Thursday – Heroes and Dragons
Dec. 16th, 2010 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
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“Forty five minutes,” my husband, Jeff, said with amazement as he read the report from our son’s school, “How can anyone stay that angry for forty five minutes? I mean, I can go off when I get mad, but…”
“You’re over it in about 10 or 15 minutes,” I said. Our son is not the only one in the house prone to the occasional hissy fit, but Sweet Pea’s last much, much longer. There is a wide array of styles for individual tempers, and our house comes with the variety pack. Jeff has a quick temper that, like a firecracker, goes “pop!” and then dissipates in a little cloud of smoke. My anger is of the charcoal variety; it takes a lot of work to get me hot under the collar, but once I am there my anger will smolder indefinitely. Sweet Pea has a temper like a Molotov cocktail; a quick burning fuse that explodes and leaves a lot of damage in its wake.
The temper tantrum at my son’s school included screaming, throwing object, head butting and banging his head, and kicking; it took 45 minutes for the fuel to burn off and for him to return to normal. He can go for up to an hour and a half sometimes.
I started thinking, Where have I seen a temper like that before? When it hit me, I stopped breathing for a second. Oh, yes, this rage was very familiar, and when I realized how familiar it was I felt a wave of love and sentimentality wash over me. Which are weird emotions to get when you are thinking about explosive, long burning episodes of rage. The truth is that I realized that my son’s fury made me really, really miss my mom.
My mom came with her own variety pack of anger. There were times when she cried tears of rage, times when she ranted and screamed, and time when all hell broke lose much the way it does with my son. I never see my son’s rages; they happen at school where I occasionally get to hear them over the phone when they sent out an SOS call to my cell phone. Mostly I just read the descriptions of them that come home in little matter-of-fact reports. I never saw my mother’s rages, either. I would see the fire ignite when her body would stiffen and her face would turn red, but I was quickly sent a safe distance away from it.
“Get out of my sight,” she would hiss. “Go to your room and DO NOT COME OUT until I come and get you! GO! NOW!” I would scurry to my room and close the door, where I would play while my mother the storm would wreck havoc through the house. I could hear things banging into walls and crashing to the floor, and my mother screaming and crying and shouting. I don’t remember how long the rages lasted; I was very young. I remember there would be a period of quiet after the rage passed, and then my door would open.
"Come clean up this house," she would say,"Look what you made me do. If you didn’t make me so mad, this wouldn’t have happened." Throughout the house every throw pillow had been thrown, every horizontal surface had been swept clean of it’s contents that lay scattered on the floor, and the curtains were askew on all of the windows. I would clean up the mess, as this was my punishment for whatever had set her off.
Some years after she died, my kid brother brought up these rages. “Remember when she would send us to our rooms and then tear up the house? You realize she did that because she was afraid she was going to hurt us, don’t you?” It was true. My mother’s generation believed in spanking, and she had no problem with the idea of taking her hand, a leather belt, or the flexible branch of a yaupon tree to her children’s flesh. But when she was at her angriest, she did not touch us; she did not believe that she would have the self control to stop before she inflicted serious injury.
It all stemmed from the time my oldest brother at the age of 4 told her to shut up. She didn’t remember hitting him; she only remembered that suddenly he was crying and that she could see the red imprint of her palm across his face. I remember her telling me about the day, and the look of dread and horror on her face let me know this was a moment she would never be able to shake off. It was then that she realized that she was capable of monstrous things and that she had a responsibility to keep the monster away from her children. After that day, when she felt felt it awaken she made us hide from it while she forced it to breath its fire and fury against inanimate objects.
I admire her for this. Fighting monsters and protecting innocents is what heroes do; the fact that the monster came from within and not from without makes her efforts more amazing to me, not less. So many people in this world do not fight their monsters and let them wreck havoc (and not just against throw pillows). We all can lose control; it takes a special kind of self awareness to feel your control give way and to take steps to protect other people from your personal demon.
I was small back then when my mother fought her monster. My son is small right now and his grandmother’s monster, passed down through my DNA, is a little too big for him to effectively manage. His monster may be a little fiercer than the one my mother fought because it is working within a masculine brain, which tends to be a little more aggressive than a feminine brain thanks to the influence of testosterone.
My mother has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, and any lessons she can teach me I have to discover by reaching into my childhood memories and holding them up to the light of my adult experience. There is a dragon in my bloodline, but through my mother I know that the sword and shield needed to fight the dragon are forged from self awareness and self control. At the age of 6, my little knight is not strong enough to wield these things effectively. I have hope for him because as a child I watched a hero fight this same dragon time and time again, and triumph over it. I pray that unlike her, he does not have to hurt someone dear to him in order to discover the need to keep the dragon in check.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
.
