Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Bob

My mother will read this entry and either a) say "I'm SO GLAD that her therapist is this good" or b) say "I wish my daughter had a more acute sense of keeping private private." Either way, she will cry about 850 times while she reads this. There you go, mom. Make your choice accordingly.

The topic in therapy this weekend was "Do I demand that the men in my life prove that they love me too much and what relation does this have to classical music?"

And the answer was "Maybe a little bit but not as badly as I used to because I'm very aware of it as a habit and consciously try to stop myself as soon as I notice that it's happening" and "It's a direct result of classical music."

By which we, of course, mean that all little girls want their fathers to love them more than anybody else.

It would be simple to say that my father loved classical music more than he loved me, and that would make this a short entry and would have saved me thousands of dollars in therapy because it would have made separating out feelings and reactions much easier. But then, well, it would have been simple and I wouldn't need hours of therapy and meditation and personal writing exercises to work it out to begin with. And probably I'd be a less self-aware person and for sure a less understanding person. And also definitely an angrier person, because if it were just as simple as "My father loved classical music more than he loved me," that would be a reason to be angry. What I found in the end when I deconstructed the whole thing was that I don't really have a reason to be angry, and that was very, very freeing.

Let me first say, so that there is no confusion about how I feel about my father, I have great affection for my father. I do not (sorry, mom) love my father. I'm pretty aware of what love feels like and how to share it, and that's not the case here. I have tried to find it in me to love my father, but when asked "Do you love your father?" I cannot make the words come out or the feelings surface. But I have great affection for him. I think that he is a very, very, very good person who had a very difficult time with basic human emotions and didn't know how to be as good a person in action as he may have been inside. And I think that there were a lot of reasons for that.

I could tell you stories about my father that reveal such a sweet person that you would weep. And I could tell you more stories about him that would leave you saying "What an ass. Jesus." For a lot of people, the sweetness outweighed the selfishness (or confusion, however you want to view it). But those people were not his daughter.

But on to the classical music. My father loved classical music. By "My father loved classical music" I mean "My father LOVED classical music." From the time he heard his very first opera, he was hooked. Sadly, I can't remember the actual story about the first time he heard an opera, and I know that I've been told the story a hundred thousand times. Our home was filled with classical recordings that were played AT FULL VOLUME constantly. Literally (because these were the days of vinyl) there were shelves and shelves and shelves of recordings in several rooms. We went to the symphony or opera at least once a month, often more. Entire summer vacations were planned exclusively around opera festivals and schedules.

Pookie and I were forced to spend an hour a day all summer long for the majority of our teenage years being tutored in classical music and its composers and how to identify them and their themes and signatures by our father. This was a particularly sore point, at least for me. I can't remember how Pookie felt about it, but every single time I was dragged in during the middle of a summer afternoon from the swimming pool or playing basketball with my friends or whatever important social activity I was doing to sit at the dark dining room table while my father made me memorize the core theme elements of Brahms' chamber works, a little black ball of resentment welled up in me. And it wasn't because I was getting dragged inside. It was because the reason we were learning this stuff was because he loved it. And of course when I would point that out (because I was that kind of child), he would say that we were being taught these things because we weren't getting adequate education in public school. And then I would get SO ANGRY because I had begged FOR YEARS to be sent to private school. And among other reasons, I was told that I would not be attending private school because it was an expense we couldn't handle. And then I would become uncontrollably furious because apparently we couldn't afford to send me to private school but we could afford...

To take elaborate summer vacations to operatic destinations, to pay for endless tickets to symphonies and operas and to actually SUBSIDIZE an entire chamber music series at the Oglebay mansion in Wheeling. Oh yes. We were this serious. You do the math about how much something like that would cost. And, no matter what was going on during one of those chamber music weekends, I was expected to be there. It didn't matter if I had to give up sports practice or drama practice or weekend trips with my friends or things that I loved. I would sit patiently and listen to chamber music whether I liked it or not.

I'm simplifying this story somewhat into discreet examples, and it's not really that simple. But the point you need to take away is that my father loved classical music in such a way that he was willing to arrange his life in a pattern around it.

And, in some continued simplification, he did not love me in a way that he was willing to arrange his life in a pattern around me.

In fact, he didn't really like me all that much (and my mother's throat closes up here). It was more than once that I heard the phrase either directly or repeated back to me from another family member that my father "loved me because I was his daughter but didn't really like me as a person." But by the time that phrase started getting pulled out, I was already in my teens and already having reactions to having been a little girl whose father loved something else more than he loved her and probably, to him, I wasn't very likable. And I didn't like him very much either. We went the better part of an entire school year, maybe more, only communicating by leaving notes on the kitchen table for each other or relaying messages through my mother. We really weren't each other's biggest fans. And FOR SURE he did not love me in a way in which he would re-arrange his life around me. In fact, it was 100% the opposite. My life was expected to be crafted in such a way that it revolved around the thing that he loved - and that, of course, was classical music.

