I Cloaked Myself in Anger

I stood on the northern shore, facing into the breeze that swept across the lake, and looked for the place on the sandy beachfront where decades before my father gently urged me into the shallow waters then taught me how to swim.

My version of the words of King Solomon, the author of the Book of Proverbs, came to mind as I scanned the waterfront—whoever (covers) an offense promotes love, but whoever repeats the conflict separates (loved ones). For decades I cloaked myself in anger and resentment over the suffocating childhood I’d experienced in my parents’ home. I dismissed the playfulness of the man who taught me to lace and tie my shoes, knot a tie, trust the buoyancy of water, play catch, and enjoy the pleasures of music and a book.

There was no balance to my decades-long fight with the man I knew loved me, but whose brokenness prevented us from embracing each other beyond those first innocent years.

A few weeks ago, I was on the final leg of a 1,200-mile round trip drive to Ashland University in Ohio where I’d attended the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference on writing. I was tired, my head full of new memoir writing prompts, and in my soul I was drawn to the kaleidoscopic events of my childhood. New York Route 8, my chosen route back to Vermont, passed through Speculator, NY, where many of those early informing events occurred.

Lake Pleasant, located in the Adirondack Mountains, is approximately four miles long and one mile wide. Camp-of-the-Woods, a Christian family resort where I now stood, was our family’s destination for one or two weeks each summer when I was a child. Aside from activities with my parents and younger brother there were craft classes, hikes, team sports, water activities, concerts, and daily vacation Bible School classes. “Campers,” as attendees were called, ate family style in a spacious dining hall.

When I was a guileless three- and four-year-old child—(was I ever innocent, are any of us?)—I believed everything my father told me, and when he held me on outstretched arms in water over my head I trusted him completely. I kicked my legs, reached my arms out in front of me, and when he demonstrated how to breathe in and out I followed his lead.  My father liked sunrise dips in the lake, and I eagerly followed him, feeling the warmth of his company in the brisk, cold morning air. When these forays occurred in mid- to late-August the bucket of water in which my mother instructed us to rinse our feet before re-entering the tent, was covered by a thin layer of ice. The act of complying with she who must be obeyed became a ritual game to see which of us would be the bravest and break the coating of ice first.

The simplicity of that time came back to me as I stood, watched the waves, and looked across the empty beach. A hooded person, perhaps an early-arriving counselor, sat along the breakwater reading or praying, or maybe both. At one time I had been like her or him, a counselor in search of answers in a Christian family resort. A place where I sang in the choir, played violin in the orchestra, earned a pittance waiting on tables in the dining hall, played in a fast-pitch softball league, and spent more time engaging co-ed counselors than I did God. I did this for three of the summers during my high school years.

I don’t live in the past, but I frequently work in and with the past as I sort through the issues that bring people into therapy with me. The events and experiences of our earliest years have a powerful impact on how our lives are shaped, the choices and the decisions we make, and the core values we embrace.

For many years I expressed anger toward my parents, rage at the oppressive and suffocating way in which I was raised. Regardless of the topic, politics, spirituality, life choices, books and music to be enjoyed, places to go, or friends to have—theirs was the only voice with credibility. Mine did not count. That rage defined who I was, how I functioned in relationships—angry, distant and distrusting—and impacted my ability to perform in academic settings. I allowed the animosity toward them to define me, and cloud the fact that their brokenness had impeded their ability to love me—the latter something I never doubted.

During grad school and post-doc years, prostrate on my analyst’s couch, Jim gently bared scars, opened old wounds and began to help me heal– a healing process too late to reconstitute broken marriages and destructive, addictive relationships, but not too late for me to find balance in my life. It was slow in coming. The cloak of anger and rage changed colors but remained the clothing I wore and by which I defined myself. Though my professional life with patients seemed immune to this powerful strain of discontent and malaise, colleagues often found me difficult to budge from obvious self-righteousness.

Now, as I sit at my desk reflecting on these memories, thanks to an article by American journalist Peter Bergen, I’m reminded of Immanuel Kant’s words: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.” The 18^th-century German philosopher gives me renewed hope, and reaffirms Solomon’s words. What I cling to, and more on this in my next post, as I define who and what I am distorts the truth if balance and harmony are not sought.

For far too long, my narrow and biased lens distorted the complex truth of who my father was. Nothing is solely one-sided and no one is one-dimensional.

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