The Cold Shoulder

Before becoming a parent, the concept of having a virtual energy reading from a clairvoyant via WhatsApp would have provoked a feeling between skepticism and amusement.  After becoming a father, I eagerly accepted any and every opportunity to gain guidance, whether it be from a well known motivational speaker on YouTube or an anonymous drunk on a street corner, pontificating at the sky.  So, I was both eager and trusting when I called someone who I will refer to as the Virtual Seer, who was temporarily located in Tanzania. We spoke for about one minute, which was enough time for me to relay that I was a father struggling to understand why I am constantly triggered by my son.  With that meager window into my world she painted a vivid picture of my life as well as the plight of my ancestors which explained my predicament to perfection. 

Being deeply seen and validated by someone who doesn’t actually know me was one of the most healing experiences of my life.  This seems to be the goal of most psychotherapy relationships, which can take years to achieve, and for me it was attainable within 60 minutes with someone who was ten thousand miles away.  The Virtual Seer absolutely nailed the dynamics between me and my parents simply from hearing me speak their names aloud.  The analysis she gave was so on point, I wondered if she had been following me since birth, gathering data for a longitudinal study.  What she shared laid any and all doubts to rest about whether or not I was crazy and being overly sensitive about my relationship with my parents.  Yes, my ability to express my needs and emotions was hindered by my upbringing. My grievances were real, and they were impacting my ability to show up as the kind of father I wanted to be for Taishan. Before I mounted my high horse she made sure that I did not unfairly place the blame in the wrong place; the hands of my parents.  She situated my story, and my parents' stories inside of a larger frame she referred to as ‘generational emptiness.’  

I’d been reading about intergenerational trauma for years and understanding it on an intellectual level, but now my awareness was becoming embodied, simply by having it named by a stranger.  Her words were reaching back in time and speaking to my childhood self, saying “I see you.” The hairs stood on the back of my neck when she even identified the precise part of my body where I hold the most tension; between my spine and my right shoulder blade. This source of body pain is something I share in common with my mother, and according to The Virtual Seer it was rooted in the “cold shoulder” of my maternal grandmother.

Noni Edie

My Noni Edie was an embodied persona of the quintessential grandmother.  She vacuumed the house daily, kept her garden meticulously free of weeds and prepared elaborate, home cooked meals every day.  There is no experience that can match the feeling of nurturance that she communicated through her famous handmade gnocchi. At every major holiday and family gathering, the centerpiece of the table would be a massive dish of her pillowy potato gnocchis swimming in her equally adored meat sauce, accompanied by a large plastic container of Kraft Parmesan Cheese. In retrospect, this “cheese product” did not deserve to reside in the same room as these gnocchi, but Noni never stepped foot in Italy herself and this was her expression of assimilation into the American dream. Visiting Noni meant the smell of homemade pear pie and the syrupy sensation of her preserved peaches sliding down my throat. Every sunday morning, she wore curlers in her hair as she went about her household chores, preparing to attend church in an immaculately clean outfit. She was likely never seen outside of the home with so much as a stain or a wrinkle in any article of her clothing.  

As loving and adoring as my Noni was, she could not escape the harsh realities of her family line.  She was the youngest of 8 children born to Oreste and Natalina Buchingiani. Oreste notoriously earned the nickname Mussolini for his violent outbursts which traumatized all of his children including my Noni. Following a particularly charged dispute, his son Caesar slashed his tires, stormed off of the family property, and never spoke to him again.  As the baby of the family and the last to leave the house, my Noni felt like her prayers had been answered when she met my Nono Frank. She once recalled an incident during their courtship when her father lashed out at her and left her things looking like elongated Italian eggplants.  For the rest of his days, Nono referred to Oreste as a “mean son of a gun.” When Noni turned 18, they quickly married so she could escape the wrath of the dictatorship.  

Mama

To say that my mom was raised with high expectations would be a drastic understatement.  She was the only child in a Catholic Italian family - all of her parents' hopes and dreams were resting on her shoulders alone.  The love was absolutely conditional upon being a well behaved daughter, and a God fearing Catholic.  The home was kept scrupulously clean and my mom was expected to conform to the rigidity of her environment from the moment she took her first breath.  Supposedly, my mom was potty trained when she was 9 months old, something that my Noni was incredibly proud of. Since becoming a parent, this is something that I don’t understand to be developmentally possible. Either way, it explains a great deal about my mom’s propensity towards anxiety which has successfully been transmitted to me. 

Thanks to support from The Virtual Seer, I was able to peer into my mom’s childhood home. She relayed images of my Noni standing in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, while my mom pleaded in vain for her attention. She literally gave her the cold shoulder, unintentionally creating a lifelong source of tension in my mom’s body that would eventually transfer to me.  It does not matter if The Virtual Seer was actually time traveling into a specific moment in my Noni’s kitchen. What is essential are the dynamics of the relationship between my mom and my Noni, and from everything I know in my mind and feel in my gut, this story checks out.  

