Dad, You Were Wrong. Every generation goes thru a trauma. It’s called “parents”.
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In recent years, the United States has been sensitized to “psychological child abuse” via, among other things, PSA’s (public service announcements, those noncommercial “commercials” for various good causes that the networks tend to put on late at nite) which show professional actors saying terrible things to the camera as if speaking to their children: ‘You good-for-nothing, I wish you were never born.’ Most people in normal families have heard such things. Many have said them. There are some things you can’t take back, try tho you might.
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I did not grow up in an abusive family, but the negative things your parents and older siblings say can adversely affect your self-conception and impact your life for decades anyway. Fortunately, the positive things they say can also impact your life. Still, the more things sting, the more they impress themselves upon the personality. 100 encouragements and compliments can be undone by 1 vicious condemnation hurled in anger.
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I am a nite person. My father was a day person. That set us up for many conflicts. He wanted me to do things, like plant tulip bulbs, in the morning. I was perfectly happy to help him plant bulbs, found the process really interesting, and looked forward to the results the following spring, but I didn’t see why we couldn’t do it in the afternoon! (Indeed, in my own yard, I have planted hundreds of bulbs, but in the afternoon, and even into the evening.)
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My days were as long as his, but started later (and ended later). He didn’t see the end of my day, so assumed that my late start meant I was oversleeping: “lazy” — and told me so.
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I have a tendency to procrastination, as have most other people, but that’s an entirely different matter from laziness. (A kid never really accepts that his faults are the same as most other people’s faults.) The distinction between procrastination and laziness may thus not be clear to a kid.
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Even rejecting 90% or more of such parental or sibling criticisms, a child does accept some fraction of those criticisms and incorporates it into his or her self-image. So I grew up thinking I was lazy — well, lazier than I should have been, lazier than other people.
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Boy, was that wrong!
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In general, from the instant I get up I am working, in the house, on the computer, getting ready for work, driving to work (and sometimes taking pictures out the window of my car at stoplites), working, driving home from work, feeding the cats, feeding the fish, making dinner, going to the supermarket, cleaning, doing the laundry, paying bills — task after task after task, sometimes doing more than one thing at a time (multitasking) such that while the washing machine is running, I’m washing dishes, reviewing the mail, making dinner; or I’m eating dinner while watching the news and making notes for my blogs (this one and “Newark USA”) or for my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website and other things I need to do later.
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I’m a perfect example of the key failure of modern American society. We have gone backward in human evolution, back from specialization. It used to be that the various functions of life were distributed among specialists. One person in a group would do the hunting (or manufacturing), another the cooking and cleaning, another raise the children and take care of the livestock and pets.
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In the typical middle-class American household in the 1950s, a part-time housekeeper came in a few times a week to help with the cooking and cleaning, laundry and mending. (Remember mending? We used to repair things, like rips in socks and pants, rather than go out and buy replacements.) We today have deluded ourselves that we don’t need that kind of help anymore, thanks to “labor-saving devices”. But some “labor-saving devices”, like the personal computer, make more work!
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Nonetheless, we have dismissed all our “help” on the assumption that we don’t need (or, we persuade ourselves, can’t afford) “help”, and must now do everything ourselves. We don’t have time enuf. So things don’t get done, or do get done, but crappily. The house is almost clean. Our email correspondence is almost current. The cats have dry food if you can’t get to feeding them canned food when they expect it. The fish can swim in cloudy water one day more. The plants will survive without water until tomorrow. It might rain, anyway, and you’d feel pretty silly getting out the hose to water down the flowers and evergreens just to have it rain overnite, wouldn’t you?
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We’re also ashamed to admit that we can’t “do it all”. We’re too ashamed to hire a cleaning lady — or cleaning CREW — because we “should” be able to keep our house clean ourselves, and having a filthy house, or dirty house, or even just slightly rumpled house, is a disgrace. We can’t call in anyone to clean unless we’ve already cleaned up a bit ourselves. Yes, we know they’re coming to clean, but — so much? What will they think of me?
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The “can’t afford cleaning help” claim may actually just be an excuse and self-reproach: I shouldn’t spend money on something I can perfectly well do myself. But you CAN’T, Blanche, you can’t! (That’s a reference to a famous scene in the 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane in which Joan Crawford (in real life, the abusive mother of the biobook Mommy Dearest) says, ‘If only I could get out of this wheelchair’, and Bette Davis, her vicious sister, says, triumphantly, “But you can’t, Blanche, you can’t!”)
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Who, in 1950, would have thought that a computer in the house would become an absolute necessity? That you couldn’t write a letter or check the news or figure and file your taxes without a complicated electronic device? And who’d have thought that so much of your time could be eaten up by a “labor-saving device” that takes the place of a CORRECTING typewriter and calculator and postage meter and even in-home(!) copier? That could send a chatty note to all your friends and family at the push of a button? That could find the most convenient store that has the particular product you want, at an acceptable price, and print directions, with maps, from your own desk or tabletop? And who’d have thought that finding that store, comparing brands and specifications, and checking prices could take so much TIME?!?
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The time I spend at my home computers (desktop and, recently, notebook) can add up massively. I created a “Log” directory to keep track of how much time I spend on each computer, and almost all my time on any computer is work.
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I have five sets of “Start” and “End” files in WordPerfect, which I “Save” to imprint a time. This gives me a directory list (in the “Details” view) that shows, e.g., “1-end.wpd” immediately above “1-start.wpd”, so I can subtract to see how much time I have spent online. Most workdays, it’s at least an hour and a half, in addition to my full-time job, much of which is spent working on a computer. Sometimes it is, cumulatively, in various sessions, 4 and more hours in addition to my full-time job. On weekends, it can run 14 hours a day, unless I’m out at stores or doing yardwork or tidying up the house.
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I backed up all my webpages recently and found that I have 152 of them, some of which are notes and mockups, but at least 130 of which are substantive pages open to public view: bare text, illustrated text (mostly with my own fotos), or foto galleries.
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If I were to try to put a figure on how long each page took to create, from conception, to drafting and redrafting, to finalization, to putting in the HTML code, to selecting the illustrations, to calling them up in a graphics program to crop them and fix the briteness and focus, to adding a counter, connecting to the server, uploading them, and reviewing them — then fixing anything that didn’t look right — it could vary from perhaps three hours for the simplest to 25 hours for the more complicated pages — even more.
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One page alone, “Letters from the Chairman” (of the Expansionist Party of the United States), warns visitors:

