Somethng I was thinking about a couple of years ago

Alana Kalinowski
5 May 2007


We all inherit little “prizes” from our parents; some are good and some can be a little frightening. As scientists will tell you, we are simultaneously a product of nature and nurture. On the nature front, it just so happens that I got a raw deal—my feet are a microcosm of my misfortune. From my mother, I inherited huge and ever so attractive flat feet. To add insult to injury, my dad bestowed upon me the skin of a lizard, not to mention toenails that enjoy growing into flesh. It sounds beautiful, right? I can’t wait to buy expensive sandals to show them off.
On the nurture front, I also received several interesting favors in my goodie-bag: thanks to my mom, although I am living in a big city, I have the desperate urge to weed a garden and shove my hands in dirt. In the tradition of my mother, who called all six of her children (three boys and three girls) either “Sho Sho” or “Shandra,” I find myself calling all of my female co-workers, “Woman.” (No need to preserve individual identity.) From my Dr. Doolittle dad, I received an obsession with animals and their physical particulars. Observing a seagull’s legs can make me happier than few other sights in life. We have all inherited quirks and qualities—so what do we do with our parental prizes?
My tendency to make up words and my hideous feet are both obvious products of my parents’ influence; there are however, qualities in each of us that are not as directly inherited, but rather, a reactionary bi-product of our parents’ influence. These are often thought patterns, habits, emotional reactions, and methods of relating to ourselves and others that we often neglect to consider. We do not notice them unless we go hunting for them, and yet I would dare to say that they are often the most powerful forces in our person. Although many of my inherited qualities are quite positive and make up a large part of why I value myself, there are many that have wreaked havoc in my relationships. As any good therapist would know, rooting out generational forces can be hard work, even when you know what must be done to kill them. In layman’s terms—how do we deal with what makes us all uniquely crazy?
Although I am still quite young, I find that the older I get, the more I like humans. The truth that is we are all a little crazy. The best part is the fact that most of us try really hard to hide the crazy, but it always comes out. Crazy is often like Derek Zoolander in the coal mines: SURPRISE! I think that part of what makes us unique individuals is our own special breed of crazy.
Our issues and baggage are the fingerprints of our person. As it turns out, a large portion of my crazy is due to the fact that I was born a very emotional and sensitive person, but was raised in an environment where to be such was intensely scorned. Since the days of my glorious mullet and sideburns, I have done everything in my power to disregard any and all emotions and distance myself as far away as possible from anything that is identifiably emotional. Fortunately, I failed in many ways, so I am not a deadened shell consisting only of thoughts. Although he died before I turned seven, I attribute, at least indirectly, this fairly unhealthy urge to my grandpa Hoffmann. Thanks, Grandpa, for the dash of crazy you so generously left for me.

As the oldest of four, my mother’s father, Dick Hoffmann, did not have the luxury of “validating his feelings.” Continuing in the language of the psychobabble we all know and love: Abandoned by his father during the height of the Great Depression, grandpa accepted his designated role as family caretaker without protest or attention to personal desires and needs. Having never developed the muscles needed to express himself, grandpa escaped all sadness and despair through the help of alcohol. The frustration, anger or any other emotion that was not completely drowned out by booze, came out in destructive mutations that were directed at my mom and her eight siblings. Although my mom can go on and on about how grateful she is to her dad for teaching her the love of nature, planting and watching things grow, she is an obvious adult child of an alcoholic.
In the ideal environment of love and safety, children are free to have feelings, to express them in various ways, and ultimately discover healthy points of connection between thoughts and emotions. As a child, my mom was not given such an environment. Living with the instability of her alcoholic father and severely depressed mother, my mom spent her childhood scared and on the defensive. For reasons obviously different than grandpa, my mom also never flexed the mental muscles needed to process her emotions and has therefore lived a life captive to them. With hardly any ability to assign relative weight to one emotion over another, my mom was naturally attracted to my dad, a man fluent in the “language of emotions” and highly mentally disciplined. As one might expect, this offset of power and ability between my parents proved to be fertile breeding ground for an unhealthy understanding of emotions for my siblings and myself.
For reasons far more complex than portrayed here, emotions were seen in my family to be the root of all evil. Emotions not under the reign of logical thought were forces that led to all things chaotic, destructive, unpredictable, and above all, like mom. Aside from the fact that this understanding placed emotions, and my mom, in an unjust, and not to mention, wrong light, it was the foundation on which my life of a conflicted identity was formed. The reality is that we are physical, mental, emotional and spiritual beings. Each version of who we are informs the other. We all know what develops when any one is emphasized above the others: the tool that kisses his muscles, that pompous windbag that debates everything you say, that guy that gets pissed off by the smallest of accidents, or that annoying person so obsessed with the spirit world that their kids are neglected and hungry. We have all met them—and probably wanted to hit them; yet somewhere in our mind we know that something is not right. Something is missing and there is a need for balance. For the majority of my life, I found it hard not to neglect the portion of my being that I believed to be the cause of all that hurt me.
I am a woman. There, I said it. Sadly, that took me years. Thanks to the historically-rooted stereotypes held by society, factoring being female into my identity was something I could not do until my senior year of college. Built like an Amazon woman, it is hard to forget that I am indeed a woman. Until recently however, this forgetting had always been the sought-after goal. Although I always promoted my female gender physically, I made a point of proving to everyone—especially boys/men—that I was not the stereotypical girl. Believing the mass lie regarding the intimate bond between women and the emotions that produce evil qualities such as pettiness and manipulation, I threw the baby out with the bathwater and rejected being female as a preemptive war against emotions. As you might have already guessed, this did wonders for my dating life. Ah, and there is it folks, just one manifestation of the crazy. But the best part is, unhealthy behavior never stops just there; it loves to see how many ways it can make itself known throughout all areas of your life.
For all those that have attempted to kill wild bamboo in upstate NY, you know very well the frustration of thinking you have killed something by rooting it out only to have those damn buds shoot up out of the ground a week later. Killing habits given to you by your parents is even more frustrating. I have been working on unlearning much of what I “know” about emotions for the past six years. It turns out I have quite a way to go. My current goal is to reclaim the validity of thoughts that have been influenced by emotions. Contrary to what I knew as a child, a thought can be true and valid even if you are in a state of hysteria while thinking it. I am not there yet. I still have tendencies to discredit highly emotional or sensitive people. I still have incredible guilt if I feel something that I cannot logically justify feeling. And above all, I still have remnants of contempt for an entire facet of my person. When I am overwhelmed by how much “work” I have to do, I rejoice in the many beautiful qualities I have inherited. I will never get rid of the crazy all together, but I have faith that by identifying and understanding my bag of issues, I can do some serious damage to their root systems.