Who gets to write the book on parenting?
How does guerilla cred get earned?
How does guerilla cred get earned?
By starting in a most creative family, I have been studying parenting my whole life.
The Birth of Guerilla Parenting
The first thing that occurred to me when deciding to write up my parenting tricks—parenting system, that is—was why would a reader even trust me to try a single one of my techniques?
My family of origin had colorful mental health issues, and I rose to the challenge.
My parents loved each other like crazy, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. The author Kurt Vonnegut once described the possibility that entire world units could exist of only two people. Welcome to the world of my parents and my family of origin—intact, but grotesque.
My parents did love us, and they could be relied on many times to be warm and reasonable. Most of the time, however, he was sharpening his skills as enabler, and she was making us dance to her unusual rhythms. If I was 10 years old and she was in her bed sulking, literally crying real tears from an off word of mine, he would ask me to go to her bed and apologize. Although he told me there was nothing to apologize for, he asked me to fix things by lying so the house could get back to regular.
For my father, this was peace at any cost, but who bore the cost?
Guerilla Tip: When a sane parent teaches a sane kid to go along with insanity, it trains the kid that crazy is the norm and helps enable the crazy one.
My father failed to act as buffer. Without the buffering between me and madness that we all deserve in childhood, I could have been turned into a basket case, been prone to periodic depression due to personalizing life’s many little indignities, or gained huge insights into the workings of the self-centered mind.
Since every kid is self-centered, the insights would later serve me as a parent.
At seven, I sat in our car that my father double-parked across from our favorite bakery, Gertel’s in the Lower East Side of NY. My father told me to watch the car as he went in to buy cake and challah for the Sabbath. I knew that watching the car had something to do with the police, but not exactly. So, when a cop wrote us a ticket, I knew there was something I was supposed to say, but not exactly. My father was very angry at me for not knowing—at seven—that I was supposed to speak to any officer who came over to look at our car before he started writing the parking ticket, and tell him my father had just stepped into the bakery and would be right out.
You know what it is that rolls readily downhill. It flowed that day because adults don’t like getting tickets and it is easier to complain to a kid than explain to begin with.
Guerilla Tip: If you need a kid to do an adult’s job, don’t ask a kid. If you do, tell the kid exactly what you want done.
My mother cooked, read and slept a lot. So, if a call came in for her after breakfast, we were not allowed to say she was back in bed. Must have given us a fair amount of time every day to explore and entertain ourselves without supervision, what a pleasure. I sang to myself while playing, I did crafts and I mixed toothpaste with talcum powder, hoping for an explosion.
My father’s support enabled my mother complete reign of the house based on her obsessive-compulsive disorder, joy-killing germ phobias and bipolar mood swings, known at the time as manic-depressive. It was not a question of which diagnosis was most accurate—they all applied. Welcome to the world of my childhood. They put the dis, the fun and the anal back into dysfunctional.
Every little thing in my parent’s home was taken personally. Every affront, meant against them; every wound, licked without end. This slant on life is sometimes called awfulizing:
· Make a mountain out of molehill.
· Interpret the focus of every action as directed at you.
· Interpret the motive of every action as negative, never innocent.
Anyone in their circle perceived as becoming less than a loyal friend was someone we also had to despise, or we were then disloyal, and the list grew long over time.
Guerilla Tip: ‘Tis a gift to be simple and view the world as revolving around you. Viewing it that way, however, does not make it so.
Thinking about the world of sanity and madness, logic and mayhem, consumed a lot of my time. By the first grade, in an attempt to gain orientation, my thoughts turned to where we were in time and space. The earth is inside the solar system, which is inside of what? And that is inside what? And that? The obsession reflected a lack of the grounded, sense of place that all kids need to feel secure. Where are we and, above all, why here?
When years later I needed to tell a therapist about my childhood, I thought it was hard to picture how crazy my parents were—Did my parents sound extreme to an outsider?—he would say they did sound extreme and he got it right away. Imagine my surprise that just a few crazy stories could convey how crazy things were for me.
Rudyard Kipling was reported to have been beaten in foster care for five years but did not speak up. In answering the question of “why I had never told anyone,” he concluded that any way that kids are treated, “...they accept as eternally established.” In the end, Kipling empathized with children and scorned adults for their hollowness.
Guerilla Tip: The crazier your situation, the harder you suppress how bad it is, just to get by.
When my mother hit low points, it was definitely not good that she was down. I was, however, happy not to be down myself. In a certain way, I thought I might have the upper hand when she was weak, a schadenfreude delight. Or maybe it was the solid feeling that I was my own man: There but for the grace of God go you and I. Knowing I was not my mother meant I was not a prisoner of my moods as she was.
Parents teach babies a game of peek-a-boo for fun but also to prepare them to separate from the parent. At first, the baby thinks he and parent are one, and the separateness can be a big shock at around eight months. Peek-a-boo gives baby practice at accepting that the parent can be separate and out of sight but still in existence, probably very nearby. Nothing to be upset about.
Likewise, it was empowering to know I was separate from a crazy mother and untrustworthy father.
The way my mother’s mood swings and depression played out in daily life was to miss the mark of parenting. Every few years she would play the piano—she read popular music and all that good stuff—but not if I asked her. Even for my birthday, ever hopeful me, I would ask her to play as a special favor, but she wouldn’t go near the piano. No idea why, something to do with bad feelings—hers. Others people’s feelings meant less when she was blue and inconsolable. Her moods ran the family.
When I was six, my mother had another major upswing, and my father was overjoyed. It now occurs to me maybe he was getting some again. He announced privately, “She’s better,” to which I replied off-hand, “It won’t last.” Middle-class suburban, drug-free and jaded at six.
Guerilla Tip: God forbid your kid is robbed of childhood by requiring adult understanding at six.
I told my father several times before I turned 10 that for balancing the high and low times, my mother should be using the tops of her cycle to plan out how to handle the bottoms. Fell on deaf ears.
