Semi-Adult

 "It is not really sympathetic or attractive to be actively mad at your parents after a certain age. You have to let it go at some point."

Marc Maron

I am not good at letting go. If I could let go of 50% of the things that bother me, I would be successful and comfortably retired. I'm trying. I am fucking trying. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

The parents thing is a weird one. I am no longer actively mad. Maybe because they are dead, but I'm hoping it goes deeper than that. 

I had to kiss my father's corpse when he died. That was such an odd compulsion. A man that, as far as I know, was never proud of me. A man who was not in sync with my choices in life, such as they were. A man I was uncomfortable around, always.

I don't remember crying at my mother's wake/funeral, other than to cry at the fact that my father was crying.

Maybe I was actively mad until they died. My mother died in 1994 - I was 40 years old. My father died in 1999 - I was 45 years old. If I was actively mad at those points in my life, it's pretty pathetic.

Could be, though. 

Too bad I could not find some peace with them before they died. They were my parents; they gave me a hell of a life. It was all material, though - they gave me a nightmare emotionally.

I want to blame them for all my fuckups and hangups, even in 2023 - but that is ridiculous. Shit, I have been out on my own since 1978 - you think I would have learned something by now. I have been free of them both for 24 years - am I completely unable to unravel life's mysteries? Helplessly unable to recognize and eradicate my own home-grown weaknesses and shortcomings?

Marc Maron on his parents: "It is their fault that I struggle in the ways that I do in certain areas of my life, but life does go on. How emotionally crippled you let yourself be does become a choice if you are self-aware enough. I believe it is difficult to unfuck yourself completely, but at the very least you can train yourself to act better and hope that it will take."

Makes perfect sense to me. I will never be able to completely undo the damage my parents did to my psyche, but I can evolve enough to at least be able to function as a semi-adult. 

I have seen two therapists so far. The first one told me up front that we were not going to delve into my relationship with my parents. That ended up being a waste of time.

I spoke a lot about my parents, my wife, my kids, my brother, with the most recent therapist, but we didn't go deep enough. I put her on hold a couple of months ago.

WARNING! WARNING! - I am on my own right now. Not talking to a therapist. Intimate conversation with me could be life-threatening.

I think what I need is confrontational therapy - in my face kind of shit. It is defined in this way: "the process by which a therapist provides direct, reality-oriented feedback to a client regarding the client's own thoughts, feelings or behavior."

Even that sounds white-washed - what I want is someone who will punch me in the face every time I get wimpy. I need to be broken down to be built back up.

My parents are dead.

I have to bury them.