In Part 1, I described the six weddings we had with Carlin. The first two were with our previous spouses and the last four were with each other. After two marriages and divorces, it became clear to us that taking lifetime vows made no sense. We agreed that we would evaluate our marriage every fifteen years and make new vows that were alive for us at each new stage we entered. Thus, these explorations are entitled Love 6.0.
In the previous article, I described my parents’ early married life in New York and detailed my father’s challenges that led him to overdose on sleeping pills when I was five. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved and believed we would be better off without him. “Love Lesson #1: Our Parents Love Lives and Losses Affect Ours,” helped me make sense of my own complicated love life.
Love Lesson #2: Be real
After my father was committed to the Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital, my mother charged me with going with my uncle every Sunday to visit my father. As a dutiful son, I did as I was told, although I remember being confused and upset wondering why she didn’t visit us. When I asked why I had to leave, he simply said:
“Because your father needs you.”
I learned early to be myself mother’s brave little manto try and be a good little manand yes to be a successful caregiver for my mother and father. I also learned early that I have to suppress my own needs in order to take care of others. It took me a long time to realize that I had been assigned an impossible task and even longer to overcome my feelings that I was a failure because I could not make my father healthy and happy.
My father continued to deteriorate on the “treatment regimen” available at a state mental hospital in 1949. During one of our visits, my father turned to my uncle and asked, “Harry, who is the child you have with you?” I was devastated. I felt like all my efforts to help had failed and my father didn’t even know who I was. In my first positive act of self-care, I told my mother that I was no longer willing to visit my father.
She accepted my decision, although I felt guilty for abandoning my father. She gave herself up when doctors told her he needed more and more treatment, even as his mental health deteriorated. Eventually, she was told she might need treatment forever and my mother finally filed for divorce.
My uncle continued his weekly visits until one day my father escaped. These days, if you leave a psychiatric hospital, the staff are happy to have an open space for the next person. Then it was like escaping from prison. They took you back and when they caught you, they brought you back and locked you up again. My father never turned back and I described his healing journey and mine in my book My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family.
I was raised by a single mother who lived with the grief of lost loves. When I was 12 years old and just starting to get interested in finding a girlfriend, my mother wrote in my high school yearbook: That above all to thyself be true, And must follow, as night the day, Thou canst not be false to any man.
I thought it was a strange quote to give to a young boy. He explained that it was a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has stuck with me my whole life and its meaning has changed as I have learned more about life, love and relationships.
Over the years I have learned that this self we are supposed to be true to is an illusory presence. The answer to the questions, what am I, is not simple and seems to have multiple aspects that change with time. For me, I’ve found that writing helps me clarify my thoughts and feelings about important questions related to love and life.
In a recent article, “Never Give Up on Love: Embrace the Four Marriages That Make Life Meaningful,” I quoted author and poet David White as saying:
“Humans are creatures that belong, though they may come to this sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and solitude.’
This was certainly the case with my father who I wrote about in my first article in the Love 6.0 series and in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family.
It was also true of my mother who had a complicated love life that I learned about gradually throughout my life. It was only after she divorced my father that I learned she had been married once before as a young woman. The marriage was short lived and she moved on with my father. I also learned that my father was not the only man in her life during the time they lived in New York between 1929 and 1943 when I was born.
My father was an actor. The other man, Milton Bracker, was a young man New York Times journalist. It seemed most people were claiming my mother and she was hoping Milton would propose, but he was a bit nervous and shy and didn’t pop the question. The next day he was sent to Italy to cover one of the great battles of World War II. My father asked her to marry him and she accepted.
I was conceived and brought into the world, but I often wondered who I would have been or if Milton Bracker had been my father. Later in life, my mother remarried, another marriage that didn’t last. It wasn’t until late in life that I learned about my mother’s father, the man I was named after.
I knew he had died before I was born, but he never talked about him. Once I learned the details of his life and death, a lot became clear to me about my mother’s love life and mine. The last chapter of my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family, it was titled “Finding My Mother’s Lost Father and Healing the Wound of the Father I Never Knew I Had.”
After my mother’s death in December 1987, I had an insatiable desire to learn more about my mother’s father, John Cohn. I found out he died when my mother was five, the same age I lost my father in the mental hospital. When her dad died, my mother, her sister, Florence, and Jenny’s mother were forced to leave their home in Toledo, Ohio to move in with relatives in Savannah, Georgia. It was very traumatic for everyone.
It was clear that my mother never dealt with the loss of her father or the impact it had on her life. It definitely contributed to her own issues with love and intimacy and putting me in her shoes brave little man when I was a five-year-old boy.
In recent years, Mark Wolynn’s book, It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, it helped me see that trauma and its impact on our lives did not begin and end with what happened in my childhood. It could ripple through the generations.
One of the key language exercises that Mark Wolynn describes is finding our “key sentence,” which captures our worst fear. Mine was I am alone and forsaken and those I love will leave me and die. Even after much therapy, I always believed that the origin of these fears was from growing up with a depressed father and an anxious and hurt mother. I now understand who we are and how our trauma affects our love lives has even more complex origins that can go back generations.
Learning to be true to myself has forced me to open doors to rooms that have been closed or hidden for much of my life. Love lives are complicated. There is always more to learn and experience. I invite you to do your own exploration. I am happy to offer guidance along the way.
I look forward to your comments and questions. Drop me a note at Jed@MenAlive.com and put Love 6.0 in the subject line.