Guerilla Tip: To make a roller-coaster life work for you, count on the highs to be followed by lows. When you are up, clean house. And while you are up, make your bed so when you need it later, it is ready.
At eight, I ran after a ball and right into the street, bumping into the side of a passing car. I was shaken, but not hurt by the car. My father brought me back into our house and insisted I show him, pants down, exactly where on my body I met up with the car. He promised he would not hit me, but somehow I did not trust his intentions. Sure enough, I got a bad spanking, pants down, after a scary car accident. He might as well have said, “Come here, I won’t hurt you. Let me degrade you for my own purposes, because you scared me.”
Being lied to and humiliated, what did I learn from this treatment that would bear fruit for me as a parent?
Guerilla Tip: If you treat kids with utmost respect, the self-esteem you build in them will bear fruit for years to come.
As my father’s anger and impatience were such a formidable pair to deal with, one technique I developed was dawdling. Because I am both a perfectionist and a procrastinator, when he was rushing out the door and rushing me out, I found last minute activities I just had to attend to thoroughly. He labeled my delays dawdling and made faces like a Kabuki dancer’s grimace, but without the makeup. Power struggle and control issue in one.
(Later as a parent, I found with last-minute chores that I was better off without the kids' commotion to take care of the chores. I would ask the kids to kindly buckle themselves in the car and wait for me. Since it was also quieter alone, I could think more clearly to tie up those loose ends.)
At around this time, my father started asking me to take after-dinner Friday night walks with him to talk about the excruciatingly personal. I took an instant dread of these talks, but found it impossible to say no. They were not about me at all. Mostly he focused on the period. Whose period did I need to know about at eight—my mother’s, my girlfriend’s? I wish I said tell it to your therapist. He repeatedly told me he could not talk to his father about sex—Tell your therapist. And often, he told me masturbation was okay. That was appropriate to say once, not repeatedly, but none of these subjects were welcome areas for me at all. I cannot remember how many times we cycled through these, but it took me years to say I did not want to go on the walks.
(By contrast, when I became a father with a girl of eight having cramps periodically, I mentioned that sometimes cramps come before a girl’s period. Although I thought we were alone in that discussion, Daniel at nine overheard the word blood and asked if boys ever see it. He was so relieved to hear “No!” that it was the only time we ever high-fived.)
For a span of 10 years, it was a challenge for me to buy a sincere card for Mother’s Day, not the usual flattery that said Mom was the best of Mother Teresa and Martha Stewart. Granted, like Mother Teresa, she was obsessed with disease, tended perennially to unseen wounds and was heavily immersed in protecting the stricken at all personal cost. And like Martha Stewart, she applied almost theatrical standards to the smallest detail in the home, tended to be a little compulsive in her demanding arrangements and, a good thing, spent some care preparing family meals. Thus, she would have had no argument hearing she was a star mother.
However, it was a lie: She was no star, she was a mess. Here I was trying to be respectful, honest and loyal on Mother’s Day, not for me, but for her. It was very difficult to find a simple card expressing that I loved her without insulting the moment by saying she did wonderful, selfless things that she did not do.
I loved her despite her flaws, and would not pretend the flaws did not loom large. I could not conduct my life that way and would not raise children that way.
One place we could all come together was at dinner and especially singing at the Sabbath table. Despite the madness, at least that area was lovely and wholesome. As the Romanian writer Emile Michel Cioran found, music reaches where even madness cannot.
My Father’s Family—
My father’s mother was the moody, cultured, well-read daughter of a scholarly rabbi and author, Moshe Mordechai Amrami. In starting to translate a book he published on the ritual bath, I noticed that he had already asked the same question I did to begin this book, who am I to write all this? A school principal of a yeshiva in Eastern Europe near the city of Gomel, Belarus, he married my moody grandmother off to a sharp student studying to be a rabbi.
She became a homemaker, hospitable but scattered. I sometimes heard her say with irony, “That never happened,” after she wandered around her apartment looking for her reading glasses and a family member said she was already wearing them pushed up over her forehead.
The perennial story about her moodiness was that she took out every pot in the house to prepare a big meal and invariably ended by collapsing in exhaustion. Her husband, the rabbi, would take over calmly and watch the stove and oven as the dishes finished cooking.
Sapta earned how to be moody and taught classes in it, indirectly of course. For example, before getting married, she had some sort of nine-month breakdown. Later in her own household, she set it up so that when her daughter had her period, the whole house had to come to a halt. Why others even needed to know and to be concerned about a personal matter is unclear. Years later, my father was still complaining about it to me. Why I needed to know this was also unclear, but it had something to do with choosing how to live. He may have thinking out loud that some things are better left unsaid. Rolls readily downhill.
As to Sapta’s hospitality, she was fond of saying she could always throw in an extra potato in the soup should an extra guest show up. Of course, there was always plenty of food in the years they lived in Chicago—the irony of her comment was that in the old country, a potato was about all they could spare for a guest.
Full of hiss and vinegar, when she heard the name one of my uncles had picked out for his newborn, Sapta blurted out, “Oh, that’s an ugly name.” Cousins of mine are not to ask who she was referring to, as you see I forgot.
Fifty years before it became common to say wake up and smell the coffee, she was in the habit of saying, “Good morning!” with a bite that implied you were asleep at the wheel.
Such a strong believer in modern medicine, she would ask my mother to hand over any leftover prescriptions. After all, if medicine makes you better, more will make you still better yet.
One time when Sapta was shopping downtown, she ran into her daughter-in-law Dina. They had not seen each other in a whole two weeks, longer than usual for them. Dina said, “Hi!” and kept walking; end of story. She was in her 20’s, a little offbeat and thought she was polite enough. Not according to my family’s rule, though. The abruptness mortified Sapta and sent her into righteous indignation. We all heard about Dina saying hi. Fascinating.
My grandfather, Saba, was also a Rabbi, but served as more of a teacher. Later, so did my father, but as he went into business, he kept his ordination under wraps except to friends. He did like to speak in public, with a political slant, but he was very brief, unlike most clergy I know.
