All Is Not Forgotten(27)
I have to tell you that I felt proud of Tom. I have mentioned his anemic ego, as well as his deference to his stronger-willed wife. Anytime I see that dynamic in a relationship, I am compelled to investigate the subject’s childhood. My findings are not uniform, but they do tend toward a finite group of childhood experiences. Tom was no exception. I have named his type of childhood “misguided intellectualism.”
If you are a parent, I’m sure your eye catches the latest fad parenting book on the bookstore shelf or popping up on your Amazon page along with every other thing the headless beast knows you need. Wrinkle cream, hair-loss gel, diet plans, Cialis. I have had more than a few good laughs comparing pop-up ads with friends at dinner parties. One of my friends is named Kerry. He’s a man, but the Internet won’t believe it. You can imagine the folly that results. Reading parenting books—and all self-help books, as far as I’m concerned—is the equivalent of learning math from a dog. They should be gathered and burned. Every last one.
Tom’s parents are educators and intellectuals. His father taught literature at Connecticut College for thirty years. His mother worked in the alumni office. They lived and breathed academia and prided themselves on being learned. This translated into everything they did and everything they were. Much of it was benign, or perhaps even beneficial for Tom and his younger sister, Kathy. Their vacations consisted of family camping trips. They were not allowed to watch television without supervision, and only on the weekends. You can imagine the dullness of the permitted content. They were required to read ten books every summer and did not attend camp. There were no sleepovers, strict curfews, and church every Sunday, although religion was discussed in terms of theory and sociology rather than passion and faith. Everything was evaluated and analyzed, stripped of the emotional influences that could lead to the belief of an untruth, or a misguided course of action. You have known people like this. For those less disciplined, they evoke the urge to shake them senseless until some emotion is set free. They seem inhuman, even in the presence of their extremely good behavior.
What did this mean for Tom? When he brought home straight A’s on his report card, there was no elation, no hugs and kisses and calls to grandparents. There were no quarters handed out for his piggy bank or extra dessert or a pass on piano practice. The paper was not hung on the refrigerator. No—it was evaluated and discussed, and Tom was reminded that his grades were a reflection of his hard work and that he should not come to think he was somehow better or smarter than anyone else. And when he sang in the school play or hit a sloppy single at his Little League game or produced a painted clay animal from art class that only slightly resembled a giraffe—everything Tom ever did was given a dispassionate and honest review. You sounded a little off-key in the second chorus, Tom. You had a little luck getting to first, Tom—don’t think it will happen again, you need to practice more. Well, it sure looks like you had fun making this thing.
Yes—exactly. They were ahead of their time, weren’t they? Ahead of the parenting advice that has been shoved down our throats in the last decade. We shouldn’t be proud of our children; they should be proud of themselves. We shouldn’t give false praise, because they will stop trusting our opinions. We shouldn’t send them into the world thinking they are better than they are. This will only lead to disappointment. True self-confidence comes only from truthful parenting.
I have been an outlier in my rejection of these absurdities.
We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy. Yes, we will come to learn that our clay giraffes were not masterly. But when we pull them out of our attics, they should make us cry, knowing that when our parents saw these ugly pieces of plaster, they felt ridiculously misplaced pride, and they wanted to hug us until our bones hurt. This is what we need from our parents, more than the truth about how small we are. We will have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.
It is not surprising to me that Tom felt small and acted small. Or that he married a woman who made him feel small and worked for a boss who treated him like a small man. It is our destiny to re-create our childhoods in our adult lives. Then we wonder why we’re not happy. This is why I have a nice house and drive a nice car.
What I came to admire in Tom was that he did love his children beyond reason. And while he subconsciously chose to subject his own ego to ongoing degradation, he did not do the same with Jenny and Lucas. His instinct to show them how much they filled his heart had not been beaten out of him. Nor had it been injured by Jenny’s rape and attempted suicide. In my mind, when I picture Tom at home, I see balls being thrown and caught, video games, laughter. He does all this with a clenched jaw and a broken heart. But he does it.
To this end, Tom was not anywhere reasonable when it came to finding his daughter’s rapist. In spite of his guilt after the attempted suicide and the reconstructed reality he created, Tom never let up. He may have persisted with less conviction or a lowered emotional attachment to the process as he was lulled into believing that his wife was right about Jenny’s recovery and the need to “move on,” but he did persist. As far as anyone in the town could detect, Fairview remained fully committed to finding Jenny’s attacker, and the reports about blue sedans came in nearly every month.