Violent Emotions

My daughters suffer from an excess of violent emotions. They both struggle with the awareness of right and wrong but have a difficult time controlling their natural feelings. The Escape Artist flicked a cigarette at R’s head while he was in bed (I was afraid to ask if it was a lit cig). Better Off Dead beat up some dude down the hall (to which a friend on her live journal suggested that if she hit him more than once, he might actually have enjoyed it) but now says she was only kidding. However, it is real and I hate to tell them that they come by this violent emotional problem quite naturally. A little family history:

Benedict Massei, maternal great-grandfather of the two, once threw a puppy out of a window from the second floor apartment of a quasi tenement building in New York because the pup used Ben’s fancy new shoes as teething rings. Lucky for the puppy, outside the window was an awning over the store below and the pup didn’t die. This was also the man who died at the age of 32 because of peritonitis caused by a broken stitch in his stomach (1927, no penicillin) after an operation for ulcers. His wife was 20 at the time, with two children: Stefanie and Nick.

Then, there was the time that Stefanie was serving dinner to her husband (second husband Dom) and five children and became angry over some insignificant thing going on and lifted the table, whereby all the table’s contents ended up in the laps of her three sons (she still insists that she never suffered from menopause, but we knew better). Boy, did we laugh. She just got angrier. And I can remember the day when I was eight that she hit me with my roller skates because I’d taken the hem out of my skirt. Of course, we must never forget the black eye I received (actually it was an accident) because I wanted a glass of water. She also tried to hit brother Larry over the head with a cast-iron skillet because he’d skipped school one day.

But then, Stefanie’s first husband (who no one in the family is supposed to talk about because of his association with some very bad people in New York) – the natural grandfather to my two daughters – purportedly beat a man to death. I cannot verify this story because my father died in 1979, but my mother related the story to me and, not being an eyewitness, could not be used in court because it was only hearsay evidence.

Therefore, I quite accepted the fact that my own violent emotions were come by quite naturally. However, after my long history of throwing things (at Sal, my first husband, a knife, a kitchen chair and the cheese grater), threatening death (if he followed my father’s advice and hit me); breaking things (at Philip who wanted to marry me but his father insisted on my getting an annulment before I could marry his son, who I then threw out of my house throwing dishes and a miniature statue of the Pieta at him); hitting people (Bill, another of the loves of my life, who left me for someone 10 years younger than me) and breaking things (I actually threw something at a wall that bounced off and broke the TV but I never felt guilty about it); planning horrible revenge (placing a bag of dog shit under the hood and on the engine of his Jaguar) and thinking of ways to kill people without being caught (we won’t go into that one, okay), I finally got some help…

We learn from reading books such as Lord of the Flies that humans can revert to being cruel animals when living in an environment without rules and ethics because that is the nature of the beast. It is not in the nature of the human beast to be kind and gentle, good case in point is the horrible stories coming out of Iraq. Ethics and kindness are learned responses, so at least I know that my daughters have been raised right: they feel guilt when they respond to anger with violence. Now we just have to learn to control it and teach them to be Sicilian: a) Keep cool; b) Don’t let anyone know what you’re thinking; c) Go to the mattresses; and d) Don’t get mad, get even!

Oh, dear, I’m doing it again… difficult to break the habits of a lifetime, you know.

The most difficult lesson to learn is to accept human nature and not have expectations. People generally see what they want to see, not reality. What can I say to my daughters to help them through their journeys through life? Saying something to someone does not necessarily teach; neither does teaching by example. I can only hope that they will one day learn to accept human nature and the fact that they can never change another human being into someone that they can respect. You must find a person who you already respect and then learn to love him.

After Frank died I started spending a great deal of time with Adrian, a kind and gentle man who was stuck in Prague with a job that he hated. I thought that his drinking habit was the result of his unhappy life and that once he settled all the problems in his life he’s stop drinking quite so much. I was wrong. He’s an alcoholic. The love that I feel for him clouded my eyes and, because I was needy at the time, I saw what I wanted to see. Now I look at him and know the truth: his problems are of his own creation and no amount of love that I offer will ever make him happy. He will always be an alcoholic.

I’ve been in love more than once in my life, I’ve loved many men without being in love and I know full well the difference between love and lust, having experienced both, and I know that you can love more than one man at a time for different reasons. I also know that I can love someone in spite of his bad habits.

But now I know that I must relearn a very important lesson – one that kept me from becoming an alcoholic myself: God, grant me the Serenity to accept the thinks I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.

I want both of my daughters to etch this prayer into their brains and really learn the meaning of it. It can make them better people, keep them sane and help them through their journey. Mine is almost at an end and I feel that I’ve learned all the lessons that I was supposed to learn, but only God knows how much longer he’ll let me stay here and if I still have lessons ahead of me. It will one day be their turn to help their children along through this difficult life and I wish them love and wisdom in doing so. My greatest contribution has been to bring them, my two beautiful daughters, into the world and I love them both very much, in spite of – and maybe because of – their vulnerabilities. None of us is perfect, but we can try.