At 30, Saba acquired forge papers that showed he was 50—too old for the country to care about using him as worker or soldier. He starved himself to back up the story of age. At the border, he was called a liar—immigration officers said he was obviously more like 70 years old, but they still let him travel to see his brother in Chicago.
Three years late, Sapta packed the three kids and left—immigration was less of a problem for women and kids. She traveled from Belarus to the port city of Riga, Latvia, for passage to America.
Once in Riga, she went to a bank to withdraw funds to buy passage, but the bank said the account was empty. She spent the day walking, kids in tow, to check for the funds at every other bank she could find in Riga. When she returned at day’s end to the first bank, she insisted that her husband was a rabbi and if he wrote that he was mailing money to this account monthly, he was.
Bank officers looked into the matter and found that the clerk handling correspondence was sure that my grandmother would not escape Belarus and the funds would never be retrieved, so he pocketed them. The clerk was fired. The bank restored the funds and handed them to Sapta. With the funds, she got her family on the ship to Chicago and to her husband the rabbi.
My Mother’s Family—
Where my mother was a complicated intellectual, her mother, Nanny, was a simple seamstress and patternmaker. The oldest sister in a family of many brothers, if she brought a boy around her brothers disapproved of, they threw him down the stairs.
Born in Romania and educated to the fifth grade there, Nanny was a good cook and baker who offered choices at the dinner table. That was something new for my father when he came courting, because his early days were hungry in Europe, whereas my mother was born in New York. My father’s choice at dinner had been to eat bread before soup or soup before bread.
From a Polish family, my grandfather grew up in London with an English accent. He came to the States and married my grandmother when he was working the film projector at a movie theater. He went on to become an MD at 40, quite late and impressive. My mother called him Pa. I don’t remember him much, he was not the warmest, but he thought he could help me when I was terrified of injections by showing me a needle before he used it on me. I am afraid that was misguided. Pa fell victim to a single heart attack at 62.
One good idea he passed along to my mother was “Go to the head and not the tail.” When you need special attention, say, at a department store or a bank, ask early on to speak to the manager. It is waste of energy to argue with a clerk who has the authority only to say no and will proudly wield it.
Nanny was a patternmaker for the New York Garment Center trade. She could not only buy a dress, take it apart for the pattern, sew it back perfectly and return it to the store, but she could also sew a girl’s dress without a pattern if her own girl admired it in a store window.
Anti-medicine and anti-doctors, Nanny made it to 100, living independently, with about 50% of her eyesight and hearing intact and 100% of her marbles. Being a woman of a certain age from a certain era, she was nonetheless trying to pass for 95.
At 90, she came up from Tampa, Florida for a visit. When I took Nanny to shop for groceries, she asked me to read her the ingredients in a container of my favorite cottage cheese. She questioned what all the vegetable gums were, which I explained as making the texture smoother—harmless. Little did I expect the clarity of her simple, wise reply, “They’re not cheese!” At dinner, she ate two bites of some fish we broiled, half a potato, a slice of tomato, hot tea with lemon and one small cookie.
My mother, an hour away, pretended she was away on a trip and asked me to say so. I did, but with little conviction, and Nanny knew.
Nanny tended to be contrary. If I forgot an item at the market, she used a bit of guilt to make her disappointment known. But if I started by saying I was so very sorry I forgot an item at the market, she would say not to make such a big deal about it.
Early in my parents’ marriage, my mother had a benign lump removed from the parotid gland behind one ear. Two years later, my father had the same operation, and after two years more, my mother had the other side done as well. Although tumors need removal, Nanny, who was anti-hospital, noticed a spooky pattern of rare matching surgeries. Clumsily, she said my mother was having a lot of operations since marrying. She was definitely onto something in my parents’ unusual bond, but expressed it in a hurtful, blaming fashion. Nanny’s comment put another nail in the coffin of her relationship with my mother, an example of how important a parent’s words are to even a grownup.
Guerilla Tip: Think before you speak, especially on delicate subjects like surgery, marriage or blame.
Back to the spookiness, why did three unusual surgeries occur to one couple in a few years? I am not a believer that everything happens for a reason or that God does not give us any challenges we cannot handle. He never told me one way or the other. I do however believe that an apparent coincidence may have an explanation. So if the surgical fest was a bizarre coincidence, it somehow benefited my parents. Perhaps there was a psychosomatic element at work. My best guess is that the tumors were invited as a show of empathy. Don’t ask me to explain how, but Nanny knew.
My Brother David—
My parents were most demanding with my older brother, David. Though blue-eyed, blond, nice looking and firstborn, he was not the model child they hoped for. Not quite as charming, compliant and graceful as they required. My father occasionally beat him mercilessly with his open hand or with a belt for minor misbehavior or being fresh. He wasn’t filleting the neighbor’s cat or anything extreme. Typically, the event began when my mother deftly invoked the classic “Wait till your father comes home,” and then handily snapped at my father for reacting so harshly.
Guerilla Tip: When royalty is displeased, heads do have to roll.
I got an occasional spanking, but with David cowering on the floor, my father really went to town, and it horrified me. It was hard to feel it was completely undeserved, because David bullied me in turn. He assured me our parents were crazy, which helped—a little. When something didn’t make sense to me, David would say, “You’ll understand when you reach the fifth grade,” “…sixth grade.” He must have needed someone to pick on, but he was still impressive: He was 18 months older than I and very smart. Maybe he needed to become even older and wiser, too, and he later went on to get a PhD in Psychology.
He was the oldest and he got the worst. They were disappointed in his level of pliability compared to the level they required. They turned around and repeatedly told me, “You’re the older one.” Of course it was flattering, but it was yet another burden and a distortion of reality.
In some ways, I was closer to what they wanted. More compliant, at least on the surface, less obviously rebellious, less confrontational, more artsy-fartsy, and it was not my habit to really tell them off like David would. My mother would often call me an angel. How nice, but it was bad for me because of expectations of perfection. To keep earning the flattering title of angel, I had to remain angelic in my attentions to her, angelic and servile. Based on Games, I learned to say, “Thanks, I’m not an angel.”
