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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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How do we start over and give ourselves parenting we needed?

By David McElroy · September 18, 2019

As I looked down the long aisles of the grocery store, I felt a sense of exhilaration which I hadn’t expected.

For the first time in my life, I could buy any food I wanted. My father would never know. He would never be able to lecture me about it.

I felt giddy. I felt like a rebel. It was an emotional high that felt like dangerous freedom.

I had just moved to Tuscaloosa to start college at the University of Alabama. I was living completely on my own for the first time in my life. I didn’t realize exactly how controlled I had felt until the moment when there were suddenly no controls on me.

For many years, I associated parenting with oppressive control, because that’s the parenting I experienced. (My mother wasn’t around, so all my parenting was from my father.) I was trained to be an obedient robot. I eventually came to understand that wasn’t the healthy way to raise children, but it’s taken me longer to start understanding some of the things that are missing in me because of the unhealthy parenting I received.

At long last, I’ve realized I still need some parenting — and the only thing I can count on is “reparenting” myself.

I’m not talking about a formal kind of therapy which went by that name a few decades ago. I have in mind something broader and more informal.

You see, I got the parts of parenting related to control — the kind which is actually necessary when a child is very small and could hurt himself easily without such control — but I didn’t have those controls relaxed in gradual ways that let me start the guided process of making small mistakes and learning from them.

Instead, what I had was complete and utter control — until the day it was gone completely.

Given the severity of the control under which I grew up, it’s probably surprising that I chose — completely voluntarily — to live a very conservative personal life. I’ve never smoked or even tried alcohol. (When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the effects it had on people and decided it was a bad risk.) I don’t care for wild parties and obnoxious friends. Nobody’s ever even heard me speak a word of profanity. That’s just not a part of my vocabulary.

My father would have loved my decisions about those things, but what he wouldn’t have understood is that I made my decisions about those things in spite of his wishes, not because of them.

In other areas, I’ve always been a bit out of control. Not from the outside, of course. But because I was so controlled as a child, I have rebelled at anybody putting controls on me. Of any kind.

My aversion to control is so complete that the only times I’ve ever been happy with work have been the times when I was self-employed. If I was going to work for an idiot, it might as well be me.

But as Sam Phillips sang in an old song, “I’m not good at things that I don’t want to do.” I’m not disciplined. I’m not good at telling myself no. I’m not good at setting limits. I’m not good at a lot of the practical skills that I should have learned with a more effective parent — someone who released controls gradually and let me make small mistakes and learned as I grew up.

When I went to that grocery store to buy food for my own apartment for the first time ever — and I felt that sense of unbridled freedom — that was the beginning of my struggles with eating poorly. I weighed about 180 pounds at that point, but by the end of my first year away from home, I’d gained 20 pounds. I didn’t think that much about it, because most people go off to college and gain a bit of weight.

For me, though, it was much more. My father had always micro-managed what I ate. If he didn’t like something, we never even tried it. (For instance, I never even tasted cheese until I had a pizza in college, because at that point in his life, he said he didn’t like cheese.)

Some people express their rebellion by smoking or drinking or growing their hair out and running with wild friends. I didn’t do any of those things. I simply lost control of things I’d never learned to moderate. Including food.

My grandparents gave me that little red rocking chair you see above on my first birthday. I loved it and have held onto it all my life. That little chair is about the only thing I have left from my childhood. I’ve been saving it for years — so my own children might one day use it.

I feel as though there are a lot of really basic skills that I need to teach myself, mostly related to simple self-control.

I associate any limits with oppression, because that’s what I experienced as a child. I need to learn that some self-imposed limits aren’t about oppression but rather about loving yourself and taking care of yourself.

If I could go back to that first birthday and start teaching myself to love myself and to give myself permission to fail in small ways, I think my life could have been remarkably different in some ways.

I still have the little boy in that picture and I still have the chair. I can’t sit in it, at least not physically. But I can put myself back into that time frame and I can try to teach myself the things I would want to teach my own children.

For those of us who had dysfunctional parenting, something such as this can be good practice for learning how to teach children in the future.

So even though I can’t sit in that chair right now — and the bottom is pretty frayed even if I could — I’m going to imagine I’m that little child. I’m going to imagine I’m happily and safely in that rocker. And I’m going to pretend that I’m a loving parent. I’m going to be working on trying to have the adult part of me teach the child part of me some things which I never got to learn.

I hope I can one day learn to be as happy and self-controlled and contented as that little boy was on his first birthday. I’ll never have the parents I really needed, but I’m going to start filling in some gaps as well as I can figure out the ways to do it.

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For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to Sam. In 2009, I took in a young feral cat who I named for the early American revolutionary Samuel Adams. He was one of the most confident — downright arrogant, in fact — cats I’ve ever been around. He had an amazing personality and I immediately loved him. He was no more than 8 or 9 months old when he suddenly died for reasons that my vet couldn’t explain. Even though I had him only a short time, he was one of my all-time favorites. #tbt #cats #tabby #feral #birmingham #alabama
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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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