Living My Father’s Regret, Part 1

The nurse asked me to step out of the thirteenth floor hospital room so my mother could get some intimate care which family was not suppose to see.   I complied locating a lounge on the same floor in the Brooklyn Veterans Affairs Hospital.  Directly across from the lounge door was a wall full of wide windows opening onto the expanse of Gravesend Bay, New York Harbor channel and New Jersey.  I saw a tanker ship in the Bay at anchor near the channel, another tanker steaming in the channel outbound and a smaller cargo freighter coming in.  As I followed the moving ships feelings of regret for many water borne paths not taken rose with as much awe as the vista itself. 

Over many of my older adult years I’ve wondered what it was that prevented me as a young man from following the strong urge to go to sea.  There were opportunities, or at least the prospect of possibilities, but they were never realized.  Certainly my father, a New York City high school English teacher, had a lot to do with it.  But, still I was an individual, not an appendage to the man’s body, although there were times I felt more that way then being my own person.  So, what was it that prevented me from going down to the sea?

Certainly, I was born to the water.  My earliest memories are ones where I am in the bath tub staying underwater so long that my mother would have to be sure I was alright, which at the tender age I was then was not an embarrassment to me.  I had a fleet of boats I would sail all about the bath water surface until my skin wrinkled.   In the nursery school’s kiddy pool my best friend and I would play tug boat and ship where we would take turns being the tug and being the ship and where one being the tug would guide with his head the other being the ship to his proper docking space.  We played tug and ship for as long as we were allowed in the pool for as many times as we were in the pool.  Where we lived during this time my father and I were able to frequently go bike riding along a wide promenade curving the ark of Gravesend Bay seeing tugs, barges, boats and ships of all sizes and types as we road and stopped to rest. 

Even when we moved to a different part of Brooklyn, we were not far from the water.  We lived in comfortable walking distance to

Shore Road

, the stretch of street, parks and ball fields along and below a ridge of the Brooklyn side of the Narrows, the Narrows being the New York Harbor passage between Brooklyn and Staten Island.  When my friends and I went to

Shore Road

to play ball with our little league or amongst ourselves or against friends from other blocks we were playing just feet from the water.   I must admit, I was far more interested in what was going on in the water, with all the ship traffic, than I was in anticipating my turn at bat or the play in the field.

At age thirteen at summer camp I discovered scuba diving!  And that was duck to water!  Indeed, it was the fulfillment of the play in the bath tub; this time I could stay underwater breathing for as long as the scuba tank allowed and not have to worry that my mother would stop me from this pleasure.  And since we didn’t go any deeper than about twenty feet, we could stay down a long, long time which we did.  I knew then what I wanted to do for all my life:  to work underwater either as a U.S. Navy diver or as a commercial diver.  But, my father having other ideas while allowing me to take scuba training, slammed the door on either career saying that scuba was only something for recreation and working underwater was not a suitable career for me, period.  I was a dutiful son and complied.  In fact once I finished being a camper at age sixteen, I gave up scuba until my own son became interested in it when he was a teen-ager and then I went on to become an instructor.

Actually, my father wanted me to be a scholar-officer in the U.S. military, something which he regretted not being himself although he had the opportunity.  He was in the Army during W.W. II, had taken and passed an entrance test to the U.S. Military Academy but ultimately rejected the opportunity.  Now, he wanted me to do what he forswore.  Which branch of the Armed Forces didn’t matter, so, being that I was water-borne I thought to go Navy, which, if all worked out the way I wanted it to, I could be a Navy diver after all.  But, his insistence on my going in as an officer required me to go directly to college, especially one of the fedeal service academies, from high school, which I really didn’t want to do.  I definitely had the brains for college work, even the tough service schools, but the interest for things academic just wasn’t there having spent four years being academic and being frustrated in being unable to stretch my mind-there is a big difference between being intellectual exercising one’s cognitive abilities pondering the questions aroused by ones reading and by one’s teachers and being academic having to memorize for ready recall in those specific ways schooling imposes the factoids of subject content.  I loved the learned conversation and hated the memorization. But I acquiesced and translated all this angst into an application to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, which would have definitely put me on the water, if not under it.  I received the Congressional nomination, but not the appointment.  I had alternately applied to the State University of New York Maritime College where I was accepted and started with a program for incoming freshmen-fourth classman as the military school called them-in July, 1966.

Well, when one is uninterested enough in a thing, one should not have to wonder too long or too deeply about the reasons for a rebellion against what one is feeling forced to do.  While I decidedly enjoyed, and was successful in, the military aspects of the Maritime College experience and even more the seamanship I was learning, the academic nature of the exercise was just way too much at the time.  I rebelled by doing so little academic work that I had to leave by the end of the first year.  And here I begin to understand a part of the answer to my question:  I was living my father’s life, not my own.  I was putting my love of the sea into a framework constructed by my father’s regrets.  Being a dutiful and loving son I could do no less than to do as requested by him, but in the end it built a barrier too high for me to scale on the way down to the sea.