In my 30s and married, I was getting further grooming: “You’re not like the others.” But by then, I knew how to set boundaries, as in: “Oh, but I’m exactly like the others.”
Though 18 months older than I, David used to have a meltdown when it came to my birthday. He had a hard time handling that since it was not his day, there would be no big gifts coming his way. Somehow, my parents couldn’t handle his entitlement and inability to cope, and they gave him a birthday gift, too. At the time, I did not care that my parents gave him a gift, if that worked for them. However, as a parent, I would call that situation out of control, to be addressed with great care, but not with a reward. My not caring did not make it okay to shortchange the birthday boy out of being the star for the day.
An imaginative family system might have been to give every sibling a nice birthday gift whenever a birthday came around, not just the birthday boy or girl. That was not the case.
Guerilla Tip: Only in an Alice In Wonderland world is a very merry unbirthday celebrated for one kid alone.
In the middle of an angry fight when he was 18, David once yelled out, “If you didn’t know how to raise kids, why did you ever have them?”
David had a recurring fantasy that our parents adopted him. I never knew whether he was completely serious or only exploring the possibilities and trying to make sense of an intolerable reality. Maybe he was inspired to this scenario by wishful thing, “Lord, help me mend my family. Let these people not be my people, and let my folks come and get me out of here. Amen.”
David never went on to raise kids.
My Brother Rachim—
When Rachim was born, I was told his birth was dangerous for him. I forget, why did a four-year-old need to know that? He was always treated like he was nervous and delicate. In fact, there was nothing in particular wrong with his health, but it seemed I didn’t have to be nice to him or bother with this nuisance of a kid brother.
Rachim remembers being told that at three weeks he survived some newborn illness. Our father interpreted this, too, as the weak disposition of a weak newborn.
Guerilla Tip: Survival of a newborn at three weeks can be interpreted as a strong disposition as easily as a weak disposition. Depends on what you want to see.
On a summer vacation in Mesa Verde, Colorado, Rachim was five and the youngest boy, Mat, three when our parents had the boys find their own way to a rendezvous in town. That was neglectful parenting, a horrifying experience for the boys. And not the only time.
When Rachim was 16 and I was 20, he went through a hard time post-puberty. One very hot shower could last him an hour or, if something went wrong, two. Either way, his skin ended up red and raw. That scene had familiarity. My bedroom by then was on the second floor, and Rachim liked using my bathroom because it gave him more privacy. I insisted he leave the bathroom door unlocked so I had access, though I promised I would not make him crazy by interfering with his ritual. Nonetheless, I would not help him act crazy by handing him, at 16, a towel that he could reach himself.
Five years later he would ask me if I had been so strict with him mostly for his sake. Again, the question of tough love. He seemed very satisfied when I told him I did it only fifty percent for him, the rest for my own sanity. Why should I have involved myself at all, to help or to hurt? Helping out with bizarre behavior or criticizing it are both boundary issues.
Guerilla Tip: Good fences make good neighbors, so respect people’s boundaries.
Guerilla Tip: Good fences make good neighbors, so respect people’s boundaries.
I certainly told Rachim at no time that he was getting tough love for his own good. It was the best choice all around, but he had his own growing up to do. We both had to respect the boundary between us.
Rachim grew up to marry, but never to raise kids.
My Brother Mat—
By the time Mat was born, I was six. We were four boys, sane enough, against two, less so. Mat was easy to get along with and mostly got left alone by my parents, a blessing in disguise for him. If that was parenting, less is more. He was smart in school and smart enough to stay below my parents’ radar and out of trouble. As I say, a blessing.
As an adult, I would periodically complain to Mat about our mother’s actions. She commented on a cotton shirt I was wearing, a very common shirt, and mentioned, “I have been looking for just such a shirt.” That was code for wanting my shirt. I was 30, and she wanted me to give her the shirt off my back—can you say a little personal and rude?
Guerilla Tip: Watch your own boundaries.
More than that, I was groomed to be expected to decode her repeated comment as a hint she wanted it, though never was she so honest as to ask for it in her own name. Anyway you look at it, get your own shirt.
I ignored the hint, kept the shirt, but bristled at the selfishness and predictable manipulation. Mat would advise me to get with the program, “Yosi, if the Queen of England admired your shirt, she wouldn’t have to ask. You’d be honored to give it to her!”
Guerilla Tip: Remember, people are who they are. Expecting otherwise would make you naïve, not them.
From her perspective, she was royalty. From my perspective, since she was acting like an arrogant and demanding prima donna, nothing new there, where was the surprise? She always thought of herself that way. He was so right, although that was not the only time he had to remind me over the years.
Mat grew up to marry, but never to raise kids.
My Sister Sheara—
In those days of the hammer and chisel, when a doctor told you when it was time to shut down your baby factory, you listened. That was my mother’s story, anyway. She used to say on the phone, “Three, so far,” “Four, so far,” and then for years, “Four.”
My mother told me she spaced her kids in pairs so each would have a friend. She used something called family planning, whatever that was. Oh, yes, it must relate to timing pregnancy—and why did an eight-year-old need to know that? But it is fascinating to know that your parents believed in control. Eight is never too young to learn that, except for the area of birth control, your mother has no sense of self-control, self-censorship or boundaries—too busy with self-esteem issues, it seems. Having no such limitations shown to us meant we all had to teach ourselves how to make it in the real world totally from scratch.
But as years passed, my parents missed having a baby. Babies are so cuddly, you give and give while imagining whatever you like until they start talking—and talking back. Then you’ve got the same control issues as with the other monsters you have. Anyway, after four boys, my parents looked into adopting a baby girl.
Two years on the list, they had an opportunity of adopting a baby boy and asked my opinion. Pause.
Guerilla Tip: Never ask a 14-year-old for an adult decision. Good—”With your Dad gone two years, how do you feel about the guy I’m seeing?” Bad—”Should I marry this guy?”
