I received some comments from Mrs Fever on my post Why I give up control in regards to my adopted father's role in his marriage to my adopted mother.
My adopted father was a very emotionally repressed person. He was raised in a small sect of an Old Testament-based puritanical religion. For those who aren't familiar with what that means, it was basically being raised around the principles from the "fire and brimstone" era of the Bible. Sin and go to hell. It differed greatly from more common versions of Christianity that are more about love and forgiveness. He was one of the middle children of 6 and grew up quite poor. e.g. all 6 of them shared one bicycle. He would work after school at his family's business and once a week would get enough allowance to buy a candy bar and a comic book.
His father was a strict disciplinarian. His mother deferred to his father for everything. Two years before I was adopted his mother died from cancer and on her death bed her final words before she died were, "I hope God can forgive you for marrying her." Her = my adopted mother = not of their religion. After that moment he never again told my adopted mother that he loved her and the slow process of their marriage's erosion ensued. His family's belief was that my mother's tubal pregnancy that rendered her unable to bear children was seen as God's punishment for her unwillingness to convert to their religion. Needless to say, I never got close with my father's side of the family.
There weren't many opportunities available to him, which led to his rage and the subsequent beatings I would receive if I didn't want to do something. It made me an ungrateful spoiled brat because when he was my age, he would have killed for the opportunity to do it. As I was quite small until I turned 15, this was enough to keep me compliant with most things. There really wasn't any love or affection. We never had those bonding father/son talks. I learned about sex and anatomy from Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler magazines I bought from a friend. If I played badly at little league I would be lucky if he spoke two words to me until I was able to redeem myself in a future game. Eventually I became neurotic, feeling like I had to be perfect and amazing in order to earn any type of acknowledgment. My father was the Picasso of piss poor communicators that would repress emotions until they boiled over. Unfortunately he would speak with his fists, but at least then we had the consolation of knowing what he was feeling rather than sifting through and deciphering passive aggressive secret codes.
With that in mind, it is probably a shock that my mother dominated the relationship. In most cases one would probably assume that my parents held some form of 1950's household or something more closely resembling his parents marriage. My father wasn't particularly interesting. He was above average intelligence but not particularly smart. He had relatively few social skills and poor understanding of human emotion. I honestly don't know how he reached the professional position that he did. As his childhood home was one where the mother did all of the "women's work," he never learned how to do much around the house. As they were dirt poor, he never learned to manage money and finances. His upbringing kept his social ties limited. Most of his experiences were part of being with his brothers that were close in age or other people of the same religion. Basically, he depended upon people just being there and wasn't good at meeting people, let alone making friends with them. I suppose this was probably difficult being a teen when drinking smoking, dancing, kissing, listening to "devil music," and the like were all damnable offenses.
Overall, he had very few life skills. He couldn't cook. He couldn't clean something that wasn't a car. He couldn't do laundry. He couldn't grocery shop. He couldn't balance his checkbook. My mother managed everything at home, from finances to which family friends we were going to spend time with, where we were going on vacation, what we were eating that night, and so on. While he was the primary breadwinner, he had very little control over the family as a whole.
My adopted mother was a bit of a hen-pecker, and this got worse over time. She constantly has to have everything be exactly as she wants it, even if that means over-extending herself into a stressed out and frantic state. She refuses help that won't do things exactly as she envisions them and then complains about how she has to do it all herself. While her heart is in the right place, she is the type that erodes people's self-confidence slowly over time with under-handed cryptic words and ensuring that people will fail to meet her expectations. This was the basic example presented to me on how relationships are supposed to work.
Post-divorce, my mother married a man that she could outright bully into compliance. She would press and press and press until my step-father would finally try to stand up for himself. She would then counter with why he's wrong, and press in a different way until he gave in. Out of the gate she seized control over everything she had controlled in the previous marriage.
My father married a woman that could be kindly described as a "cold-hearted bitch." Her demeanor in relationships was something along the lines of, "I tolerate you. You're an idiot. I'm always right. This is how things are." This woman was a long-time friend of the family and we had seen her break down her first husband in a way led to an earlier divorce. It was obvious before they married that she was calling all the shots and my father carried the shame of living in her ex-husband's shadow (who had made a lot more money than he did).
Out of these four parental figures, while my step-father had the highest IQ, my step-mother won out on tenacity, psychological warfare, and understanding how to manipulate people. In all of the relationships it was obvious that the woman was the primary shot-caller and the man's role was to facilitate her will.
The rest of this post doesn't really pertain to my father, but does relate back to the Why I give up control post.
Some time ago I had also written about how my class in school was one that was riding the backlash of a multi-million dollar sexual harassment lawsuit against the school district that the district lost badly. As part of the settlement, they clamped down on the rules so strongly to where the typical adolescent ritual of flirting was crippled. The rules as they were put in place, gave girls an immense level of power over the boys. If a boy made a girl feel uncomfortable, she only had to report him and he would be suspended and/or expelled. There were 2-3 years worth of students that basically were scared to flirt, date, and the like.
If you were a boy and interested in a girl, everything had to be done outside of school. This usually required having a platonic friendship first before trying to advance things to a relationship level. If you were a boy you didn't get to know a girl "in that way" in school or ask them out on a date to get to know them. The rules were written in such a way that girls could make advances on boys, but not the other way around. With the exception of the students that transferred into our district, in say, 1993 or later, the girls were empowered and boys were relatively passive.
Needless to say, the majority of my friends that ended up in relationships mirrored the relationship between my parents and step parents. The girls were the ones who chose them. They were the shot-callers. The boys went along with what they wanted. This is just how things were.
Sometimes it seems like everything in my life helped steer me to this lifestyle.
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