A Lever Long Enough Can Move The Globe But It Takes a Different Kind To Work Through Depression

Chomping down the entire one pound bag of pretzel nuggets took most of the day, Wednesday, as I snacked my way from early morning until late afternoon.  I was trying, and failing, to “catch the bear”, so I could go on-line to locate information for my alternative school project. The immediate project chore on which I am to be working might best be described as a Bullet Point Need Statement.  It is to consist of a targeted population of children, in hard numbers, from which the school is to draw, reasons present schooling of the population is not meeting the needs of the population and reasons my school design would meet those needs.  Now, the targeted population for my project is Special Needs; thus the Need Statement is to have the hard numbers representing the entire Special Needs population of the New York City, a break down of those being served by present public and private placements throughout the City and those who are not being served in any way at all and of disability, disorder and disturbance so it can be argued more specifically on how each disability, disorder and disturbance is being mis-educated and then for me to be able to argue the reverse for my school.  Unfortunately, these numbers are not easily come by as at the moment I am unaware of any group which collects them and the City’s Department of Education guards very jealously such information.  Besides, the total number of Special Needs children in NYC may be a number which does not exist anywhere.  Yet, it is possible that with some time on-line I might generate leads on where I could get such information or, jump for joy, the information itself.  But, I am required to take the step of going on-line for this purpose, and I am balking, big time, at doing this. 

About seventeen years ago there was this colleague, a professor of far greater import than I, who had been fighting all sorts of demons for almost as long as I was at the time.  He told me of a “lever” which moved his emotional predisposition to action from paralysis to action, and as one should understand, a positive emotional predisposition is the key motivator to all self-actualization.  He said, paraphrasing, I feed the bear, order him to leave me alone and then I can get on with what I want to get done.  Now, we’re not talking copious amounts of comfort food:  he was talking a handful of grapes, a single Navel orange, a big Delicious apple.  However, I have taken to things like pretzels, ice cream or cookies.  While it certainly would be healthier eating fruit, it is the self-actualizing step, the voluntary act of eating, feeling the pleasure and fulfillment of the action, and of the food itself, which re-sets the emotional predisposition, which releases the paralysis. And, naturally, it is eating in proper proportions, such as a small handful of pretzels, four ounces of ice cream or four to six cookies which makes the difference between a lever and an act of self-sabotage.

I explain how the lever works though my sideways understanding of Freud’s psychology of Superego, Ego and Id where I substitute the concept of Parent for Superego, of Adult for Ego and of Kid for Id-where the Kid is divided into the Playful Kid, well adjusted, reacting appropriately, etc., and the Bent Kid, maladjusted, vengeful, over-reacting, etc.  The Parent is filled with all the pre-and proscriptions of authority.  The Adult is largely goal oriented, logical, deliberative, interpreting the world in proper perspective.  The Kid is full of impulses, instincts, intuitions, positive and negative-of course, the positive belong to the Playful Kid and the negative belong to the Bent Kid.  

Behavioral paralysis, the inability to do those actions one wishes to do, is a consequence of the interaction of Adult, Parent and Bent Kid.  The Adult proposes an action which the Parent assigns as a pre-or proscribed behavior, a should or should not, a must or must not.  Once the Parent defines an Adult action, the Bent Kid opposes it as the Bent Kid opposes all Parental authority.  In the conflict between the Parent and the Bent Kid, the Kid triumphs, causing no action, or, worse, a self-sabotaging behavior, either way making the Parent impotent voiding the intended action.

The idea behind the eating lever is to generate the Playful Kid feeling of self-actualized pleasure from a range of food associated with pleasure to replace the Bent Kid feeling of vengeance stirred by the opposition to the Parent.  Once the Playful Kid feeling takes over, the combined food pleasure and satisfaction of the self-actualized step, the Adult is enabled to put into proper perspective the Parental pre-or proscription, that is, weighing pros and cons in light of the action’s goals, which has the effect of breaking the paralysis and precipitating action.  So, with a handful of pretzels purposely taken as a lever I can tell the bear to leave me alone, and get on with my school project chore.

However, in the presence of Depression, the lever works but less often.  As was said to me by another friend, “Sometimes you get the bear; but sometimes the bear gets you.”  Unfortunately, in Depression, the bear gets me far more frequently than I get it.  Yet, I try whatever lever I can which might catch the bear.  And I thought Wednesday, that with a handful of pretzels, I could tell the bear, the Bent Kid, to leave me alone and I could get on to what I wanted to do.  Well, that day, the bear, the Bent Kid, got me, and instead of generating pleasure and self-actualizing satisfaction, the Playful Kid feelings, the Depression kept on feeding me more of the Bent Kid’s vengeance which I expressed by continuously going back to the bag of pretzels and just as continuously balking at going on-line for the required information.  So, I never did go on-line for the information.

However, today I am not entirely paralyzed in that there are some activities my psychodynamic and Depression will allow me to do. Within the spectrum of what I want to do there are many actions including writing this post.  What I call the trade-off lever gives me permission to do what I can, which if done with some frequency elevates a sense of personal power, the recognition I actually can get accomplished what I set out to do, and increases the “can do” spectrum, perhaps to include my on-line project research.   So, now, I’ve “traded off” doing the specific school project chore to talk about the personal struggle of doing the chore.  And, I suspect, I will be “trading off” further as I relate the history of the project in blog posts to come.  And in so doing I will be not only telling my story, but also I will be re-setting my emotional predisposition sufficiently to occasionally chip away at the research, and at other elements of the school project itself. 

In the end, which ever lever is working, at least I will be getting work done and, after all, getting something accomplished to someone suffering Depression is a big deal, a definite sign of moving in the right direction and of sustained movement out of the deep psychic hole.