What I now know from experience is that it is incredibly difficult to give our children what we ourselves did not receive. As much as I’m sure my Noni told herself she would never treat her child the way she had been treated, there were some wounds that were too entrenched for her to overcome or even be aware of.  By never physically beating my mom she made leaps and bounds towards a more nurturing relationship.  Still, the notion of loving her child unconditionally was probably not even on her radar as a goal to aspire towards.  When she was feeling annoyed by the demands of her child while trying to take care of the endless tasks in her home I can see why she would withdraw.  And so, my mom learned to play her role in the family, doing all the things necessary to earn the conditional love that was available. She went to church, worked hard in school, and did what her parents asked of her. She was living a respectable life and making her parents proud, at least until she moved out of the house in the late 1960’s and had her mind blown as a student at Chico State University.  

In the following decade, it is hard to imagine a path that my mom could have taken that would have been more upsetting to her parents.  After getting married, she got divorced, which was absolutely unheard of in her family at the time.  She became politically active and increasingly critical of the U.S. government, particularly for its involvement in the Vietnam War.  The icing on the cake was when the FBI showed up at my grandparents house demanding to know why their daughter was in Cuba, which was news to them.   My mother was participating in the Venceremos Brigade, a program that clandestinely brought young Americans to the island to provide volunteer labor to help build the communist utopia envisioned by Fidel Castro. To my grandparents, who were fully indoctrinated in the hysteria of the red scare, purposefully going to Cuba was one of the most morally reprehensible actions you could take at the time.  When confronted with the news about their FBI encounter, my mother was able to craft a depoliticized story about how she was in Mexico and got offered an opportunity to learn about education in Cuba.  When I asked my mom about this chapter in her life she said that communication with her parents became very sparse, and she was not able to share much with them about what was really going on in her life because their reactions would range between fury and complete confusion.

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As a child, I had every reason to believe that whatever happened before I was born was a separate, distinct chapter in my lineage.  My mom made such a clear break from the traditions of her parents that I imagined her childhood being nestled between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Her stories of confession at church and spinning batons in the local marching band were ancient parables so impossibly far from my reality that they couldn’t conceivably impact my life. I was allowed to frolic naked in the backyard and make messy art projects. I was permitted to wear dresses and put on my mom’s makeup. I was never forced to go to church. I wasn't beholden to any etiquette like knowing which hand holds a knife or which fork is used for salad. I joyfully chewed with my mouth open, and I was permitted to leave the table without asking to be excused.  My Noni was often appalled by my animalistic behavior and would tell my mom “you never used to do that!”  I had the notion that my grandparents represented an archaic way of being and my mom had escaped from that paradigm to raise me as a free spirited child.  Of course, this is not how intergenerational trauma operates.

What’s become clear since I began my parent journey is that every generation is simply doing their best with what they’ve been given. Despite her very best intentions, my mom ended up in the same boat as her mother. If not the same boat, then at least the same body of water.  Even though my mother made enormous strides towards providing a nurturing environment in which I could develop and thrive, there are still gaps in what I received. There were things that she was unable to give as a result of not having received them.  

With an introverted firstborn child, my mother faced the challenge of learning to attune to the emotional needs of a being who does not necessarily say how he is feeling. Working full time, paying a mortgage and keeping a functional home did not leave an abundance of time to decipher the unspoken needs of a child who appears to be comfortable alone in his room playing with legos for hours on end.  In addition to lack of capacity, there was a void of lived experience. There was no childhood memory in her body of having someone be curious about her inner world, and hence no blueprint for her to follow in connecting to the mysterious and elusive emotional world of her child. As a result, I retreated into a cave of introversion and self-sufficiency, creating the story that no one will really understand my inner world, and it is up to me to meet my own emotional needs. Thus began a lifetime of emotional repression and people pleasing, which has caused great harm and confusion to myself and others.

Since becoming a father, it has become clear that I struggle with identifying and expressing my emotions, which is not what I want to model for my son. There is a gulf between where I am and where I would like to be.  Processing this discrepancy is not something I am likely to complete, and Taishan will one day need to unpack the baggage that he accumulates due to the gaps in what I am capable of providing him.  On some level I can accept this, and trust that these are the precise conditions that are necessary for him to grow and evolve. At the same time, I feel sadness about how much work I still need to do on myself. I’m determined to travel as far as possible on my own healing journey so that Taishan can focus on creating what he wants instead of following in my footsteps and wasting energy trying to decipher what he wants and how he feels. In particular, I’m aiming to fully explore the roots of my anger, in the hopes that my son may have a more evolved relationship with his undesirable emotions and not be stuck holding the unprocessed rage of those who came before.

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For a musical interpretation of encouragement from anscetors, listen to ‘Keep Going’ by clicking the image below .

“I owe all that I’ve created

to the last seven generations,

If my life is any indication

I know my seeds will flee the matrix”