Now, my mother, I'm sure, is dying to tell me at this point that I have this all wrong and that she remembers it entirely differently. This is for two reasons. Firstly, my mother was an adult at the time and I was a sixteen-year-old. She probably noticed many ways in which this was not the case. I, however, as a sixteen-year-old only noticed that I and what was important to me were not all that high up on my father's priority list and that I was habitually asked to give things up that conflicted with the real true love, Bach. Also, to be fair, my mother is prone to look at things through a pair of glasses that are ever so slightly rose tinted. So, mom, before you send the long email about how I have this wrong, remember that I don't. You can't get something that you actually experienced wrong. But read on, because I'm about to tell you that I understand that dad really didn't actually love classical music more than he loved me.

My father was not good at experiencing or expressing interpersonal emotions. And yes, I just lifted that entire phrase from my therapist because who else would speak like that? This was probably due to a number of things. We can begin by simply leaving it at that we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that my father battled some mental and/or emotional demons most likely of a chemical nature similar to the one I had to deal with. Of course, that was back in the day where we didn't find great natural supplements or know how to control our body chemistry through diet or feel comfortable writing about our therapy breakthoughs on the web, so how those were dealt with was probably less than adequately.

Secondly, my father's family was, as a whole, not good at handling or expressing interpersonal emotions. I think I love my grandmother on my father's side as much, if not more, than most of my other family members. But I never heard her tell me that she loved me. EVER. Or at least that I can recall. And so of course my father would be bad at that. And to make it worse, my father and his family and their lack of expressive emotion was contrasted with my mother's family, who gave me exactly what I craved. My mother's side of the family? They will tell you that they love you when you come out of the bathroom. They will tell you that they love you because there's a pause in the conversation. They will tell you that they love you because you passed the vegetables at dinner. They are ALL ABOUT telling you that they love you, which to my underdeveloped teenage emotional matrix (yeah, I stole that phrase too) made the lack of that coming from my father all the more poignant.

Now, we've established that my father wasn't very good at experiencing or expressing interpersonal emotions, but everybody has love, and everybody wants to experience channeling that love somehow. And so my father found something that he could give his love to and that, at a basic level, elicited emotions in him that made him feel something similar to receiving the emotion back. In the end, it makes sense, because music can make you feel things. So if you're going to have a hard time feeling things for people, at least feel things for an art form, yes? After realizing this, I noticed that this was a totally similar characteristic in a lot of people I know who are overly passionate about, in specific, music. And I don't mean passionate about performing or creating music. I mean about listening to, collecting and adoring music. Anyway, it seems so clear now that that's what he did.

And I think my father would have preferred it if he could have made those emotions and reactions work that same way for me (or my brother, or my mother). But it's harder with people. They talk back, they have expectations, you can't decide what feeling they're going to make you feel before you put them onto the turntable. One thing I've definitely learned is that bad examples about how to share with and love people that get set early stay with people long into their life. I'm thankful every day that I had my mother's family around to make sure that, just like them, I was ALL ABOUT the love. And once I realized that my father really was just trying to compensate for something he didn't know how to do with people by doing it with music instead, I stopped being angry at him a while ago. By which I mean I stopped being angry with him on a daily and intellectual level, because if you get me in the same room with him there is a 99% chance that within 15 minutes I will have either lost my patience with him and snapped or have had to leave the room, but 33 years is a long time to resent somebody without having it surface when you're around them.

So I think that by "I stopped being angry at him" what I mean is "I'm at peace with him being who he is" more than I mean "I look forward to being around him." I think that's something though, yeah?

And so, of course, the resulting question is: "Jocelyn, do you feel like you're always asking the men in your life to prove that they love you more and more and more because you didn't feel like you got enough love from your father as a child?" (And the men in the room who have dated or tried to date me all raise their hands and holler "YES!"). And some of them would be right because that's definitely a habit that I got into. And some of them would be wrong because it's also a habit that I worked very hard to break and honestly what they think is my being demanding is just my refusing to settle for getting less than I give. And a couple of them would even say, "She's done that to me, but then she's caught herself and apologized." And those would be the ones I'm most proud of. Because, people, that took a lot of therapy and a lot of work at recognizing my own emotional patterns.

For a long time in my early twenties, I couldn't listen to classical music without actually getting angry. Literally. I would hear a beautiful piece of music, and it would make me feel anger that I didn't think that I got the love that I should have from my father when I was a child. I mean, I'm sure my mother is composing an email in her head right now about all the ways in which he did show me love. And I'm saying, "Mom, no he didn't. If he had, I would have felt it. I'm sensitive to the emotion. I'm sorry. And I'm not angry about it because I understand it now. But please don't try to convince me that's not how it was." Anyway, last weekend I listened to Chopin all weekend and it was a wonderful experience. Uplifting. Sweet. Blissful.

To me, that's really the sign that I've learned to let go of what I didn't get and focus on what I did. And I feel good about that. And I hope that when my mom closes her laptop after she reads this, that's the part that stays with her. That I grew up to be a really happy girl.