It sounded wonderful, five brothers walking down the street together. They were horrified. I had picked an incorrect response, but they were so blinded by their vantage point they did not notice I reversed it instantly and told them to wait for a girl. The sound of rejoicing was heard in the land. Since that was what they wanted, that is what they wanted to hear.
Sheara came along not long after that. I was 14, and Sheara was still eight years younger than the youngest brother, Mat. We loved her and helped feed her, wash her and change her. Rachim remembers that our mother never changed Sheara.
Secretive as my parents were, their research told them it would be impossible to keep the adoption to themselves forever. Some helpful cousin would speak up when the kid was a teen, and how would the secret be explained then? So they decided it was better all around if they did not keep the adoption a secret from anyone, Sheara included. She was told as a baby and it never seemed to be an issue as the years progressed, either.
At 16, Sheara was the only kid left at home, and she got it bad. Although our parents enjoyed TV, they objected when Sheara watched Cher on TV. With Cher’s suggestive costumes, our mother would call Sheara a tramp. As usual, you had to be there to see my parents’ leap of logic from seeing a teenager watch TV to calling her trashy—for watching TV. When our parents offered her a year abroad to finish High School, I told her I would miss her, but to grab the chance.
Guerilla Tip: Don’t put down someone else’s taste, like when a child likes something childish. Why be a killjoy?
A few years later as an adult, Sheara pointed out that I was still treating her like my baby sister. We were both adults despite any age difference and history, so I should no longer have treated her that way—We were peers. She was right.
Sheara grew up to marry and have three kids.
Back Home—
Returning to my perspective on our parents, when I was eight, my mother lost her father to a heart attack. She was unusually attached to him, and at his loss her mental health took a 30-year dive.
There were two winters she did not leave the house due to her fears. (Forty years later, I would double-check that memory with my father to make sure it was true. It was.) Her problem with winter was the evil lurking in the hearts of dogs and snow.
Guerilla Tip: Dogs soil the street, snow touches everything, boots walk on snow and people wearing the same boots walk everywhere and often into your house. Deal with it.
My father used to tell me not to marry a neurotic woman. I did not know there was another kind, so I took that to mean not to marry. Dutifully, I waited till I was 35. While I loved her very much, I wondered if my father might divorce my mother and get us a stable replacement instead.
Which was absurd, since the whole scenario my parents created was not destined to change much. It worked very well, for them. (Years later he would tell me he felt he deliberately had to choose her over the five kids because we would bounce back, but she was sick.) “She’s sick,” answered every question about taking responsibility for their actions, whether manipulating or enabling. But it does not.
In Games People Play, Eric Berne called that game Wooden Leg: Begin with a real flaw, then milk it endlessly to cover every hostile or passive-aggressive move you make. When I am late—I have a wooden leg. When I need to take a taxi—I have a wooden leg.
My mother played the victim card and expected a lot of sympathy. (Years later she would participate in a recovery program. In a passing moment of clarity there, she tapped into just how disempowering self-pity is. She appreciated the program’s quip—The dictionary lists the word sympathy somewhere between sh**hole and syphilis. Her quote, not mine.)
Whether the following viewpoint is politically correct or not, and charitable or not, I earned the right to it.
Guerilla Tip: If you are diagnosed with mental illness or with cancer and become a demeaning tyrant as a patient, you do not get to blame the demeaning part on the illness.
No, that would be you—frustrated, struggling, desperate and cranky—responding to the illness. All that is understandable as a reaction to the illness, but not attributable to the illness itself.
Owning your own actions means you accept that your actions are not always saintly. When they aren’t, all you need to face is that you are human.
Guerilla Tip: Faulting a crazy person for not acting better, isn’t that blaming the victim? Not at all.
No one blamed my mother for her inner torments. She deserved kindness. My heart went out to her for it, and I loved her in spite of it. At the same time, she was a user. She used friends and strangers, her husband, her five kids. As tormenter, she had responsibility for the tormenting. If tormenting deserves blame, she did, too. Moreover, to the extent that she used her own torment as a Wooden Leg excuse for stepping clumsily on other people’s backs, she should have been ashamed.
Guerilla Tip: Inner pain does not buy you a perennial free pass for taking advantage of your situation or of others.
When my parents got married, he was 24 and she was 19. They had been engaged for a full two years, and because of this long wait, my mother later recommended shorter periods for engaged couples. She also told me a few times when I was between the ages 10 and 14 about rumors in her religious circle that as an engaged couple, they were ‘waiting,’ but not exactly.
This was her very mixed message to me: Do not spread rumors about your friends; the couple was most certainly not rehearsing for the wedding night; but if a couple is getting married, it doesn’t really matter in the end what waits for the wedding or if something happens before—still claiming that it didn’t. Based on her protesting too much, I heard the following message: We explored each other before the wedding night, but after all, we were engaged anyway?
On some level, this kind of overly personal material always felt like an honor, being taken into the confidence of a parent and hearing R-rated material. At that time, the story would have been considered X-rated, not ‘R’. Not that hearing such stories was anything less than stimulating, of course, but kids need this? If the answer in unclear to you, you are invited to imagine your own parents and their wedding night, a universally unwelcome image.
Guerilla Tip: Sharing is caring only when you are selective in what you share. If you have a cold, hold off on sharing food. If you are tempted to share a story that does not instantly pass three tests—Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary?—hold off on sharing the story.
My mother’s story was not necessary for a preteen. In fact, it never had to be repeated except to her own peers.
During his work life, my father was in the business of buying and selling ball bearings for the aircraft industry’s after-market. There were shipments daily, and my father came to rely on Sal the UPS driver. They would get to talking during loading and unloading, and Sal had a beer on the house along with a quick nap during his usual 4 PM stop. Apparently, he described to my father a curious habit of his wife’s: Even if they fought during the day and went to bed angry, all Sal had to do was tap her on the shoulder for her to turn around responsively.
