viragette

It’s been more than a minute and some ideas have been rattling around. Notable among the backlog of posts is this seed of an encyclopedic diatribe, namely that if humanity has been “designed”, we could only have been designed by an appalling idiot.

This entire site, to date, might have been dedicated to that notion, if only I’d included better summary statements. Case in point: what happens when a sane person and a crazy person are confined together? Does the crazy person become sane?

It turns out that crazy is contagious - how “intelligent” is that?

Another apparent paradox: people with fantastic romantic relationships make it look easy. Because it is. Easy. Meanwhile the people with the horrid relationships work harder than Sysiphus vs. Wile E. Coyote. Did anyone really need another reason to suspect that Love and Puritans don’t mix? My tip: if you are not having a whole lot of fun, a priori, your fantastic work ethic will get you - not much ass, at all. I just thought you should know.

Anyway, it’s been a long, cold winter and I’ve been cold with the blog. Still, I’m hoping to cuddle up with the keyboard for just a moment and tell you a secret: I’ve helped my dad out, alot.

When I was a child, I tried to help my father in childish ways. I’m grateful to my mother, and to my fairy step mother, both of whom recently reminded me of how much I helped my father when I was a girl. I long ago rejected how much I had tried to help him. Out of shame for childish hopes. And because I failed.

Right now, my father is slowly dying in his armchair at my grandmother’s house. His blood won’t clot and he is a funny, jaundiced color. He won’t go to the doctor, or tell anyone what, exactly, the doctor told him. About his liver. And he won’t return my calls. All of the polite meekness of my girlhood, all the spelling bees and hours of quiet, studious girlhood passed in utter desperation - they simply did not do the trick.

my dad at 17
My father and I talk can freely about his alcoholism, and his prior drug use. But, I’ve never talked to him about the personality disorder. I do not think he would like it, or find it useful. My father is a narcissist. That sounds sort of like “asshole” and, admittedly, the two are easy to confuse. I can barely think of a more horrifying mental illness. As a narcissist, my father is compelled to reject and hurt the people closest to him. He has destroyed or irreparably harmed every relationship he has ever held dear. He speaks to me with incredible longing for those lost loves. That he has derived not one ounce of profit or gain from his path of destruction is an attempt, I think, to make peace with the demon; he refuses to gain from his irrepressible Imp of the Perverse. Instead, he seems frightened and bewildered by it. I have watched as he tries, again and again, to reconcile himself to the idea that he is simply a bad person. That is the only logical explanation he can imagine. He tries, without much success, to act the part. Crying like a baby at Dances with Wolves is gonna give you away, Dad.

When I was 14, my dad did something that frightened me. I refused to speak to him for 8 years. And then I helped him to get through that. I did the bewildering work of reconciliation. And more. I did the work that made our crippled relationship the strange blessing that it is. I went to the meetings for the family members of alcoholics. I reached out with unconditional acceptance and firm, clear boundaries. I stopped trying to fix him. I earned a graduate degree in neurobiology and now find myself studying addiction, compulsion and the way in which the brain exerts - or does not exert - control over our desires.

Because I was a little girl, my father’s illness has been a strange gift. His children were extensions of him, and we were supposed to be perfect in company. He took no particular interest in my childish hobbies, or actively discouraged me if they were inconvenient to him. Yet, he expected excellence. It did not matter that I was a girl. Arguably a bit of a misogynist, my father raised me, his daughter, with a singularly feminist expectation - that I should be able to do anything. I believed him.

I’ve tried so very hard to help my father, and to solve this central problem of my childhood, that it is almost comical. I went to college as an act of pure teenage defiance and then ended up earning a Ph.D. with which I study - my father. I made peace with his demons - and found my own. As of late, my father believes that he is going to die and I have stopped worrying about whether anyone else finds anything that I do to be excellent. I can do anything, and I can do that too.

Brandon Benson 4.2 MB