Family Ties

What happens when siblings remember their parents differently? Dad was abusive. No, he was charismatic.

The truth is, he was both. What’s different is not so much our memories, as our willingness to accept the effect he had on us.

Many of us worshiped our fathers. All the more so if they were out of the house a lot and when they were home swung between playing with us and lecturing us, sometimes with a red face and a wagging finger.

B.F. Skinner first demonstrated that inconsistent rewards produce the strongest reinforcement of behavior. If you’re never quite sure whether you will win a parent’s approval, you try all the harder for it.

That explains a lot about how young children and adolescents relate to mercurial parents. As we age, we become able to see a parent’s erratic behavior for what it is, and stop seeing it as a reflection on our own worth. We learn that parents who periodically rage at children are the ones with the problem, not the children.

But what happens if you are a child of such a parent and he dies before you have come to that mature understanding of his behavior? Your emotional response to it is frozen in the time of your adolescence. 

When your siblings say, “You know, Dad was a little crazy,” you might offer that being a little crazy is the flip side of brilliance. The adult in you cannot hide from the fact of his inappropriate behavior, but the child in you still sees it as part of his bright sun, the one you longed to be in the warmth of.

The trouble comes when a sibling tells you that he hurt him. Emotionally and physically. Or your mother tells you he hurt her, emotionally and physically.

What do you do with that information?

Impugn the source, likely as not. He was weak. She was unstable. Secretly you might even tell yourself they deserved it. They weren’t as strong as you. He didn’t love them as much as he did you. It’s wrong for them to attack his memory. He can’t fight back, so you do it for him.

Families are a separate thing from the people who make them up. They don’t exist except in relation to one another. The good memories may be there, but the bad ones always come up. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

When these dynamics are at play, it may be too hard to keep going back over the past. Nothing is solved. Old wounds are ripped open and bleed as freshly as when first inflicted.

We’ve been taught that nothing is more important than family. Maybe that’s so. But it may also be true that sometimes family is not as important as the individuals in it.