Depression Kid

I was nine years old.  Sometime in 1933.  And my world was collapsing in front of me.  My father was drunk again, he and my mother had been arguing more and more loudly, when suddenly everything exploded and he began physically attacking her.  In seconds she was on the floor and he was sitting on top of her, his hands around her throat.

“Dad!” I screamed.  “Leave Mom alone!”

He just grunted, swore again, and hit her in the face.  She screamed, half a scream, half a moan.

“Don’t!” I heard myself yell.  “NO!”

He hit her again.  Then again.

Somehow I had an empty milk bottle in my hand.  A heavy, thick, almost indestructible empty milk bottle that had been sitting on the kitchen table.  It felt like a heavy rock, solid, unbreakable...

My father looked at me.

I was crying.  I could stop him.  With that milk bottle in my hand.  One good solid smash--just one--right on his head--.

I raised the bottle.

He kept staring at me.

I dropped the bottle and ran from the room.

I don’t remember what happened next, but somehow I was lying on my bed, sobbing my heart out.

“It’s all right, honey,” my mother was saying, her arms around me. “He’s gone now.  It’s

all right--”

But it wasn’t all right.

I should have done it and I hadn’t.

I should have stopped him. But I didn’t.

I should have hit him so hard he’d never hit her again.

I should have.  But I didn’t.   I don’t know why I didn’t, but I didn’t.

And without realizing it, I felt guilty about it for the rest of my life.

If I’d known that was the reason, it wouldn’t have been the reason; the reason I always felt “not good enough” for practically everything good that ever  happened to me.  Whatever it was, I didn’t deserve it.  I wasn’t good enough.

It’s also the reason I spent most of my life being overly cautious about things.  Thinking rather than acting.  Observing rather than participating.  Preferring to be the #2 guy rather than the #1 guy.  Not #12 or #76, to be sure, but definitely not #1.

Because I wasn’t good enough.

I should have done it.  But I didn’t.

And yet in the weird way we humans work it was also the reason I became so ambitious, so competitive, so determined.  One way or the other, dammit, one part of me was determined that “Yes, I would be good enough.” Maybe even better than good enough.  If I just tried harder, learned more, studied, pushed, prodded myself, I would be good enough.  In spite of that part of me that insisted I wasn’t.

But of course I didn’t know any of those things.

Until I woke up one day at 72.   72, for crying out loud.  Certainly well on the downside of however many years of my life were left.  Or looked at another way, just in time to be practically useless.  And yet I was delighted at my discovery.  It explained so much, why I’d done so many things the way I’d done them.

I probably shouldn’t have even bothered, but I was delighted.  And  I still don’t know why I finally realized it.  There was no clap of thunder, no flash of lightning, no heroic climax of one kind or another.

Somehow I just knew it.

After a lifetime of up and down and good and bad, somehow I just knew it.

I just knew it.

But it sure took a long time to work itself out--.