My "Act" Redux 1

"Be a man!"

Another candidate for the "act" injunction. But this one just feels way too generic. Don't all us XYs get these messages over and over again for all of our lives? I mean really, even the damned ED medication ads imply it. Got to be part of what contributes to a national epidemic of depression and anger. If one in ten is unemployed and one in five is either unemployed or underemployed, and the ones who are men have a lifetime subscription to the messages about the relationship between their employment and their identity, it's a wonder there aren't more instances of impotent male rage in the news.

But enough with the generic.

I'm trying to remember the early years and I'm seem to get about back to five, maybe some glimpses of four. We lived in a little GI Bill bought house on Long Island. I remember hearing pretty much nightly arguments. I remember a time my mother had seen some deal about photos and took me and little sister via bus and at least a transfer or two, and everyone being frazzled and upset. You can see it in the photos that everyone had been crying at some point. The boy in those pictures is every inch the sadsack the adult sometimes later was. Another picture from almost the same time shows a smiling happy kid. It's puzzling to me sometimes. Both those little boys are still in there.

I think it is a good bet that my mother spent the years after she married my father absolutely disappointed in him. She had a little fewer than twenty years after that. A not quite casual comment by an aunt years after my mother had died seems telling, "She thought she was getting the doctor's son." I know in my teens, after she left him, I became the focus of that disappointment.

Maybe there's another injunction in there: "Don't disappoint anyone!"

And another one comes up inside of that, "Don't be wrong!" Maybe especially don't be wrong about figuring this out.

More to chew on.