10. Green Aliens

After I became independent at age sixteen, visits with my family of origin were bizarre experiences. To me, my parents were like aliens from another planet. It didn’t matter whether it was my Dad and his wife or my mother and her boyfriend(s). In both cases, my parents acted as if we were having normal family relations. I was on my own as a result of my incorrigible behavior, and now it was time to get on with the business of being a responsible adult, making no demands on them whatsoever and assuming the role of a devoted, dutiful daughter.

It was always about my behavior. If I dared to suggest that perhaps their behavior was part of the story, this just proved the point that my behavior was still wrong, that I ought to work harder in therapy to correct the errors in my thinking.

On one level, I continued to want to please, to avoid conflicts; yet on another level, I deeply resented them for not taking any responsibility for abandoning me at such a young age. My parents beautifully played off of each other, my Dad insisting that I was primarily my mother’s responsibility and my mother saying I was my father’s. This way neither needed to dwell on whether the right thing had been done, because it was between me and the other parent.

I received $0.00 in the way of financial support from my parents from age 16 onward. I know that my father and his wife did provide financial assistance to my step-siblings, albeit reluctantly. My father explained that his earnings were fully allocated to specific household bills and that only his wife’s income had a discretionary component; therefore, he wasn’t in a position to offer me any assistance. At one point he loaned me $700 when I was in desperate straits and I refused to pay it back on principle. My mother claimed to have no spare funds to offer, which may have been true, yet she did offer occasional financial support to my other siblings.

I felt fortunate for the SUNYA financial aid package while it lasted (which wasn’t long). In the Fall of 1977, after accepting a marriage proposal from the Friendly Ice Cream King, and knowing that by working to pay rent I would become ineligible for the full student aid package, I dropped out of SUNYA to become a Real Estate agent. Why would I so easily give up on pursuing a degree at that point? Just two years later I would figure out how to put together my own financial aid package via a combination of grants and loans, so it wasn’t that I didn’t have options for continuing in 1977.

I think it had to do with not expecting a better outcome for myself. I had intended to become a Friendly Ice Cream manager, not to pursue a college degree, until the opportunity dropped into my lap. Before that I didn’t take college seriously. It seemed so far out of reach, partly due to separation from my family but also due to messages received from my parents growing up. I remember the idea of college being associated with both hard work and good behavior, the good behavior determining whether or not any parental financial support would be provided. Even if you were super good, my parents made it clear that you’d have to pay for a significant chunk of your own education via jobs and loans unless you could get scholarships and financial aid. College was spoken of like one of a myriad of financial burdens, not as a formative experience of great value.

In the Jack Version 2.0 post, I suggested that the expectation of a college education for children is solidly middle class, whether you’re actually in the middle class from an economic standpoint or there by way of cultural identification with middle class aspirations. I think my father and mother were not middle class, my father decidedly not, though he eventually became a high income earner in adulthood. In my mother’s case, growing up on a farm in Iowa during the Depression, it’s not so clear. In visits to Iowa relatives over the years, I sensed an underlying structure to family life that I would describe now as based on Protestant, even Victorian, middle class values. If not college, then some kind of vocational training was expected for children not planning on farming. With support from her parents, my own mother attended nursing school and became an RN. Farm poverty is a kind of rural poverty and yet this family offered their children, even girls, some middle class options.

However, the transitions from structured life on an Iowa farm to urban life during nursing school to married life with the personality disorder that was my father were not a recipe for continuing the slow and steady march into the solid middle class. Financial setbacks and marital strife ensued, making the future aspirations of children a lower priority than just getting by. I have to assume that if my parents had not divorced and had been able to get a firmer financial footing, they would have wanted to discuss education and training options for their children and offer what support they could. Between the financial impact of the divorce on my mother and my father’s complicated financial arrangements with his new family, I fell through the cracks.

The real kicker was not being able to go to either parent’s home the Summer of 1977. That’s what broke the momentum, impacting my financial aid and deflating my expectations. It was one thing not to offer any financial assistance, another to refuse the shelter I needed that Summer to make everything work, or at least to get involved in sorting out financial options (for example, covering aid gaps with loans). No money, no shelter, no caring advice. That sent a message of unworthiness I internalized. I did not feel worthy of a college education, at least not that year.

Instead I became a Real Estate agent, got married, and within a year my son was born. The Real Estate gig didn’t last. It was utterly boring and I had no knack for selling properties. In between diapers and waitressing and trips to playgrounds with my other young Mom friends and their kids, I started reading about feminism and got a clue that I was worthy of a better outcome.

Relations with the aliens continued to be strained. Things got worse after my son was born, as they wanted to enjoy being grandparents (thus wanting even more contact). I really didn’t know what to do with them. It didn’t matter. Life unfolds, much of it out of your control. I gritted my teeth through most of my early adulthood, a coping mechanism that eventually resulted in several root canals. It wasn’t that I didn’t love them. I did and do. It was the continuing abandonment I experienced in their not taking responsibility, not listening when I wanted to talk about the past and its impact, or listening only enough to argue and justify. The last time I saw my father alive, he told me that if he had to do it all over again he would make all of the same decisions.

Why is it so hard for people to admit they screwed up and apologize, to be part of the process of mending? My parents really missed out on having a better relationship with their daughter. I think most days it didn’t even cross their minds. Other days, I think they suffered.

Note: In case you can’t read the text in my Dad’s balloon in the cartoon above, here’s one of his favorite funnyisms he liked to say over and over again: “Just think, if Jesus had been electrocuted, Catholic girls would wear little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”