Two Car Rides
I was taken on two car rides when I was a child. One was a short trip. The other was a continuous back and forth journey through six weeks. Taken together in the context of my childhood, they explain a lot about where I’m coming from. And it will have to do, because this is all I plan to divulge of my family life here.
The first car ride happened when I was four or five. My mother and father were in an argument. I expect this argument had something to do with my mother’s open affair with the town minister. Not sexual, as far as I know, but very much romantic. A religious love forbidden by existing marriages and therefore made all the more passionate. It was more popular in my home town where I grew up than a TV show, and my father had to live through the humiliation.
It happened around this time, so I expect my father’s stupid behavior was triggered by this arrangement. In fact, I suspect she taunted him by saying he wasn’t this or that enough whereas the good reverend was. And so, to prove to my mother that he was every bit as much of a man as the midwest Methodist minister under her spell, my father yanked me from the home, shoved me into the passenger’s seat of his beloved car, and proceeded to drive to the market down the street.
It’s a pretty straight shot to that market, but I think my father was very evidently drunk. I was in danger. No doubt. But what I understood was this car ride was the result of their toxic marriage. More important, it was the first certainty in my soul that nobody is, in fact, in charge. No authority figure has the authority they claim to have. And no one will save you. Ever. Sort of like skipping ahead in time to still be five years old, but to be shown everything about the Uvalde shooting and the adults who did nothing. Sort of like that, I imagine. Trust no one.
For months I had the same recurring dream, over and over. It started with me in the passenger seat of a car (the car was never very well defined). We are in the driveway of the house, and the car is backing up. Nobody is in the driver’s seat. I am terrified. As the car reaches the end of the driveway, it turns to face the other way down Granger Road, the opposite way from the way my father took. It faces, in the dream, toward the woods, the gravel road, and the unknown wild beyond. But, because it is facing this way, I, in the passenger seat, can now look out at the front porch of our house clearly. My mother has come out in hysterics.
And then, all at once, she is in the driver’s seat. I am momentarily relieved, because someone is finally in charge, but then I look at her, and something isn’t right. I begin to panic again and I wake up.
Over and over and over. Nobody ever talked to me about the car ride or admitted it happened to me or attempted to explain it. They made up, and the whole thing was immediately covered in a CIA style do not disturb wrapper and hidden in an end-of-Indiana-Jones style closet that would soon be filled with such evidence. Evidence about which we must never speak, or, especially, discuss with Stephen. Or, later, especially, allow Stephen to investigate. At any cost.
About five years later, my mother found out that my father had cheated on her. In response, she fled the house in her car, me in the passenger seat, to start a new life. Just her and me. Over the course of the next six weeks I was her psychotherapist, her career counselor, and the son of someone she suddenly hated more than I’d ever seen anyone hate anything before. For six weeks I lived in a world where we searched for a new place to live by day, only to come home at night and camp out until the next morning.
Nobody explained anything about this to me. Not one word of why it was happening, or what would happen next. My mother was dying, that’s all I knew. She was suddenly dying. I had to save her. I had to save my dying mother by absorbing a life-changing wave of toxic trauma that took six weeks to crash and created a new tide pool of family sorrow that would establish a whole new geography of relationships.
I understood the dream better only when I was much older. It was the direct result of being terrified into a traumatic state where no harbor was safe, yes, but it was also processing truth so deeply that it was predicting the future. And I knew its prediction was right. I knew that mother was no more responsible in the end than father. Nobody would save me. I would be a helpless passenger in a car driven in fury to prove a point that had nothing to do with me until I was able to escape to college, and really for a good time after.
Now I am the enemy of the family. The person that everyone conveniently decided is responsible for mother’s increasing mental illness, from which she continued to suffer helplessly, because she would not accept help, for the rest of my life, in greater and greater levels of terrifying disorientation about what was happening to her or why she was so hateful of everyone around her. I once tried to help. That was when my two brothers and my father made their move. They knew they could convince my helpless mother that I was the cause of her sorrow and in fact, the very cause of her illness. If they could just convey to me and her both that this was the consensus, she would find peace, and I would probably be wise enough to figure out all on my own not to come home anymore.
And so they did.
And so I didn’t.
These days it’s hard for me to relate to people who aren’t very secure with God and their position in life. Because most people are fronting an authority they don’t have, and every single one of these fronting people can tell that I see it. And the minute they see that I see it, they see me as a Palestinian child through the eyes of an IDF soldier. I must be destroyed or their authority, which is a lie, will be exposed.
That is also how my mother sees me now. I am her Palestinian baby. The thing that must be starved out because it once threatened the authority she believes she has. She hates me deeply now. I wonder if it worked for my family. I wonder if shunning me for being the traumatized witch who could see the reality beneath the layers brought them happiness and comfort and stability. I hope so.
I relate deeply to Jim Rockford and I wish I had his dad. I really do. I pretend my apartment in Long Beach is that trailer by the beach in Malibu in the 70s. You can’t get that scene anywhere north of LA now anymore, not least because it’s all burned to the ground.
But you can still get a big whiff of it in Long Beach. I’m glad I made it this far. What Jung has taught me is that my journey, while very unique, is not isolated. It is part of a greater pattern, and many men greater than I have suffered through it. And that pressure you go through turns your soul into a diamond.
