ll give myself credit or not, I’ve had a lot of experiences over the years. I don’t think I need a final romance, I don’t think that’s what will end this novel.

IT’S AUGUST AND I’M OUTLINING FOR MY NANOWRIMO. ABOUT FUCKING TIME.

Ahem. I’ll make a formal announcement next month and again in October regarding my yearly mailing list for nanowrimo.