Do u hate ur parents

I didn't know how I felt about them when I was a kid living with them. I had never been a very social little boy and they exacerbated that by moving us out into the middle of the desert where there were no friends to be had. So I had no idea what a normal family was like and didn't understand that ours was not one of them. When my mother hit menopause she became a screamer (there were no medications for it in the 1950s) and I dreaded coming home from school, but I still didn't understand how I felt about them. It wasn't until 35 years later when my wonderful wife (whom I don't deserve) and I were watching "The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" (one of the things I love about her is that she shares my appreciation for children's literature, whether print or screen). The characters were talking about their worst fears, and Piglet said, "My worst fear is coming face-to-face with my worst fear."

I had to hit the Pause button. I realized that all throughout the later years of my childhood, what I feared worst was my mother. But I never allowed myself to know that. My worst fear was, indeed, coming face-to-face with my worst fear. How can a child fear his mother? Especially when his parents are the only companions he's got? What a horrible life that would be! Who wants to admit that he has that life?

The few friends I had agreed that they were hard-cases, but how much of that was from their own observations and how much from believing me? My wife didn't think much of them but her own mother was so much worse that they seemed halfway normal to her.

I don't know how hateful they really were, not having seen many other parents in action. They controlled me, didn't allow me to pursue my own interests, didn't let me hang out with people who might have broadened my perspective. Their only goal was for me to live their dream of going to a prestigious university, so I spent most of my time studying science and math. They did nothing to help me learn how to get along with other people, which would have been hard because they did not get along well with other people. They never had more than one or two friends and we rarely had company. It took me many years, one disastrous marriage and a couple of therapists before I made much progress toward being a decent human being. And when that started happening I found that I hated them even more. Even though a "decent human being" would certainly have found a way to make peace with them.

My father died in 1996 at age 84. No one had ever come to visit him in the hospital and no one mourned his death. All the "friends" he played tennis with were just being good sports and letting the jerk play. My mother died in 1999 at age 87. No one had ever come to visit her and no one mourned her either. All of her neighbors were just being good neighbors and making sure she was alright. One even called the cops after not seeing her for several days, and they found her lying quietly on the floor after having a stroke. She was hoping to die there but instead she got shipped off to a nursing home. That was when I got confirmation for my feelings about them: they really were nasty people.

Because of my job we had to move 600 miles away from my mother's nursing home and couldn't even make dutiful visits. When we got the call that she had died, we said all the right things to each other. But then the first time the phone rang we found ourselves both walking over to answer it eagerly, something we had never done in our (then) 27 years of marriage. We knew it couldn't be her, so we didn't regard a ringing telephone with dread!

Please find a copy of the Parade magazine in last Sunday's (Jan. 1 2012) newspaper. The "Ask Marilyn" column (by Marilyn Vos Savant, the person with the highest recorded IQ) got a question from a guy wondering why foot massages only feel good when somebody else does it.

She replied that it's just like tickling yourself: it doesn't work. Our brains are programmed to downplay physical sensations that we cause to ourselves, whether good ones or bad ones. This is why you're not conscious of the pressure on the bottom of your feet when you walk, for example.

This is also why the old parental chant, "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you," when they spank their children is, in fact dead backwards. The parent genuinely does not feel the blow as strongly on his hand as the child feels it on her butt (or face or anywhere else). He genuinely does not understand how much pain he's causing the child, because his hand doesn't hurt so bad.

And this is why children's playground squabbles can turn so ugly. Kid A hits Kid B, and all he feels is mild discomfort in his hand. Meanwhile Kid B is really in pain. So he hits Kid A really hard, so hard that it feels about as painful to him as the blow he got. But to Kid A it feels like he was hit by a truck! He retaliates, and what is happening is that each kid is trying to hit the other one so that his hand hurts as much as the last blow he received. They each believe honestly that they're taking much worse than they're giving.

My point: You had to hit yourself much harder than your father did, because your brain is blocking out a large portion of the pain. Please don't try it again!!! You could really injure yourself this way!!! This will not help you understand what your father was doing, because it didn't feel the same to him as it did to you.

I was deliriously happy when my parents died. I wish they hadn't been so dadgum healthy and had only lived into their 70s instead of their 80s.

Nonetheless, there's a little good in the worst of us and they were no exception. They managed to teach me three things that were extremely important and valuable to me as a child and still are as an adult.

• There is no invisible, illogical supernatural universe full of creatures and forces who capriciously interfere with the operation of the natural universe. I didn't know what religion was until I was seven and when another little boy told me about it, I assumed he was just making up a funny story so I laughed my head off. I didn't understand why he didn't appreciate my response.
• Violence is never the right way to settle a dispute. I think I was spanked or slapped about four times in my entire childhood--and even at the time I knew I kinda deserved it. As a result, I have never hit anybody in my life. And I don't know how this happened but somehow I broadcast that and nobody has ever hit me either.
• People who look different from me are still regular, normal people. My mother took me to visit someone in the hospital and there was a little indoor playground with a bunch of kids playing. I started to go over and play with them and she stopped me. "See that little boy in the corner playing all by himself? Why don't you go play with him. I'm sure that would make him happy." We had a great time playing together. It wasn't until I was much older when I learned that people who look like me have some really nasty, ugly names for people who look like that little boy. I didn't understand why, and I guess I still don't.

I wish I could say those three things are so wonderful (which they are of course) that I can forgive them for all the bad things, but I can't. I spend decades trying to recapture the childhood that I never had, with toys, games, risk-taking and friends. I mistreated a lot of people--not as bad as my parents, but it's hard to believe anyone was willing to be my friend. They took me under their wing, gritted their teeth, and tried to help me become better. I had no financial sense and completely missed the real estate boom in Los Angeles. I never had children because if you have children then you don't get to be the child anymore.