I was taken on two car rides when I was a child. One was a short trip. The other was a continuous back and forth journey through six weeks. Taken together in the context of my childhood, they explain a lot about where I’m coming from. And it will have to do, because this is all I plan to divulge of my family life here.
The first car ride happened when I was four or five. My mother and father were in an argument. I expect this argument had something to do with my mother’s open affair with the town minister. Not sexual, as far as I know, but very much romantic. A religious love forbidden by existing marriages and therefore made all the more passionate. It was more popular in my home town where I grew up than a TV show, and my father had to live through the humiliation.
It happened around this time, so I expect my father’s stupid behavior was triggered by this arrangement. In fact, I suspect she taunted him by saying he wasn’t this or that enough whereas the good reverend was. And so, to prove to my mother that he was every bit as much of a man as the midwest Methodist minister under her spell, my father yanked me from the home, shoved me into the passenger’s seat of his beloved car, and proceeded to drive to the market down the street.
It’s a pretty straight shot to that market, but I think my father was very evidently drunk. I was in danger. No doubt. But what I understood was this car ride was the result of their toxic marriage. More important, it was the first certainty in my soul that nobody is, in fact, in charge. No authority figure has the authority they claim to have. And no one will save you. Ever. Sort of like skipping ahead in time to still be five years old, but to be shown everything about the Uvalde shooting and the adults who did nothing. Sort of like that, I imagine. Trust no one.
For months I had the same recurring dream, over and over. It started with me in the passenger seat of a car (the car was never very well defined). We are in the driveway of the house, and the car is backing up. Nobody is in the driver’s seat. I am terrified. As the car reaches the end of the driveway, it turns to face the other way down Granger Road, the opposite way from the way my father took. It faces, in the dream, toward the woods, the gravel road, and the unknown wild beyond. But, because it is facing this way, I, in the passenger seat, can now look out at the front porch of our house clearly. My mother has come out in hysterics.
And then, all at once, she is in the driver’s seat. I am momentarily relieved, because someone is finally in charge, but then I look at her, and something isn’t right. I begin to panic again and I wake up.
Over and over and over. Nobody ever talked to me about the car ride or admitted it happened to me or attempted to explain it. They made up, and the whole thing was immediately covered in a CIA style do not disturb wrapper and hidden in an end-of-Indiana-Jones style closet that would soon be filled with such evidence. Evidence about which we must never speak, or, especially, discuss with Stephen. Or, later, especially, allow Stephen to investigate. At any cost.
About five years later, my mother found out that my father had cheated on her. In response, she fled the house in her car, me in the passenger seat, to start a new life. Just her and me. Over the course of the next six weeks I was her psychotherapist, her career counselor, and the son of someone she suddenly hated more than I’d ever seen anyone hate anything before. For six weeks I lived in a world where we searched for a new place to live by day, only to come home at night and camp out until the next morning.
Nobody explained anything about this to me. Not one word of why it was happening, or what would happen next. My mother was dying, that’s all I knew. She was suddenly dying. I had to save her. I had to save my dying mother by absorbing a life-changing wave of toxic trauma that took six weeks to crash and created a new tide pool of family sorrow that would establish a whole new geography of relationships.
I understood the dream better only when I was much older. It was the direct result of being terrified into a traumatic state where no harbor was safe, yes, but it was also processing truth so deeply that it was predicting the future. And I knew its prediction was right. I knew that mother was no more responsible in the end than father. Nobody would save me. I would be a helpless passenger in a car driven in fury to prove a point that had nothing to do with me until I was able to escape to college, and really for a good time after.
Now I am the enemy of the family. The person that everyone conveniently decided is responsible for mother’s increasing mental illness, from which she continued to suffer helplessly, because she would not accept help, for the rest of my life, in greater and greater levels of terrifying disorientation about what was happening to her or why she was so hateful of everyone around her. I once tried to help. That was when my two brothers and my father made their move. They knew they could convince my helpless mother that I was the cause of her sorrow and in fact, the very cause of her illness. If they could just convey to me and her both that this was the consensus, she would find peace, and I would probably be wise enough to figure out all on my own not to come home anymore.
And so they did.
And so I didn’t.
These days it’s hard for me to relate to people who aren’t very secure with God and their position in life. Because most people are fronting an authority they don’t have, and every single one of these fronting people can tell that I see it. And the minute they see that I see it, they see me as a Palestinian child through the eyes of an IDF soldier. I must be destroyed or their authority, which is a lie, will be exposed.
That is also how my mother sees me now. I am her Palestinian baby. The thing that must be starved out because it once threatened the authority she believes she has. She hates me deeply now. I wonder if it worked for my family. I wonder if shunning me for being the traumatized witch who could see the reality beneath the layers brought them happiness and comfort and stability. I hope so.
I relate deeply to Jim Rockford and I wish I had his dad. I really do. I pretend my apartment in Long Beach is that trailer by the beach in Malibu in the 70s. You can’t get that scene anywhere north of LA now anymore, not least because it’s all burned to the ground.
But you can still get a big whiff of it in Long Beach. I’m glad I made it this far. What Jung has taught me is that my journey, while very unique, is not isolated. It is part of a greater pattern, and many men greater than I have suffered through it. And that pressure you go through turns your soul into a diamond.