Sounds like a loving system they had going, and my father repeated it to me more than once. It might seem like a good relationship to model, too. However, picturing Sal tapping his wife’s shoulder for her to turn around and respond was too graphic for me.
Not that hearing such stories was anything less than stimulating, of course, but kids need this?
Therapy was big for my mother. Going to therapists and showing no one could fix her was big for my mother. She used to tell me things she learned in her sessions, figuring that kids needed to know these therapeutic insights about her. Repeatedly, she told me it surprised her to face that she did not have an unconditional mother. She had thought otherwise. To me, my grandmother was the sweetest homemaker, then widow, but she was not warm to my mother. Where my mother was a complicated intellectual, Nanny was simple, uneducated, but cheerful. That was my mother’s way of telling me not to expect an unconditional mother.
My mother was fond of telling me how dismayed she was, newly married, to find that Nanny started driving to temple on the Sabbath. On the phone, my mother told her, “I’m shocked,” to which Nanny replied, “We shock each other.” The story proved how harsh Nanny was to her.
(It was not until I was 20 that I could point out, after an embellished retelling, that Nanny just might have been reflecting the harsh tone used on her. Why was my mother deciding how Nanny should live and then not seeing who provoked the flare-up? My gentle thought left my mother speechless—At least she didn’t say we shock each other.)
Guerilla Tip: As a parent and a human being, always keep a few things to yourself. I heard self-control is a good thing.
Other than a saint, no parent can keep up a display of love with complete disregard for how kids act. Perhaps it’s a matter of the degree in how directly we show dissatisfaction by withholding our love. My mother was emphasizing that if I did not perform to her wishes, love would be sharply withheld. It was not hard to let my parents down.
At 13, I wrote myself a note to sit in my desk drawer that said, “Your Bar Mitzvah was sinful and atrocious.” At my Bar Mitzvah, I had done a very bad job at reading the long Torah portion during the Sabbath service. Or rather, I made many mistakes. Maybe you can do a good job at something and still produce bad results. One strong possibility was that I was not as prepared as I thought, although my tutor did give me a complete rehearsal. Another: I loved to sing in my school chorus and perform in a folk dance group, but had overwhelming stage fright for any solo piece. If I began stumbling during my Torah reading, the stage fright could have taken over to make the stumbling worse.
When the weekend was over, my parents sat me down and told me, “Your Torah reading was sinful and atrocious. Don’t think you can get by on charm.” True enough about charm, but a sin is a serious thing. Labeling a public embarrassment a sin is adding insult to injury. Can you imagine humiliating a kid for embarrassing himself? And an atrocity is also overkill for a mistake by a 13-year-old. They went over this conversation repeatedly, holding a grudge against me for letting them down so badly.
I thought it was wise to write myself a little note so, besides the grudge I wanted to hold, the words would not get distorted. When my parents eventually discovered the note in my desk, they accused me of holding a grudge.
Guerilla Tip: Do not look in a 13-year-old’s drawers.
As far as holding a grudge, what could I say when they were right? They were the ones who showed me how satisfying it was.
There were years she couldn’t hug us at all. Then there were the years she employed the following choreography to get herself through a hug:
1. Brace yourself as a kid approaches you, expecting a hug.
2. Lift your arms in preparation of encircling the kid somewhere around the kid but far from the kid’s body.
3. Take pains to make sure as little of your bodies touch each other, certainly no part of the shoulders, chest or torso. Cheeks, preferably, do not brush in passing.
4. Ever so lightly, put your hands on the kid’s back with a motion that simulates affection, not rejection due to how dirty the kid actually seems to you—well, no dirtier than everyone else.
5. Limit the amount of energy infused into the moment, as a long shower will of necessity be following to eliminate all problems introduced by touching all that dirt and germs.
When the hug is over, claim to be exceptionally warm. Criticize mothers who claim to love their kids but send them away to summer camp before age 12. Also, mothers who are undemonstrative.
Beyond my mother’s anti-hug as a way for her to distort the display of love herself, it prevented the normal and natural urge of a kid for a chance to show love, too.
It is tempting to say that kids were not the target of any of those phobic moments and years. Explain that to an eight-year-old. If you expect him to understand fully and accommodate, you are stealing his childhood from him. It is a burden to ask adult maturity from a kid.
Guerilla Tip: No kid is supposed to carry the parent.
(For my own kids, I expressed a lot of love in hugs and in words. Maybe I started it, maybe they did, but we sometimes part by waving, “See ya, love ya, bye!”)
My mother stood fast by her own distinctive view of the parent-child relationship, which may at first sound familiar. She believed in one’s absolute obligation to sacrifice tirelessly, display loyalty, show complete devotion and nurture endlessly. That probably matches your ideal parent until you learn she was defining the child’s role and responsibility in looking after the parent. Today the term parentifying is used.
Since she said these things out loud, it made it easier for me to pinpoint how distorted the situation was. Had she been less outspoken in her belief, I might have thought I was reading it wrong. It was a blessing in disguise.
At seven, I had horrible nightmares that woke me up in shock. Each time my parents got a babysitter for us so they could see a movie, I panicked and told them not to go. My mother used her usual tricks to put me in an impossible position by asking, “You want me to stay home instead of enjoying myself by seeing a movie?” Her question got me to say no, which I understood to be the right answer.
However, a truer answer from a frightened kid would have been, “Yes, stay home with me.” After all, why did I have to attend to her sense of well being? She manipulated me to say I wanted her to go, when in fact I was terrified. Using a sitter and going to the movies was not the problem. Twisting my, shall we say, brains until I approved and validated her actions was the problem.
Eventually our doctor made a low-tech suggestion that worked nicely: no TV for a half hour before bedtime, to settle down. Despite my resentment, it worked and the nightmares faded.
Guerilla Tip: You know what experience is, don’t you? When you don’t get what you want, what you do get they call experience.