It's a "joke," but the joke is on him because it's true.

We've been giving DarksidZZ advice for several years now and he never takes it. I've never seen a photo of him, so I opened the dictionary to the word "loser" and I assume the picture that illustrates the word is him. He is absolutely determined to live the most miserable life he can possibly create for himself. The only fun he has is complaining about it every couple of years to a new batch of SciForums members who are not already wise to him.

He's gotten so much good advice from all of you wonderful people that if he had just collected it he could publish it and make a fortune. But then he wouldn't be able to complain about being a loser. I have a friend like this. She sabotages herself at every turn, making all the wrong decisions deliberately and missing every great opportunity by simply waiting just a couple of days too long. She is now 52, she has a night-shift job (that's where most losers wind up because it's so easy to avoid getting good advice there) that pays about $15 an hour, she lives with her parents who lost all their savings in the 2008 crash so she won't inherit much of anything from them, she cashed out her IRA to pay her credit card bills, and her goal now is to find a relative in a small town who will put her up (and put up with her) until she dies, which won't be long because in addition to everything else she has taken unspeakably rotten care of her health.

This is DarksidZZ in another 12 years. And he's happy with that just like she is.

He does no research into anything so he has no idea how the world works and what he might be able to do that would be both interesting and lucrative. I think everybody's favorite DarksidZZ story is the one where he asked us how to welch out of paying off his car loan. He was going to hoard the money and "drop out" by going to Hawaii!!! He must have found a tourist guidebook that was written in 1952, back before Hawaii was a state, and it had lots of wilderness, and Honolulu was the size of Great Falls, Montana, and luscious coconuts were hanging off the trees for anybody to pick, and you could sleep on the beach in the nude!

 

I apologize for that. I should have reviewed that post one more time and realized that I had done that. What I really meant, and should have said, was that although all night shift workers are by no means losers, a great many losers eventually end up on the night shift. My loser friend has quite a few night-shift colleagues who are great people, but it's undeniable that a much larger percentage of her shift-mates are losers than is typical on a day-shift job, even though they're not the majority of the crew.

Um... that's what "anonymous" is all about, right?

Indeed. Technically, to call any of our fellow members a loser is a violation of the rule against personal insults. But just as we should be able to call a woman a "whore" if she writes detailed posts about engaging in degrading sexual activity in exchange for money, I think it's fair to call Darksidz a "loser" when he makes a point of telling us--over and over again, with a poorly concealed overtone of pride ("Look at me! I'm still here spongeing off of people who are too damn weak-willed to throw me out in the street, while you suckers toil and worry about paying the rent!")--how he satisfies the definition of that word down to the last perfect detail.

I can't help wondering how he got to be that way. Obviously his parents are enablers, so that casts a good deal of suspicion on his upbringing.

But it's a convenient rule of thumb to say once you've spent as many years being chronologically an adult as you did being chronologically a child, no matter how badly you were brought up it's time to get over it and take control of your own life. Anyone who doesn't do that is a loser and deserves to be told so.

I mean shit, people crawled out of Auschwitz 24 hours away from dying of starvation, having had their gold fillings extracted without anesthetic, after watching their children, spouses and siblings gunned down like vermin, and an amazing percentage of them found a way to put it behind them and become perfectly reasonable people who laugh and love and work for a living.

I didn't go into voluminous detail, but I never doubted that my parents loved me. I suppose that was my salvation: I grew up knowing how to love and not being afraid to do it even though sometimes it ends up hurting. They didn't know the right way to show it, but still I knew.

I freely admit that I was nowhere near that bad off, and I hope I didn't give anyone the impression that I was trying to put myself in the same league as those of you who were abused physically or in other equally damaging ways. I was simply responding to the O.P., logging in as a person who did indeed hate his parents and explaining why for the benefit of the discussion.

But to answer this question, in my case at the very end of my adolescence I stumbled onto a group of friends who were extremely strong and caring. I managed not to piss them off and also to be somewhat entertaining as a wisecracking sidekick and a singer at their parties, so they took me in and spent a lot of time teaching me to be a better person, but since they were doing it by example I suppose it didn't feel like work to them. They were all one-percenters in their own way, so it wasn't like I was the odd man out anyway.

I also had a lot of therapy. And... I dated a second-grade teacher for a long time and she seemed to have exactly the right skills to deal with an adult who was emotionally far younger than his chronological age. Oddly enough, when I became noticeably better she dumped me after all that effort and tolerance. Through a "Butterfly Effect" coincidence she was responsible for me meeting the future Mrs. Fraggle--her final gift for which I've never been able to thank her because she dropped off the radar.

Indeed. While all about me people were "dropping out"--sleeping in crash pads, panhandling for food or even stealing it, being high all the time and living off the generosity of the most prosperous decade in history (the 1960s)--I (like those friends who helped me grow up) always had a job and a home of my own. It did take me seven years to get my B.S., but that was because it took me three years to face the fact that I didn't want the degree my parents had choreographed for me (something technical) and, after dropping out of school for a year, getting a job and a wife (the first one, a perfect match because she was just as screwed up as I was), I had to start all over on a business degree.

I don't know. My friend who has the same life but is 12 years older and pretty much past the point of ever being able to fix it is more depressed every time I see her. As a woman she spent her whole life assuming that if she just looked and acted beautiful some fabulous man would rescue her. That might have worked a generation earlier, but by the 1980s it just wasn't enough any more.

Hey dude, it happens. And it happens far more often than any of us would like to admit. You think all the losers are kids? A whole lot of them manage to get married and have kids of their own.