The Natural Progression

As life progresses I am progressively certain that much of our life is determined in the early years of our own lives.  We live with our parents voices always over our shoulder long after they are gone.   Perhaps it is their everlasting gift or, equally possibly, their ever present revenge.  One way or another they tend to always be there in life and in death.  

I wonder how one day my voice will echo in the mind of my son.  Hopefully positively or at the very least, elicit a quiet smile.  It will probably resound mostly in my sarcasm or the stupid jokes that I make annoying and perhaps comforting in the same sentence.

My mother’s voice often echos in my mind.  It happens at so many different levels. 

Could it be that mother’s nag us more and that is why they stay with us?  Everyday at work when the cleaning women makes her way through the office she stops to clean the restrooms.  It always seems to happen at the moment I need to pee and I think she spends an excessive amount of inside, alone.  I suppose in her world it is her only privacy and typically she is ensconced listening to English lessons playing in her ear buds.  When she finally departs, I try to give the floor time to dry.  That said, there are days when I have been holding it for what seems like an eternity and I just have to go in.  As I cross the wet floor in a kind of dance, trying to avoid the most moist sections, I can hear my Mom yelling at me for walking on her freshly mopped kitchen floor.  “Patrick Laurence” she would say, her voice stern and disapproving. 

Sometimes walking in a neighborhood and spotting a few young boys I can hear her voice echoing off the hoses as she yelled out from the back porch of our Alaska home that it was time to eat.  I am one of the first people to show up in my office every day and often I will leave the lights off.  It is nice to just escape the harsh florescent light and enjoy the quiet, dark space.    Minutes will pass before in another part of the office a person will enter.  The type of person that feels like they need to make environmental decisions for everyone as they methodically switch every switch on a long panel of lights.

 “Fuck you Kevin.” I mumble as my solitude comes to an end.   I remember laying in bed as a child in the dark and cold early morning hours on a school day in Alaska.  My mother would turn on the light to my room and tell me to get up.  It was like a bolt shot through me as my eyes strained to resist the battering illumination.  If I resisted, covering my head, she would place a frozen meat package on me that she had recovered from the basement freezer for dinner.  

My mother was a public health nurse and then a school nurse.  Later in life she followed nursing with a career as a teacher of high school drop outs on their last lifeline.  She was a devout feminist and this colored her attitudes about most things.  As I grew through puberty she made sure I was fully aware of the consequences of impregnating a teenage girl long before I ever had the chance to have sex.  She didn’t just insist on condom use, it was enticement through terror of results.  This occurred long before my sexual life even started and when it did pleasure was always taking a backseat as my mother’s voice bounced around my head. It is a feeling that has stayed with me for my whole life.  Even after having a vasectomy I can still hear her voice in my mind.  In fairness to my mother, she made two terrible mistakes early in her life and she spent the remainder of her life living with the guilt and consequence. 

For a man, their legacy with their father presents its own quandary.  Father’s represent many things for a man.  They are the judge and jury in their youth and final arbitrator of punishment.  They are also a source of advice and wisdom that deeply enters a boy’s psyche as the child wants to deep in their soul to meet with their father’s approval.

This does not diminish and continues through life.  So much so that many decisions are often made by reflecting on what my father would do.  When the father does suggest something and if it runs counter the to the son’s thinking, a war breaks out inside the son’s head.  There is a deep conflict between making their own choice and the feeling of disappointing their father.  Of course on the father’s part it is just advice, an opinion and that is all.  Yet in the son’s perception this guidance holds more relevance.  We as children long to please our father’s because their approval of us is an affirmation of our worth.  

I remember almost 40 years ago sitting in a high school psychology class taught by the self aggrandizing Mr. Fleming.  I do believe Mr. Fleming has left us but during his years as a teacher he was one of those personalities that attempted to use a giving profession, teaching, as a way of buoying his own ego.  Despite this I recall Fleming instructing us how more often than not, we replicate our parents behavior.  His case examples were of course the dramatic illustrating how abused become abusers.  While miserable and spurned it was what their learned way of handling a situation and thus often adopted in their own life.   

Learned behavior is self evident in less extreme examples and as the years progress so much of our parents seems to filter out in the course of our own behavior.  I often use this reality as a means of providing comfort to someone that has lost a beloved person in their life.  As they are grieving I will tell them that the lives of the departed will live on within them and they will stay with them as they navigate the remainder of their own lives.  

I am sorry I left a foot track on your floor mom, I will try to be better next time.