Out of exasperation in the home, I would always seek my own solutions. At five or six, I used to sing when I played with my toys, zoning out to a safe and peaceful place. In my early grades, I joined the school choir, but not to sing: I liked getting called out of class twice a week. I was so bored that, while I loved many of my teachers, the only conscious reason I had to join the choir was to leave class. I half expected, “Wait a minute, are you basically leaving for choir just to leave class?” I was more aware that I wanted an excuse to get out of class than I was of being happy just to go sing.
At home, with exquisite sensitivity, I learned to sense every maternal mood change—when it was safe to hug or to touch, to speak my truth or to lie judiciously. At the same time, I judged everything for myself. I viewed every situation at home with the skepticism that my parents’ judgment, unless proven otherwise, was untrustworthy. I made the general assumption that the opposite was usually a better starting point. My childhood experiences built an inventiveness in me and some powerful resolve, but not without scar tissue that no six or eight year old needs.
“There’s something on the floor,” was code for “Pick that up,” without actually asking anyone so bold a request. Based on Games, I learned to keep walking while noting, “I see it right there.”
Or I would check if she was asking a favor and help out only if she agreed it was a favor. She did not like to ask for favors. A favor would ‘count’ as a request and obligate her with repaying the favor. Parents should not have to owe anything to the kids; the kids always owe the parents.
Guerilla Tip: Manipulation does not count as asking a favor. If you can get your way by manipulating, you then owe no favors in return.
Once when my mother took me out for a soda at a lunch counter, we saw the server pick something up from the floor. Granted that since the server was preparing our drinks, her hands should stay clean and not touch the floor. However, to address this major problem, my mother told me—no more than 10—to ask the woman if she would wash her hands.
At 10, I did just that, but I resented it. The problem was not the hygiene but the manipulation. Since the issue was my mother’s, not mine, she should have handled it herself. But she felt too cowardly to ask and instead bullied a kid into the front lines.
(As an adult, if I had to ask other adults to wash their hands, I would emphasize I am very finicky. That way makes it clear I was not criticizing but asking for help.)
Guerilla Tip: If there is something you want, you own the responsibility to go after it—no one else. Of course, you can often ask someone for a favor, but can you always ask someone for a favor?
(Later when she passed away at 75 and I sat in mourning, I told friends that she was the most manipulative person I have ever known. The room went silent as people were at a loss for what to say. Most people make nice after someone dies. If not for the lessons to be learned, I would be silent, too.)
She often needed things performed for her. A homemaker, she wanted things very clean but could not easily do laundry or clean house with her hand washing and complicated relationship with germs. So she did no cleaning. Instead, she directed her staff (all other family members) to perform tasks usually handled by the homemaker. The tasks had to be done to her standards, using her odd and demanding methods.
That was one great gig she had.
Laundry was something my father did after coming home from work. The method she required was to run the washing machine for two complete cycles of wash-rinse-spin before moving to the dryer. She had figured out that since a normal wash cycle ends with rinse water that has a bubble or two, there must also be a germ or two. Repeat the entire cycle with no detergent. If not, the clothes moved to the dryer are dirty clothes, and the dryer would now need cleaning—by him.
Guerilla Tip: If you can get someone to wash your clothes in a way that no chance of detergent lingers to irritate your skin, go for it.
At 19 I needed clean clothes for a trip to Boston, and I did my own load of laundry. My mother had a fit when she found out…that I did my own laundry. I had moved my father’s clean wash into the dryer without knowing if that was its first or second washing. It was clean. Since my dry clothes and the dryer itself were then dirty to her, she wanted it all redone.
At 9, I would have gone along. At 19, I left for Boston with my clothes, and I have no idea what happened while I was away. My father likely spent a lot of time in the basement.
If I balked at a request, she would complain, “If you loved me, you would do this for me.” Based on Games, I learned to reply, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t be testing me all the time.”
At the time, I could not have said, “Either I love you, but not in that way—or the thing you are doing now is not what I call love—or both.” At the time, I could not have said, “If you feel I don’t love you enough, is this your way of getting more love?”
Generally when I fought back by using my own smarts that I learned to trust heavily, my parents would say handily, “You’re lawyering us.” Gag by insulting. Insult by invalidating. So using intellect well was honored, but using it to push back and disagree with them was dishonored.
(By contrast, later as a parent with a kid who was being very logical, I often found myself engaging their reasoning by saying, “In a perfect world, that would be true. But in this world…”)
Talking my way out, however, became my specialty.
(It grew into an ability later to explain things, when teaching yoga to adults, as the technical writer on a business team, and here to a readership who may even not meet me face to face. Lemons, lemonade, anyone?)
Once, my mother visited friends for the weekend and felt pampered by her hosts. She told me again and again, “They couldn’t do enough for me.” Having things done for her, that delighted her. Services performed for her were like collectibles she was gathering. She spent a lot of energy gathering such goodies, especially what she could get others to do for her without asking.
Guerilla Tip: Manipulation does not count as an obligation. If you get your way by manipulating, you then owe no favors in return.
Small things would soil my mother’s world, so she thought of herself as becoming contaminated and uncontaminated physically and spiritually. She found some confusion in the clean-unclean connection to her religious practices: cleaning herself, washing hands and home, separation of dishes and separation of washing dishes, separation during her monthly cycle and visiting the ritual bath.
While the underlying fears remained unclear, she busied herself keeping her world free of dirt. But not necessarily by doing the cleaning herself. What troubling inner thoughts needed such distractions? How would a very bright adult who loved culture and reading be happier with these busy-making time fillers? Who knows? Who cares?
Hand washing at a sink was a problem for her, because after she was done, she had to turn off the faucet that she had turned on with dirty hands. Unless she could get a kid to turn it off for her. That would work.
Guerilla Tip: Note to self...watch and learn bad behavior...avoid when parent.
If she had to turn off the dirty faucet herself, that would make her hands dirty again and in need of washing. One solution was to wash the dirty faucet while the water was running, but before her hands were completely clean, I think. Then it, the faucet, would be clean enough to touch when shutting it—off. Not so simple.