This is a very large file (over 650,000 bytes [for the text alone]), but the text should load fairly quickly. The illustrations (about 115 different photos, flags, etc.) will take a bit longer. A printed copy of this file will run over 150 pages!

Each of those letters was individually composed, so it is impossible to approximate how much time it took simply to write all 181 letters on that page.
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Would my father have accepted all the work that went into creating these 152 webpages — writing all those hundreds of thousands of words and finding, fixing, and placing those hundreds and hundreds of graphics — as “work”?
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Or was “work” for him tied so inseparably to “is what you are paid for” that my “efforts” would not have counted as “work”?
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Well, they count as “work” for me.
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I’m thus amazed how wrong my father was — and how long I believed he was right — despite what should have been the evidence of my own experience (but wasn’t).

Living and doing are usually so self-consuming that one generally just doesn’t have time to look back. Which is why we ourselves make many of the same mistakes our parents made — and reproach ourselves when we hear what comes out of our mouth. When the very worst things come out of our mouth, we need to apologize PROFUSELY — and hope the apology, and not the initial, ill-considered or not-at-all-considered words, is what prevails.
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Parents say so many things to their children, over so many years. They cannot know which are the worst, which are the best. We may need to tell them.
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Then again, maybe we need not hurt them by pointing out the unintended hurts they did us, and instead learn from their mistakes not to make the same kinds of mindless, cruel comments to others.
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My father died a decade and more ago, at 79. My mother died last year, at 90, prematurely, due to a medical mistake. That’s right: prematurely. She was bowling in a league only weeks before she died. I cannot tell them anything.
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Consider what you need to tell your parents, before you can’t. Consider too what you could tell them but shouldn’t.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:51 AM