Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves
by C. Terry Warner
Editors’ Note: Starting today, Meridian will be serializing Terry Warner’s much anticipated book which gives remarkable and unpredictable insights into human relationships and the quality of our hearts. For years, an earlier version of this book was so highly sought, that a copy center in Provo kept the draft on hand for those eager to read it. Now it has been finished and published and you can read it on Meridian.
A Day When I Lost It
Susan and I named one of our sons Matthew, which means “gift of God.” During the early months of his life I would dance around his crib in my pajamas, singing. Some of the songs I made up as I went along, some I had learned from my mother, and one my grandfather had taught me many years earlier:
Matthew, Matthew was a fine old man,
Washed his face in a frying pan,
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,
And died with a toothache in his heel.
Susan would laugh. It was the best of times.
Thirteen years later Matthew appeared one afternoon at the bathroom doorway and yelled, “When’re you going to get it fixed, huh, Dad?” The downstairs toilet had been broken for several days, which meant Matthew had to use the bathroom upstairs where I was changing the baby’s diaper.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took my time acknowledging his presence. My ears began to heat up a little. How dare he talk to his father that way?
I didn’t raise my voice. Instead I set the reeking diaper in the diaper pail and observed my son standing stiffly in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for an answer. I said, very slowly, “I am not going to answer a question put to me in that tone of voice.”
“So you’re not even going to talk to your own son, huh?”
I did not say the next thing that came into my mind, which was, “I’m not going to talk to my son until he can speak respectfully to me.” Nevertheless, he responded with a defiant “Oh yeah?” in his eyes. For a fleeting moment this reminded me of his bright eyes and spirited bearing when, at the age of nine, he sang “Wells Fargo Wagon” in the university musical. How had that charming child turned into a teenager whom, for that moment at least, I would have been happy to have out of my sight?
Summoning up my patience, I briefly considered explaining how I had tried to fix the toilet that very afternoon-but then decided he didn’t deserve the courtesy of an answer. The growing pressure of my silence was making him squirm. “Fine!” he finally exclaimed, and he huffed out the door, through the house, and down the driveway toward the Hickmans’. Probably to use their bathroom.
“Oh, brother!” I heard myself say.
Hadn’t I answered with perfect self-control? Hadn’t Matthew become even more impudent? What more can a father do when his son acts like that? I picked up the baby and told myself to forget about the whole episode.
Not half an hour later I heard Matthew talking with Susan in the laundry room. He was complaining that I was so far gone I wouldn’t even talk with my own children. Susan didn’t say anything in response-she didn’t even try to correct him! All I could hear besides Matthew’s complaints was the hum of the dryer and the clicking of the snaps on the clothes going round and round inside. Couldn’t Susan see he had her eating out of his hand?
I decided to get myself downstairs to make sure the broken toilet wasn’t overflowing. I didn’t want to give Susan and Matthew more evidence against me than they already had. On the way down I nearly tripped on a pile of clothes Matthew had left on the stairway landing. For a fleeting instant I felt like yelling, “What are these clothes doing here?”
But I didn’t yell. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, all my resentful thoughts gave way to silence. As quickly as I took my next step, I could see for the first time what I had been doing, as if light had broken through a crack in the ceiling of my mind. I had been looking upon my own son as my enemy! How could I have done that? How could I have been finding satisfaction in catching him in a fault? How could I have demeaned a person I loved so well?
I knew the conventional wisdom-you need to come down hard on a boy who acts defiantly, not let him get away with it, give him a swift kick in the pants, take away his privileges. But had I done any of those things, I would have felt even worse than I did. The truth that mattered was not that he had been mistreating me-perhaps he had, but that’s not what stopped me in my tracks. The truth that mattered was that I had been mistreating him.
How Could This Have Happened?
Matthew had been a toddler when his sister Emily was born. While Susan was in the hospital, he and I had gone everywhere together and had become perfect friends. No one had ever looked at me more knowingly. We played in the afternoon when I was supposed to be preparing for my classes and did errands in the early evening as long as the Spring light lasted. We were easy and generous with one another. Though only one year old, he understood everything.
Why wasn’t I easy and generous now? Why hadn’t I put my arm around my son and admitted how inept I am with mechanical devices? I could have asked him to help me figure out how to fix the toilet; we might have done it together. I could have apologized for my bad feelings. I had often seen others defuse tense situations in just this way and had even done so myself at other times. Why had I been so quick to take offense this time?
Never mind about Matthew’s clothes cluttering the landing. I was tripping over truths about myself that lay strewn all around my memory. My thoughts and words in the bathroom had been mean and petty. I had congratulated myself for not yelling at Matthew, but hadn’t my pious scorn and silence put him down as ruthlessly as a slap in the face?
If only I had responded differently to him, he would have responded differently to me. I knew this.
The more I reflected on my history with my son, the more those truths disturbed and disheartened me. They reminded me how much lighter and finer and happier things could be between us. They showed me how much of what I prized most in life I had lost.
I could only ask, How could I have fallen so far? Why had I made myself so unhappy?
I could not answer these questions. I only knew that somehow, as I had gained in life experience, I had declined in sensitivity and wisdom. If the episode in the bathroom was any indication, I had grown temperamental and petty. Getting older had made me less mature. I had actually believed that if things were ever going to be right between Matthew and me again, it was he who needed to change, not I. This wasn’t the truth; I was the one who had to change. Why would I, an apparently intelligent and well-adjusted man, mistreat the boy I loved and make myself unhappy in the process? How could the life I had shared with this boy have lost its sweetness?
