Okay, now it's
time to play Rate Your Dad! Just like a Cosmo quiz, this little
exercise will give you vast insight into yourself, while proving virtually
useless in your daily life. Here we go:
When it comes to
scary fierceness, my personal dad was:
a) Deliciously
frightening. In fact, I am currently indulging in some nostalgic
memories of his bad-ass scariness even now.
b) Disappointingly
wussy. Just once I would have liked to have said 'my dad can beat
up your dad', but sadly, my dad could not have beaten up a kitten, let
alone one of my childhood foes.
c) Maniacally
over the top to a degree for which I feel disinclined to forgive
him, even now. Seriously, I don't think it was all that beneficial that
I had to spend several years of my childhood locking myself in a closet
for my own protection.
d) Bewilderingly
incomprehensible to this day. I suspect he may have had a mental
disorder. Either that or he really loved me. I've never been entirely
sure which.
e) Doesn't apply
because, you see, I didn't really have a dad. No, when I needed
protection from my childhood enemies or someone to teach me how to handle
fear, my dad wasn't around. Where were you when I needed you, dad, huh,
where the fuck were you?
Excellent! Now it's
time to see how you scored in the dad sweepstakes.
If you answered
a) deliciously frightening, you need to take moment now to experience
profound gratitude, awe, and impressed admiration for your dad's ability
to pull off the immensely complicated protection/scariness maneuver
while relying solely on instinct, experience, and character. That's
an achievement! The dad who successfully nails this one can never get
enough credit for it. Worship at his altar every now again just for
fun. It feels good!
If you answered
b) disappointingly wussy, then from your point of view, your
back was not watched and your dad does not rule. You've been on your
own in an uncertain world, forced, by sheer necessity, to develop a
finely-honed and unceasing inner uptightness that reminds you that nothing
in life is really play, it all counts, and if you're going to survive
at all, you damn well better do it yourself. In some cases, this morphs
into:
The
dreaded 'mama's boy' syndrome.
The person so afflicted is called a 'mama's boy' because it's not mom's
job to scare the shit out of her offspring until their central nervous
systems want to puke (although certain moms do this anyway) - quite
frankly Mom is supposed to be incredibly busy, in an evolutionary sense,
doing a lot of other stuff. People without the equivalent of some sort
of scary dad to get their central nervous systems stretched and calibrated
have a devil of a time managing the spikes of fear and anxiety that
normal life calls for. These people's poor central nervous systems don't
know how to work the fear mechanism and therefore shy away from anything
that requires its proper operation.
If your central
nervous system goes into a panicked meltdown every time it encounters
something resembling fear, you are, unfortunately perhaps, going to
have to do the work your dad didn't - and start scaring the shit out
of yourself on a regular basis until you get hang of it. You are going
to have throw your own self into the pool, and towards danger, forcing
yourself to meet all kinds of challenges you are in no way in the mood
to face, until your central nervous system gets a tiny lightbulb over
its head and says to itself 'oh hey, wait a minute, I get it! It's
only fear. This is a normal feeling that rises and falls and quite
frankly can be lived through. I had no idea. Well, don't that beat all.
What a surprising turn of events.' And so on. There is nothing quite
like being forced to live through something unpleasant, even if you
are the one doing the forcing, to improve your ability to laugh in the
face of the future unpleasantness you will undoubtedly later encounter
in life. But enough of you b) people.
If you answered
c) maniacally over the top, then you too will experience the
bonus unceasing uptightness. People who get too much dad-induced CNS
terror stimulation develop equally hideous problems. It is entirely
possible for an over-ferocious dad (and this happens not all that infrequently)
to push his kid's personal fear VU meters permanently into the red zone.
The youngster's cortisol and other stress hormones climb the wall all
the way into the danger range and refuse to climb down until they're
convinced things are safe or until the terrorized person dies, whichever
comes first.
If this applies
to you, you can either try coaxing your hormones down off the ceiling
or you can periodically erupt into stress-filled rages. Your choice.
If you choose to try the coaxing method, you will need to spend a surprisingly
large amount of tedious time reassuring your hormones that things are
safe now, or at least safer, and they can edge their way toward a lower
level. It may feel odd, and even ridiculous, to reassure yourself, as
if you were a three year-old with a nightmare, that all sorts of minor
things do not pose a life-threatening danger, but from the hormonal
point of view, you are the ridiculous one if you don't believe the very
definition of life is danger. So you will have to do an inordinate amount
of patient convincing, again, as if you were a dad who was actually
good at his job, until your hormones learn that you, and indeed the
rest of the world, are not as mean as your original dad was. It's a
pain the ass, but the human body is the human body, and it's really
good at being a pain in the ass when survival issues are at stake.
If you answered
d) bewilderingly incomprehensible, then your dad was completely
normal. Both your suspicions are correct. All evolutionarily correct
dads do indeed have a mental disorder known as dadness, and yes it was
in fact caused by the frequently involuntary fact that they loved you.
Consider yourself lucky to have gotten off with a thoroughly mixed bag
of hopefully mild insanity. If you ever get around to it, you can give
some thought to whether your particular dad's brand of insanity was
helpful, unhelpful, or simply strange. You can ponder the consequences
of your dad's dadness and decide whether it's worth your while to alter
any of them. Or you can not get around to it and simply subject your
own children to your particular brand of partially dad-induced insanity
and see how things work out. Most people choose the second option unless
an Important Motivation arises and forces them to dwell on Dad Issues.