Double the process since all our sinks had two faucets. She had to wash the spout, too, since water coming past it better be very clean. Furthermore, where on the hand or wrist was it safe for her to end the washing? No good answer came to her as the water ran. But as faucets are dirty, so is soap dirty. Finally, what towel could be clean enough to use when done? Keep going.
Is it better or worse for a kid or an adult in such situations? I only know I would be mortified if a boss who could shut off a faucet asked me to shut it off instead, whether as a favor or as part of my job. No salary would be high enough to perform the chore.
Flossing the boss’s mouth would be more appealing.
Of course, dry cleaners were a problem. They hand you your clean clothes with hands that handle other people’s dirty clothes. Enough said.
Buying clothes was a problem. How do you try on clothes that may have been touched by other people, whose hygiene was not only in doubt, it was blatantly untrustworthy? Easy: Leave tags on, dry clean the clothes with the tags, hope the cleaning process does not harm the tags and, voila! try the clothes on for size. If they do not fit well, return them with tags on and receipts in hand. Except that dry cleaners were a problem.
To be fair, the thought process that sparked each of these worries is not illogical, just useless. When the brain becomes its own enemy, it causes a breakdown of human nature, a sad mental health issue. Most of us have the natural ability to rise above living our lives through the lens of a magnifying glass. We give ourselves a little distance. When we get stuck in the extremes, we lose the forest for the trees.
Guerilla Tip: Note to self...watch and learn...avoid when parent.
It was not until I was 25 that I moved away from their home. They would ask me to come back home and I would say, “I am home. I have a lease on this apartment.” Pretty radical to them.
In my late 20’s, I was doing my best to accept my parents with their plusses and minuses. They did not want closeness and they were not interested in my life or any new friends I made, but they were not stingy with money. There might or might not be strings attached.
Guerilla Tip: For some people, money is one of the few ways they have of expressing love. Could be worse.
I once bought my mother a beautiful topaz gold ring on a vacation in Israel. At the time, $35.00 seemed like a lot, but it was for my mother. Note that I was 26 and living on my own, so I paid for the trip on my own. Being who she was, my mother left the ring out on the kitchen counter for the weekend I was visiting, a show of displeasure. She heard me say I bought a different ring of similar cost, not as a gift but on behalf of a neighbor who reimbursed me. In other words, I neglected to spend more on my mother than on a friend. Oops.
At Thanksgiving time when I was 28, my father said our mother “was not up to making a big dinner,” and he made restaurant reservations for the whole family. I told him all the siblings much prefer to meet up at his house for a home-cooked meal, but he insisted he could no longer cancel the reservations. To make it easier on him—okay, to make him stop talking nonsense to get his way—I called up the restaurant myself to see if a cancellation was still possible. Surprise. There was no reservation made under the name Baskin after all, which I reported back to him. My mother cooked, served and had a meltdown. She punished us for forcing her hand and ‘making her’ do the holiday. Is this what people mean when they speak fondly of the holidays, the memories, the times spent together? I wouldn’t know.
Guerilla Tip: There’s no place like home.
A big confusion I have about my upbringing is that my parents gave so much lip service to devotion, but were too caught up in their own universe to see their kids for who they were. It was themselves and each other that they served with great devotion.
Makes you wonder, what did I learn from them of any use to me as an adult, let alone as a parent? See Tips Learned from My Family of Origin.
Kids arrived so close together that it was sink or swim, and I rose to the challenge.
Back from a movie one night, we found the new babysitter had the hardest time at bedtime. That was with only two kids at the time.
Guerilla Tip: All the fussing we do as parents does not apply to sitters.
We would come home to find they usually had it easier at bedtime than we did. There was less history, less investment, less meaning to the relationship. What kid wants to stay up to hang out with some neighbor’s teen? But the bedtime issue for that night, only discovered upon tiptoeing into the room with the two cribs, was that they were in the wrong cribs, too young to explain it to her. That was with only two kids at the time.
With three, there was even more to juggle. I was dead set against the idea that for years of panic to come I would be a prisoner of my own wishes to have a family. I was determined it would not be feeding time at the zoo.
My experiences built my resolve to get a system going that I could rely on for my own sanity, let alone for the kids.
Guerilla Tip: Sanity is not selfish. And what if it was?
Safety announcements on every airline say, “If you’re traveling with small children, adjust your own oxygen mask first, then…” Apparently, the instinct that tells us to take care of the kids first is amiss. It is safer to take care of ourselves first, and then we are in a stronger position to nurture and lead.
And along came divorce.
During three years of separation and then divorce, I had the newly found freedom to reshape rules and relationships based only on what I found that worked, regardless of the models of anyone’s family of origin.
Needless to say, many of my own models had to be ignored. Specifically due to my family of origin, I had earned the bravery to reinvent parenting for myself. This was the most rewarding struggle I ever faced.
I found loving ways to wrestle with the challenges of raising kids, to match wits while outnumbered by a relentless and almost overpowering adversary, to sharpen my strategy of fighting for peace under fire, and to use whatever scrappy tools were at hand.
Hence, guerilla parenting.
Look around. Has conventional parenting produced exceptional or mediocre results? If you want results that are conventional, you will get them with conventional techniques. Otherwise, you are hereby invited to stop imitating everyone else.
Guerilla Tip: Better to be creative and use what you’ve got, what works for you and for your kids—all unique individuals.
As people say in the business world, “What do you do when you hit a wall? Climb over it, go around it or dig under it.”
Other people’s kids may seem wild like gorillas, but you can do better: Kids are not gorillas nor are they to be treated as such, tempting as it may sometimes be to look for a zoo.
Guerilla Tip: Speak to kids as you speak to other people, with solid words but a simpler vocabulary. Don’t say, “Mommy, she in bad mood,” if you are Mommy—and never if you are Daddy, unless you want your spectacles removed.
Don’t say horsy when you mean horse. On the other hand, a rocking horse or bouncing horse is not a horse, so call it horsy if it makes you happy.
Change the course of your family history. Let me help you find your voice. All you need is love and a few tricks to apply.
Remember, though, it’s you or your sanity, not you or your kids.