Memories of the experiences that had imparted that sweetness made the exchange with Matthew all the more grim by comparison. I was capable of so much better. The more I thought about my better possibilities, the more sorrowful I became. I had failed to be the person I knew myself capable of being-the person I am when I feel most whole and alive and in harmony with myself.
Nothing in my experience has been a greater source of sadness than this discrepancy, this distance, between the person I am when I am true to what I know to be right and the person I become when I am not.
Troubled Feelings-the Universal Affliction
We have all had experiences like mine with Matthew. We have felt hurt or provoked or upset by the people around us-angry, for instance. Or resentful. Or envious. Or intimidated. Or fearful. Or humiliated. Or disgusted by something done to us. We feel helpless to rid ourselves of these feelings.
We don’t rid ourselves of this sense of helplessness by trying to ignore the supposed offenses of others or attempting to distract ourselves from our feelings. The unfairness, indifference, disrespect, rudeness, or cruelty troubles us through and through-sometimes only faintly but always unmistakably. The pain, which is real, seeps into and taints every sector of life. Unclouded happiness seems impossible.
Everyone who has ever been stuck in such troubled thoughts and feelings knows how they make a shambles of our inner lives. A “gas law” of emotional disturbance operates here, which might be formulated as follows: “Any inner space, no matter how large, will be filled by any agitation, no matter how small.” The feelings that we blame on others, and that seem to ruin everything, rudely refuse to be evicted once they take up residence in us. Even though we retreat to the bedroom and lock the door, figuratively speaking, we sleep in terror, knowing those feelings are somewhere wandering about in the house. Families who live on strained terms discover that their impatience and frustration contaminate every project they undertake, whatever the setting- cooking in the kitchen, repairing something in the workshop, reading in the bedroom, even trying to play a game together. It is difficult to overestimate the corrosive power of agitated feelings.
A Few Examples
I cannot help thinking of individuals I know who have struggled under the oppressive weight of some negative, troubled emotion or attitude. Their problems range from everyday unhappiness to what clinicians would call pathologies. No doubt you can also think of people you know-or of yourself. Keep in mind that this condition is as common as breathing air. Each of us, to one degree or another, deals with troubled thoughts and feelings.
A homeowner constantly critical of everyone in the neighborhood;
A schoolgirl envious of her more popular classmates;
An office worker who gets passed over for promotion because she’s constantly down on herself;
A family member who refuses to do his part of the household chores and complains against those who press him to help;
A teacher who belittles his students if they don’t answer his questions to his satisfaction;
A woman who nags her husband;
A businessman preoccupied with his appearance and possessions and overanxious to impress.
When such ordinary people are described in a little more detail we can see that some of them live with considerable frustration, disappointment, or pain.
I recall Mandy, for example. Her father, a construction supervisor, had died of a stroke when she was fourteen. When she was a little girl, he had always worked long hours, often on jobs far away. He took Mandy’s older brother, Jeddy, with him on school holidays. Her mother encouraged it because “the boy needs his father’s influence.” When little Mandy asked to go, her father would say, “Not a good place for girls.” In the summer he would get away overnight for hunting or fishing, sometimes with a friend and usually with her brother. But he’d say to Mandy, “You’re too little,” or “I need Jeddy to clean the fish.” About the time Mandy turned ten her little sister, Nessie, was born, and her father was promoted and didn’t have to leave the house so early or work so late. He would throw Nessie in the air and crawl around with her and kiss her good night; when Mandy tried to kiss him, he said, “You’re too old for that.” As she grew in years she would feel “down” for long periods, and at those times especially it would take very little to make her feel rejected. If someone didn’t give her full attention, she would try to get out of the situation as quickly as she could. At those times, she said, her resentment over being rejected would glow in her like hot coals. She would often brood about what her father had done to her.
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Another person I think about is Norm, a successful business owner with great drive and energy. He controlled his costs and his people with equal impatience. It did not surprise me to learn that his inner life was blighted by troubled relationships with his chief lieutenants. Despite his power, Norm could not find a way to make his employees more committed and cooperative, and he carried his aggravation home from the office every night. “I haven’t really been with my wife for nearly a year,” he told me. “When we go to bed she reads and I just lie there and stare at the ceiling and relive my frustrations.”
I got to know Ruel not too long after he took a job in sales, thinking he might be able to break out of a pattern of “bad luck” in trying to find a job at which he could be successful. After receiving his training, he didn’t immediately get himself out the door to make sales calls. Instead, he spent his days listening to motivational tapes-getting prepared, he told himself, so that he could succeed when he did go. On the surface he appeared cheerful enough, but as I got to know him I discovered him to be preoccupied with wounded feelings and discouraged thoughts-the customers would be unreceptive; the manufacturer had done a poor job on the product and it would be hard to sell; his own family and life circumstances had not prepared him properly to get on in the world successfully.
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Victoria had reared her two now-teenage children in an authoritarian and controlling spirit. They had become touchy and belligerent-so much so, she said, that “they wouldn’t listen to me on anything. I couldn’t control them anymore. I had no idea where to start getting our household into order-I didn’t even know how to talk to them.” She felt completely stymied.
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You get the idea. I am not focusing on the emotional and attitudinal problems of unusual people, different from the rest of us. I’m talking about troubles that belong in some form and at some time to just about all of us, the kind of troubles that we worry and talk about in our families and with our confidants or that we’re ashamed to admit to anyone.
In the next segment, we will see how we get “stuck” in negative emotions, and how the way out may be an unexpected one.
2001 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
