Stephen Vincent wrote:
>Thanks you guys for the nice responses. Part of my pleasure in the piece
>is that I come from that post-generation of children where women - who had
>either been to university or self-sufficiently employed during the War -
>were compelled to marry and go back into the house to raise children, etc.
>It produced a lot of angry women - and kind of odd relationships with the
>children.
>
So much of this reads like "You followed me home." If my mother--she of
ancient resentments and grudges--were alive now she'd be 99. For that
matter, my father was born in 1899, so I am part of a direct family
spanning two centuries. She worked before she married my father, I
believe even afterwards, but when I came along in 1944 she did what was
expected, even demanded. As for the (not quoted here) idea that parents
expected their kids to fulfill their broken dreams...too true. I had
this revealed to me by Dr. Michael Eigen, a New York psychoanalyst who
discussed the Child God idea a wonderful and readable book called The
Psychoanalytic Mystic (Eigen's more a Buddhist than a Jew). In my case
the child-as-redeemer resided in both parents, not just my mother. My
father was a man of great natural gifts and intelligence who'd quit
school because of family poverty, before the 8th grade; who joined the
Marines in 1918 to go to war but shipped out of Port Newark one day
before the Armistice and so missed "his" war; and whose life--as I have
come to understand it--was one series of thwartings after another,
several of them occasioned by the consequences of his prodigious
appetites (hint: not for Linzer tortes). My mother, albeit I knew her
for 48 years, is an even greater enigma: she had a head for business,
went back to work after my father died, and did her best as a
mother--but because it was expected, not from any real gift or
vocation. I intuited several years ago that I'd been expected to be my
parents' redeemer, to make up the holes in their self-perceived ruined
lives by being the Perfect Child. No child should have to carry that
burden, no child can carry it, and I certainly could not.
My mother lived her life with the out-loud idea that the God in whom she
did not believe had screwed her anyway, that she was the center of the
world's suffering, and that she'd had a ne'er do well husband and a
loser son (me, in case you didn't get it). When my wife and I had
children it was almost as though my mother was the beneficiary, that
we'd done it for her. As sick as this sounds, I can't at this moment
help thinking of The Handmaid's Tale.
The fact I was an only child did not help. But with a sibling around I
might have become one of the Kray or Mantle brothers. Sometimes no
frame of reference can be a good thing.
Well, I became a Ph.D., not much of a writer, and certainly not a great
financial success. My mother reminded me of the latter every time I was
out of work.
So growing up with the gang back in the Bronx was not exactly a source
of joy. But God! it was fertile ground for writing, not even as the
so-called Best Revenge, but because the stories, looked at from many
years' distance, are a combination of Peck's Bad Boy and H.P. Lovecraft.
So much for the afternoon autobiography.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
|