Meanwhile, if you
answered e) where the fuck were you, dad? you deserve your own
page devoted entirely to your issues, which we will produce for you
later on. For the moment, let's just say that:
Dads,
missing or otherwise, who don't get the scary protection thing down
reasonably well are a serious inconvenience to their kids. If you are
such a kid, or former kid, there are certain parts of your body that
are going to hold a grudge about this, whether anyone likes it or not.
You personally may
feel that it is unseemly, uncharitable, unchristian, and just plain
embarrassing to hold a grudge against your dad for the rest of your
life just because the stupid fucking bastard wasn't around to provide
scary protection or didn't do a decent job when he was around, but there
are certain parts of your body that beg to differ. They are pissed.
They had every intention of figuring out certain vitally important things
regarding safety, risk, and protection in a relatively safe environment
and if a relatively safe environment to practice these things was not
forthcoming, they are extremely annoyed and long with an unquenchable
thirst to get their hands on one so they can figure those damn things
out like they were supposed to. They feel unfinished, they feel incomplete,
and they feel very bugged by this.
It is almost always
a real pain in the ass to be thirty-eight and carting around a poignant
yearning for the loving, protective, safe, back-watching dad with excellent
judgment and scariness skills you never had. Evolution does not design
its systems for your convenience, however, it designs them in order
to get certain vitally important survival tasks taken care of and it
quite frankly doesn't give a shit how inconvenient you might think being
all grown up and still longing for a dad is. It wants you to yearn,
and yearn you will, whether you admit it or not.
This presents a
fair number of people with an ongoing dilemma. They find themselves
reluctant to indulge the full extent of their pissed-offness at the
goddamn dad they didn't really have, because it seems sort of risky.
Furthermore, whining about that sort of thing frequently creates a very
uneasy sensation, as though one is expressing the assertion that one
believes one deserved a better dad than one got, an opinion many normal
people are inclined to think nobody else will agree with. It's a bit
embarrassing to express such an opinion and have people tell you to
shut the hell up and suck it up. Nobody really wants to hear this when
their evolutionary dad feelings are hurt, although the nature of dadness
being what it is, frequently they do. For sheer unbridled fun, a person
might as well go around announcing they're defective, not fit for human
society, and that nobody loves them. Not the best way to win a popularity
contest.
A not uncommon strategy
for dealing with this nasty state of affairs is to hang wistfully around
the edges of life, not saying anything in particular that would give
you away, hoping desperately that someone will come along and tell you
that you did, in fact, deserve a better dad and that they're very sorry
you didn't get one. Sometimes this strategy works, but often it doesn't,
at least not for an intolerably long time. So let's cut this nonsense
short.
I am here to tell
you that you did indeed deserve a better dad, one who watched your back,
and I am very sorry that you didn't get one. I am not telling you this
because I personally admire you or believe that all people are inherently
worthy or what have you. I've never met you, and for all I know, you
are actually a miserable piece of crap. That's beside the point. I didn't
make this rule up, evolution did.
Evolution has
certain requirements for suitable dadness and if you didn't get one
that protected and frightened you properly, you deserved a better one.
Period. End of story.
Anyone who doesn't
think you did can quite frankly go fuck themselves because they're wrong.
You don't need to adapt to or accept the entirely human and incredibly
widespread failings of dads around the world. What you need to do is
solve your problem, and complete the tasks your evolutionary system
has on its checklist because it is going to be in a very bad mood until
you do. You don't need to pretend it's okay, that your dad tried, or
that it isn't his fault he died, that he ditched you and your mom to
marry some whore, that he spent your life in a drunken, homicidal, child-endangering
rage or what have you. It's not okay. You've got a problem. You don't
need to forgive him for his failings and you don't need to hold a grudge
about them either. The grudge-holding mechanism is merely a place-holder
there to remind you that you've got a task on your checklist that you
haven't checked off yet.
What you actually
need to do is, when you get some spare time, identify his failings in
tedious detail, recognize with outraged intensity that you wanted something
different, repeat your realization to yourself over and over like someone
cramming for a test and then go out and secure the things you always
wanted now that you remember what they are. Compare your real dad or
lack thereof with what you actually wanted until you can identify the
difference even if woken up in the middle of night from a sound sleep;
use this information to pursue your heart's desire and then cross the
damn task off your checklist at last. The process is conceptually simple
and quite logical.
In this case, what
you wanted was to figure out certain things regarding safety, risk,
and protection in a relatively safe environment instead of having to
rely for the rest of your goddamn life on the mish-mash of habits, half-formed
ideas, and sheer anxiety you strategically developed in a relatively
unsafe environment at the age of three.
So do that. Get a relatively safe environment and cogitate deeply on
the nature of fear, risk, and desire; contemplate the realistic availability
of protection in your current situation; assess your environment; update
your inventory of strategies as if it was your wardrobe; rearrange your
favorite survival skills for convenient access; and just generally get
yourself organized.
It's a lot like
cleaning out your garage, of course you want to put it off, but you
can't deny how much you like it when it's done. The truth is, your evolutionary
system loves to be organized when it comes to shit like this, and it
will marvel blissfully at your newly cleaned garage, congratulating
itself about a million times at getting it done, announcing to you repeatedly
how happy it is now that it can park the car without running over the
trash barrels. You will love it! Avail yourself of the relatively
safe environment of your own mind, or if that is too dangerous given
its inherently unstable tendencies, then the relatively safe environment
of your marriage, your friendships, or even your damn therapist's office.
Just find some place where nobody's going to bug you and think about
this stuff until you figure it out. That's all there is to it.
You've
got your choice - do you want the GOOD DAD, the BAD DAD or the NORMALLY
FUCKED UP DAD next?
prettyfedup.com