.
“Forty five minutes,” my husband, Jeff, said with amazement as he read the report from our son’s school, “How can anyone stay that angry for forty five minutes? I mean, I can go off when I get mad, but…”
“You’re over it in about 10 or 15 minutes,” I said. Our son is not the only one in the house prone to the occasional hissy fit, but Sweet Pea’s last much, much longer. There is a wide array of styles for individual tempers, and our house comes with the variety pack. Jeff has a quick temper that, like a firecracker, goes “pop!” and then dissipates in a little cloud of smoke. My anger is of the charcoal variety; it takes a lot of work to get me hot under the collar, but once I am there my anger will smolder indefinitely. Sweet Pea has a temper like a Molotov cocktail; a quick burning fuse that explodes and leaves a lot of damage in its wake.
The temper tantrum at my son’s school included screaming, throwing object, head butting and banging his head, and kicking; it took 45 minutes for the fuel to burn off and for him to return to normal. He can go for up to an hour and a half sometimes.
I started thinking, Where have I seen a temper like that before? When it hit me, I stopped breathing for a second. Oh, yes, this rage was very familiar, and when I realized how familiar it was I felt a wave of love and sentimentality wash over me. Which are weird emotions to get when you are thinking about explosive, long burning episodes of rage. The truth is that I realized that my son’s fury made me really, really miss my mom.
My mom came with her own variety pack of anger. There were times when she cried tears of rage, times when she ranted and screamed, and time when all hell broke lose much the way it does with my son. I never see my son’s rages; they happen at school where I occasionally get to hear them over the phone when they sent out an SOS call to my cell phone. Mostly I just read the descriptions of them that come home in little matter-of-fact reports. I never saw my mother’s rages, either. I would see the fire ignite when her body would stiffen and her face would turn red, but I was quickly sent a safe distance away from it.
“Get out of my sight,” she would hiss. “Go to your room and DO NOT COME OUT until I come and get you! GO! NOW!” I would scurry to my room and close the door, where I would play while my mother the storm would wreck havoc through the house. I could hear things banging into walls and crashing to the floor, and my mother screaming and crying and shouting. I don’t remember how long the rages lasted; I was very young. I remember there would be a period of quiet after the rage passed, and then my door would open.
"Come clean up this house," she would say,"Look what you made me do. If you didn’t make me so mad, this wouldn’t have happened." Throughout the house every throw pillow had been thrown, every horizontal surface had been swept clean of it’s contents that lay scattered on the floor, and the curtains were askew on all of the windows. I would clean up the mess, as this was my punishment for whatever had set her off.
Some years after she died, my kid brother brought up these rages. “Remember when she would send us to our rooms and then tear up the house? You realize she did that because she was afraid she was going to hurt us, don’t you?” It was true. My mother’s generation believed in spanking, and she had no problem with the idea of taking her hand, a leather belt, or the flexible branch of a yaupon tree to her children’s flesh. But when she was at her angriest, she did not touch us; she did not believe that she would have the self control to stop before she inflicted serious injury.
It all stemmed from the time my oldest brother at the age of 4 told her to shut up. She didn’t remember hitting him; she only remembered that suddenly he was crying and that she could see the red imprint of her palm across his face. I remember her telling me about the day, and the look of dread and horror on her face let me know this was a moment she would never be able to shake off. It was then that she realized that she was capable of monstrous things and that she had a responsibility to keep the monster away from her children. After that day, when she felt felt it awaken she made us hide from it while she forced it to breath its fire and fury against inanimate objects.
I admire her for this. Fighting monsters and protecting innocents is what heroes do; the fact that the monster came from within and not from without makes her efforts more amazing to me, not less. So many people in this world do not fight their monsters and let them wreck havoc (and not just against throw pillows). We all can lose control; it takes a special kind of self awareness to feel your control give way and to take steps to protect other people from your personal demon.
I was small back then when my mother fought her monster. My son is small right now and his grandmother’s monster, passed down through my DNA, is a little too big for him to effectively manage. His monster may be a little fiercer than the one my mother fought because it is working within a masculine brain, which tends to be a little more aggressive than a feminine brain thanks to the influence of testosterone.
My mother has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, and any lessons she can teach me I have to discover by reaching into my childhood memories and holding them up to the light of my adult experience. There is a dragon in my bloodline, but through my mother I know that the sword and shield needed to fight the dragon are forged from self awareness and self control. At the age of 6, my little knight is not strong enough to wield these things effectively. I have hope for him because as a child I watched a hero fight this same dragon time and time again, and triumph over it. I pray that unlike her, he does not have to hurt someone dear to him in order to discover the need to keep the dragon in check.
