I'm thinking back to how I learned to do things. I watched sports on TV and then went and participated by joining little league baseball and football teams. I don't remember the coaches actually teaching us anything. They'd make us exercise and practice and improve the basic skills we already had. We learned to play by watching it on TV and seeing the older kids play before we were old enough.
I played some basketball but didn't have the height to compete and there were no little league teams. I excelled at ping pong and the only experience I had with it was watching and being fascinated by the Chinese' dominance in the Olympic games.
I played golf because I had to caddy for my Dad while he honed the skills to his passion. We watched it on television. We had golf magazines around the house and a tarp in the garage to hit balls into in the winter when the local courses were closed.
So, we're born with a skill set like good hand and eye coordination, athleticism and we pursue what opportunities exist in the areas where we have interest. We learn on our own through trial and error. We get better with practice. We build confidence as we hone our skills.
As I aged, it seemed my peers grew into young men and the girls into young women while I remained like a child. I was a late bloomer physically. So I found my self excelling at individual sports like ping pong and golf where I placed high in local competitions.
Well as we all age, there comes a time when we begin to explore our sexuality and again, no one teaches us about it. We learn by observing and through experimentation. Our curiosity leads us to find what we like and the feedback we receive lets us know what we're already good at and what we need to practice. I think we all want positive feedback. We want to be good at things. We want to be desired. We want to feel good about ourselves.
Lately, I've been wanting to read more than usual, which is very little. The only other time I really wanted to read was when I was incarcerated. I wanted and needed to be somewhere else. Books helped me with that. At times I'd have three books at a time. One I was finishing up, one I was just getting into and one on deck. I read more in an eighteen month period than all my life prior and since combined. As well as listened to a few radio programs that for me, achieved a similar escape.
So why am I wanting to read more now?
I often find myself contemplating and reflecting on life as I am busy with other things like cutting the grass or cooking. Often I awaken from a dream and with a song in my head that's relative to the dream.
This morning the song was "Wrecking Ball."
The dream was about my first wife, whom for thirty six years I thought was the mother of my one and only child, but through DNA this year found it to not be so.
As I went through my morning routine of feeding the cats, turning on the lights, fireplace and coffeemaker I realized that she, my first wife had been pregnant three times in the span of two years. None of them mine.
She was three months pregnant (by a friend of mine) when I married her . When that child was about one and a half years old, she was pregnant again but had an abortion (claiming it was mine but it was a completely different guy from the first, a friend of her's). This tossed our marriage into a tailspin and we separated for six months. When she got pregnant by another guy (third guy), I'd had enough and we divorced.
I woke up feeling like a victim. And I thought, who grows up wanting to be a victim? How'd I become that?
I began thinking of other things that happened over the course of my life and I saw a pattern of being victimized. Why? I thought about them and could not find the nexus for the individual events that would warrant revenge or anything of that nature.
What I discovered, the epiphany was that, just as I wrote about at the beginning of this post, I learned to be a victim by observing.
I was raised by a victim.
We all identify with one of our parents more than the other. According to Dr. Phil the same gender parent is the biggest influence in our lives. I believe I was more of a Mama's boy.
Had I identified more with my father I likely would have been an abuser. (I was and I abused me)
She was a victim. I'd seen her with black eyes and bruises. I'd watched her cry and listened to the violence on the other side of the bedroom door. I'd been a victim of the violence at my father's hands and witnessed a sibling suffer similar who then in turn victimized me with his dysfunctional frustrations mentally and physically.
There are things that have never left my memory that I've always wondered why they happened to me at the hands of what I considered friends and family.
I have to conclude that as much as my golf swing was identical to my dad's due to keen observation, that my ability to be victimized was honed in a similar fashion by keen observation of my mother.
There's another saying by Dr. Phil that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior.
I'm currently reading Heavy - An American Memoir
In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.
But we grow up and we realize how foolish we've been and at some point we have to adjust our behavior if we want better results.
And at this revelation, do we burn the bridges? Do we forgive and forget? How do we move on when there are triggers and pain that lurk with further observations.
But I'll save that topic for a future post.
