David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

psychology

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

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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.

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Midlife becomes big crisis when our self-deception stops working

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For most of my life, I was a liar.

A more charitable person might simply say I was full of delusions. Whatever you want to call it — lies, deceptions, delusions — I was full of them. The normal rules of life didn’t apply to me. I was going to be instantly successful at whatever I tried. People were going to recognize me for the superior person I was. They were going to love me, praise me, follow me, adore me.

I believed I was special. I believed others would see that.

When I was a small boy, I used to put myself to sleep every night making up stories. I was always the hero. I saved people in trouble. Other men wanted to follow me and emulate me. All the women wanted me to choose them. One of my earliest consistent stories was of rescuing a girl from a burning building. She was a classmate on whom I had a crush. After the rescue, she adored me, of course.

I grew up. I quit fantasizing about rescuing Wendy from burning buildings.

But what I didn’t realize is that the delusions didn’t go away. They grew into bigger delusions. I was still sure I was special. That faith carried me. I didn’t know the day would come when my self-deception would all come crashing down.

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Watching kids on a Friday night reminds me of struggle to belong

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The local high school football stadium is close enough to my house that I can hear the crowds cheer from my back yard on Friday nights in the fall.

I can hear the dispassionate voice of the stadium announcer saying that it’s third down and two yards to go for the Leeds Green Wave at the Elmore County 17 yard line.

I have a powerful emotional reaction to high school football. It was a big deal in the town where I went to high school and I was there for every game. The entire community seemed to be there. The stadium was always packed — and we went all the way to the state championship game during my senior year.

It wasn’t just “them” — the team — rather it was “us.”

It felt as though it was all of us, from the students and teachers all the way to the city business owners and civic leaders. Everybody was there. It was a source of pride. We were part of something bigger than just ourselves.

I’m sitting in McDonald’s late on a Friday evening watching high school kids who have just watched Leeds defeat Elmore County 33-27 — and watching them reminds me what it felt like as a 17-year-old to need to belong.

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