pg3

The past is filled with families being together, and everyone is normal. Blanket truth, I realize, but the core of the idea is correct. When I was in high school, there were no hero’s, no parents, and no clue as to how to feel. You had divorced parents, abused children, ignored sociopaths, and the hidden angels in the eyes of your friends. Friends died, disappeared, stole, moved, lied, and cheated. There were no patterns to refer to, no elders, no road-maps, and many times, the only parent that worked all day, and tried to balance the house at night was overwhelmed to do any kind of emotional or general nurturing. From here, the feelings of the child were patterned into a mold of the old; what they lacked in their family is what they would keep from their own. Not what we wanted, and not what we were looking for. If we are demanded to gain independence before we are taught properly how to feel, than we will devise our own way learn what love is, hate, denial, fury, passion, et al. That is what we did. Whenever something happened that made you cry, hurt, or angry and you did not understand why, there was not a soul in sight that could give you a clear definition of why you feel that way. You only had your friends, some chemicals to dull the confusion and enough time to talk it out.

Perhaps I was the lucky one in all those times. My parents had always been married, and believed that, in love, forever is forever. They had married young, but had a moderate courting first. In the early 60’s, it was not uncommon for people to marry young. My parents had the style of young adults raised in the 50’s, with the perfection of the universe seemingly explained, combined with the ability to grasp the enlightened thinking of their societal-younger siblings in the Oakland -San Francisco area of the early to late 60’s. My mother had an apartment in Haight-Ashberry in early '62, before it was the axis of the free world. The theory is that the person you love is a bond that does not change, no matter how much the individuals change. I was taught by my parent’s example, as they had learned it from their parents albeit in unusual paths. I always believed that the most exciting thing about a relationship was being a witness to how your love grew over the years. Like the flower that has to bloom before it dies.

My family life kept me from experiencing what all of my friends had to go through: the divorce, the separation of loving parents, the confusion of your friends who get left in the trenches of mother and lawyer against father and lawyer. Where do you turn to ask about your budding interests in how people relate to each other when the two people who raised you, the two halves of yourself, can not get along. It is not recognized that, as teens, most of us wanted to figure out what went wrong in relationships, so that we would never need to go through what our parents went through, and hauled our asses along. We never wanted our children to be raised by anyone as confused as our parents. Thank-you, baby boomers. This is a big problem to sort out when you are just starting to understand yourself. For me, someone who had a good family (not a great family by any means, but a true blessing); it was a puzzle I had to figure out for those who came to me for emotional support. Jennifer was one of them who needed my shoulder, but there were many others. Sometimes it seemed like everyone. She had the ability to feel, and I think that made all the difference in her life. For me, a shoulder to cry on was my key to having friends. Understanding why a feeling can be so consuming was my popularity. In the years of confusion that followed, I believed that my support was a two way street, until I realized that what I was having problems with were the types of things most people do not question about themselves, or their lives.