Half my life ago I moved out of my parents house and into an apartment. The apartment was small and I had a room-mate, but for the most part it was cool and a new phase of my life began. My parents told me I wouldn’t last three months. Well, they’re dead I still haven’t moved back in with them. Sorry mom, sorry dad, you just were not suitable room mates. Not like the one I had was, but at least he didn’t pry into my business.

For the longest time all I got from my parents was preparation for failure. I was never let loose to try to fly; I was kept safe and secure and hidden from the world. Example: I do not remember the exact circumstances, but once this guy followed me home from work, someone cut someone else off while drive or something, universal gestures were exchanged and tempers flared. Well, like I said he followed me home and I went in to get a bat to beat the shit out of this asshole. Well he was waiting outside with a tire iron; it was going to get messy. At this point my parent intercepted me and I never did leave the house. The idiot finally left and that was that. There I was with a good head of steam and no one to beat the hell out of. In any case, maybe I would have beat this guy, maybe he would have handed my hat to me, but the point was I needed to get into that fight for nothing other than my own dignity. I was prevented and I have never forgiven my parents for it. I understand why they did what they did, they did not want to see their 17 year old son beat the hell out of anyone or be beaten to a pulp. Sure, I understand that, but they did not understand the crisis of dignity I was working through internally, even though I told them at the time I had to go out there. Did they listen? Nope, and I have never forgiven them.

My favorite author, Robert Heinlein, had a term for these situations which he explained as a Martian concept. I was at a “cusp” and correct action was required. When a young Martian needed help for big decisions it would consult an adult or elder Martian. However, when a young Martian made its first right action at a cusp all on it own without consultation it was then considered an adult and worthy of judging rightly at cusps. This incident was a cusp where I judged rightly for myself, I understood the implications of my decision but was not permitted to use my judgment to grow and become an adult. Seems logical to me, and it would explain why I was so affected by the incident.

That brings me to my haunting. Here is the dream that seems to be on random / repeat in my subconscious:

I seem to be out of the house, but not really out if you follow me. Out, another building, but still my parents are around. I am working hard at this point. I work many hours and when I come home I work some more. I have set up an elaborate work station for myself to help me deal with all the demands I have placed on myself. It is an efficient and working machine, even in some sense relaxing and in fact cool to look at. One day I come home and it is gone, all the work I have done is disassembled and neatly put into drawers along with my t-shirts. I am devastated, all that work shot down in one day. A set up that took a long time to perfect and balance was gone. I ask my parents where all my work had gone and I get the response “We put it away, it was too messy”. At this point I feel literally sick to my stomach, there is an acrid smell and my world spins. I finally get up when my dad starts calling me a baby and to get over it like a man. At this point I become enraged and proceed to chew him out for being the failure of a father he was and that he should not be casting aspersions since his dream was to become and engineer and his father forced him into a life as a pharmacist, something he regretted all his life. I railed on him that he never grew up and in his gutless life was too afraid to consider a life beyond what his admittedly tyrannical father told him to do. He was a man, out of the army and still he let his father make his decisions. I beat him with his failures till he drops. Then there is my mother watching, and I start the same on her. Her big thing is “We always supported you, always wanted the best for you”. I scream at her all the times that she got what she wanted and where I was not a consideration. From being promised a good college education, being excepted into a world class art institute (this is true, I was accepted to Otis/Parsons in Paris / New York / Santa Monica) and having that ripped away because they had to go on an Alaskan cruise to simple things like letting my private mail remain private. The fact that they only accepted me when I was becoming successful in the jobs I was holding seemed to them that they had done a good job and it really was not me at all but their incredible parenting skills. You see they would tell everyone how proud they were of me except me. I never got praise from them for anything, only a set up for failure. Too cautious was the mantra of our house. Don’t get your hopes up. Is there a better less risky path to take? Don’t get hurt, it doesn’t do a thing. BUT I NEEDED TO GET MY ASS KICKED.

So here I am being haunted by a pair of scared and cowardly specters. Maybe, just maybe if I beat them up enough they will go away. Now I know what all you Freudians will say, I am overcompensating for my own failures and that two dead parents are easy targets. I have to face myself for what I am. But here is the hitch, my parents really were as I described, and I know that. They bare a large part of who I am and the way I face things and shade my decisions all the time. They were wrong, they did not need to shelter me as much as they did, and they should have let life teach me a few lessons early on.

So maybe this is an exercise for me, to put in writing what I wanted to tell my dead parents, what I could never tell them in life because a son does not say those things to dying parents. Things I have known for years but kept inside because when it all came down to it I wanted to be the good son, but get this, I never did what I could for them for fear of failing at it and letting them down. How screwed up is that. In an odd sense it is an ironic twist on them. But it was how messed up I was in regard to my parents. So I write this as a cathartic endeavor to rid myself of their lingering influence.

Obviously I could write a whole lot more on this subject, but how boring would that be for you the reader. I mean you would get to know me better and in a way more than my parents ever understood, but it would be a text of spite and vitriol, and no one want to read through hundreds of pages of that. So, I work through my problems with glimpses like this and more so in my more formal writings.

In my latest work, “Levis’ New Genes” I realized that I have cast myself in the role of Levi. Levi is a mistake, one that happens but should never be seen. He is locked away in an institute with other “mistakes” to live a safe and non demanding life. Of course like any good story that is not all that happens. As Levi grows I realized that the steps he is taking are metaphors for the steps I have taken in dealing with my parents. For a story that I wanted to be a comedy it is working itself into a pretty dark drama, I really did not want that, but that’s where it is going and I have to go with it.

I started writing “Levis’ New Genes” about two years ago when I was undergoing some very dramatic changes in my life. But as I approached the middle of the story where Levi is forced to face some very unpleasant facts, I found that I could not continue the story because I had not figured out how I had felt about the same issues. The issue in question was my adoption and how I felt about it.

I, like many adopted people, usually have very strong opinions about how to deal with the fact that their parents are not their biological parents. It brings options to mind that can really mess you up like “What would have my life been like if I had stayed with my biological parent?” This is a tough issue to face and obviously one that you will never be able to fully answer. For me, I reasoned that my biological parent gave me up for a good reason and that I was better off with my parents than I would have been with a 15 year old teen mother. It was probably the right thing to do, so why bother with questioning it. So when people ask if I ever want to find my biological parents I say to them, why would I when she made a life decision and gave me up, she must have had a good reason, who am I to rethink it for her? Likewise if she ever sought me out I would never take her up on a meeting. What good would it serve? So in a sense Levi had to face the fact that his early upbringing was a hoax or at least a deception. So, again, in my mind it left that character only one option on how to deal with it, and it is a dark reaction since he does not have years to process the facts.

I have lived that dark reaction in the last two years. My mother died and my father less than a year later. You can say that it was a relief for me, and I know that sounds cold, but in a real way it is the truth. For me there is no more net. I never used their net in the past, but it was “always there for me” if I could suck it up and endure the talk of failure and disappointment I proved to be for them. It’s gone and I am truly on my own to make my own decisions without someone thinking I make bad choices. My choices are now completely my own and I need that.

Amazing how the mind works, symbols and specters popping up in dreams to help you deal with feelings that you do not want to talk about or face openly. So, to those symbols and specters I say, “Be gone and haunt me no more for I have heard your supplications and ill-informed words and have deemed them irrelevant to my life. I have made my own mind up on how I want to live my life and you can not dictate your false wisdom to me any more. Be gone, haunt someone else, or be at rest in your earthy resting places. Be gone!”

Was that a little too Shakespearean? I know, Freud would say, “pull up a couch and tell me more about your mother…”