a kind of grief

[brainwane]

I wish I could go back in time and tell my dad:


If you are capriciously angry, sometimes yelling, you will raise at least one child who has an incredibly hard time dealing with her own or others' anger.

If you sometimes punish your children for their bug reports, you will raise at least one child who dreads telling you when something is wrong.


Realization stimulated by reading a bunch of hilarious and often heartwarming family stories, e.g., on togetherness and "Literally nobody in my house yelled. Ever. It was a rule." which is mindboggling.

(My father died in 2010.)

Comments

[ndrosen]

“Capriciously angry, sometimes yelling [and sometimes hitting]” describes my father. I would not precisely describe myself as having an incredibly hard time dealing with my own or other people’s anger, but I certainly have a considerable capacity for anger, and had a greater propensity for it in my younger days. That, however, may be largely a matter of membership in the messed-up human race.

And yet, my father did have his virtues, and did genuinely care for me and try to do what was right for me, even if I did not sufficiently appreciate this when I was sixteen years old, and he was throwing a screaming tantrum, and threatening to kick me out of the house (in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language), all because my younger brother had broken my watch.