I can’t help wanting to replay life with emotionally healthy parents

By David McElroy · December 13, 2018

When I was born, babies were kept away from families for awhile. Even the mother didn’t have a lot of time with the baby right after birth. For the most part, the babies spent their time in a nursery, separated from visitors by a huge sheet of glass.

I’m one of those babies in the nursery above. I’ve been told that I was the one on the front left, but I can’t be sure of that. The man you see reflected in the glass — the one in the short-sleeve dress shirt and tie — was my father. For days, he couldn’t hold his first-born child — and I’m told that he spent hours watching me, just like this.

My father could be a very loving man at times. Because I had to go so many years without being able to talk about his terrifying narcissistic side, you’ve heard me speak quite a bit this year — since he died in April — about the awful side of growing up with him.

But when I look at a picture like this from my baby book — with him longing to hold and love his new son — it breaks my heart, because it reminds me how much he wanted to love me and how much he wanted me to love him.

How would my life have been different if my father hadn’t suffered from narcissistic personality disorder? And how much would my life have been different if my mother hadn’t been pushed to a breakdown by his treatment of her?

When I’m able to put aside the horrible memories I have of childhood — the fear and the shame that were so much a part of my life — I can remember another side of him. I can remember when he was compassionate and loving and kind. I can remember moments of being proud of him and times of feeling love and caring for him.

When I can look past my feelings of having been abandoned by my mother — who you might remember left us for him to raise — I remember a brilliant, loving and creative soul. I remember someone who read to us tenderly and talked with us about everything under the sun. I can remember moments of feeling loved and contented.

I wonder what life might have been like if there had been more of those good moments and less of the bad. Since it’s impossible to replay the past, it’s a useless question, but it still haunts me.

In Sufjan Stevens’ brilliant album, “Carrie and Lowell,” he spends a lot of emotional energy looking back at his childhood with his dysfunctional mother, so that album really resonated with me. In the song “Should Have Known Better,” he expresses what I often feel about my thoughts about my past:

I should have known better
Nothing can be changed
The past is still the past
The bridge to nowhere

Nothing I say or do or think can change anything that happened. So why do I feel so driven to think about it?

Maybe this is ridiculous, but I think it’s because I want to get right what he got wrong. He had so much potential — as a person and as a father — but he was torn apart by emotional demons that he didn’t understand. Something happened in his family which caused him to be broken — and he never recovered. He died alone because he drove away everyone who had wanted to love him.

My father was about to turn 30 when I was born. When I look back at who I was at 30, I fear that I would have been a lousy father at the time. I hadn’t matured enough, but mostly I hadn’t come to understand what I had been through. I hadn’t dealt with my baggage. I fear that I would have been a lot like he was as a father if I had had children back then — and that makes me sad.

I always knew I wanted kids, but I never felt the time was right when I was married back then. For the sake of whatever children I might have had then, I’m glad I waited. I think something inside me knew better.

I have gone through a lot of change and growth, especially over the last 10 years. I’m not the same person I was at 30. I’ve confronted a lot of demons and seen a lot of my shortcomings. I know I would be a different father now than I would have been then. I hope I get the chance to be a father soon.

My parents both wanted to be good parents, but both of them had serious flaws. What I’ve learned is that flaws don’t mean you have to be a bad parent. They just mean you have to be mature enough to confront who you are and who the other person is — and make sure the children are in an environment conducive to their emotional health, whether that’s with the parents or without them.

I can’t relive my life with healthy parents, but I do replay how things should have been different. I will try to get right the things they got wrong. I won’t be perfect, but I hope knowing their flaws — and knowing what their flaws did to their children — can let me get right a lot of things that went very wrong in our home.

I just have to find a woman to be their mother who understands this, too, and is as committed to their emotional health as I am. Maybe that’s a fantasy, but it’s one I hope to make come true.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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