Love

"Oh love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."
Hermann Hesse

The last thing I ever connected to my upbringing was my own capacity to love. My anger when I drank, my distance from most people, my need to confront things and issues, and my urge to keep moving from place to place, job to job all made sense to me in this context. I never examined my ability to love others, either women, my family, or my daughters. It never dawned on me to suspect that love wasn't an intrinsic gift independent of my environment or the conditions I was raised in. I guess I thought it was something so pure, so natural that anyone could summon it and make it work.
My mother was loving in her way. She hugged us, tried to protect us from my step-father, and she professed her love often. But the emotional blackmail that followed negated those overtures. When things didn't go well, she would retreat into her "illnesses" or into a deep depression. And the lesson I learned most about love from my mother was that she loved my step-father, and it was her job to repair whatever damage he would do to us. It was also her job to let us know he loved us, for he never told us, other than a few times when he was in a drunken stupor. No, I don't think I ever had a chance to experience or understand love in a healthy way.
By the time I left the house I thought I was ready to love others, to engage in intimate relationships. But I was wrong. I never, ever let anyone too far in. I didn't share my feelings, other than anger and occasional playfulness. I never allowed anyone to understand me, to share my life. I didn't know how.
I believed that working hard and providing for my family was my job. I did so, and continued to keep those people I loved at arm's distance. Subsequently, I am now 50 years old and realizing that no one knows me. Yes, people love me, God knows why, but no one knows me very well. And despite the fact that I have realized this, I still have no idea how to reach out and let those around me in. There is a peculiar kind of loneliness that follows this revelation, but not a terrible kind. You can hurt people by letting them in, and maybe I just don't like what is buried deep inside me. So my form of love has been protecting those around me from myself I guess, and I never understood that (though I listened to thousands of complaints over the years about my remoteness) until I saw the film Affliction. The movie was familiar, the story much like my own. But it was the film's final narration that really that made things clear for me. Men like me, who are raised in violence, retreat from those we love, knowing instinctively that the violence is deep inside us well. Our job is to protect them from our inheritance, subsequently hurting them in a completely different fashion.
The job at hand for me now is to take a hard look at the inside, try to separate it from the ugliness it was formed in, and find me. When I do, I have to make peace with whatever is there before I can truly love anyone the way they deserve. It is a frightful journey, as I suspect I have my doubts that I am any better than my step-father. I just know I cannot live the rest of my life this disconnected from the people who love me.