TRANSCRIPT
I recently had the idea that I wanted to share and analyze a photo from my childhood. I was 13 years old when this photo was taken, almost 14, and it’s a photo of me and my grandfather, my mother’s father. It’s a strange photo, actually, from the perspective of my family. It’s a fairly easy photo to analyze, and I’ll analyze it first from their perspective.
Gosh, Daniel is such a pest! Why is he talking into a megaphone through a glass window from outside? Why is he bothering us? Well, I think it’s not so much of a problem, really, because we can just ignore him and do adult things.
And then there’s my perspective. What was I doing here, standing outside of this glass sliding door with a megaphone? Well, it was my grandmother’s birthday. It was her 75th birthday, and the whole family had gathered. One of the gifts we gave my grandmother—maybe it was even my idea—was to give her this megaphone because she would try to call for us when we were outside, and she had a crickly old voice, and it was hard to hear her. So we gave her a megaphone, and the concept of a megaphone fascinated me. It was like, oh, maybe people will finally hear me now.
I think at some deep emotional level, some core of myself felt in a level of fantasy that now they would finally hear me. If my voice were only amplified, maybe I’m just too quiet. Maybe I can’t be heard by just being my normal self. But what’s really going on is I’m living in a world that cannot hear the cries of my soul.
I look at my grandfather. By the way, why am I sharing this picture of someone in my family? I never share pictures of people in my family. They’re all alive. My grandfather, though, has been dead for 10 years now, more than 10 years, just over 10 years. He died at 99. Here he, I believe, was 73 years old, almost 74. He was—what was he?—20 years into, 15 years into having his affair with his former psychotherapy patient, now his girlfriend. And on this day, I remember he gave my grandmother an emerald necklace, and my grandmother was so happy because she got an emerald necklace. But he never listened to her when she cried about him having a girlfriend or having had girlfriends before her. He said, “Well, if you don’t like it, divorce me.” But she wasn’t going to do that. I think she was scared from her cultural background to divorce him, and she was also just a scared person—weak, afraid—and he knew that, and that’s why he married her.
Would he have been happy if she had divorced him? Maybe, except, well, their kids would have been angry at him, and he didn’t want that. But bottom line is he really didn’t care. He didn’t care about me, and nobody did. This is another thing that I remember this so well. My mother sometimes would pay attention to me, sometimes would pay a lot of attention to me, but when she was around her father, I was dead to her. She was not interested in me. It was literally like she was tuned out, and sometimes she was literally just checked out. She would get drunk a lot of times around her father. I think it was because it was so painful for her because he didn’t care about her. He didn’t care about anyone.
I figured it out when I was an adult. When I started making sense of adult psychology, I realized, ah, I get it. He is absolutely self-centered and cruel. I don’t know if you can see that in this picture. If I zoom in on his face, can you see how cruel he is? He was a man who could be very charming, very charismatic, and even “quote unquote” loving if he was getting his way. If the attention was all being paid to him, and the rest of the time he was absolutely indifferent or angry. That face of his, which is smiling here, could very easily turn into a raging snarl. It could be so hateful and cutting.
My grandfather was a psychologist and a fancy Ivy League psychology professor. He had been—he retired right around the time I was born—but he was all knowledgeable. He knew everything. They all considered him the voice of reason, the voice of insight. And it’s like, imagine the patriarch of a family, the one who’s considered the most knowledgeable, most wise, most insightful person being a scumbag—a person who doesn’t care about anyone. I mean, imagine, imagine the cornerstone of the point of view of a family is someone who doesn’t have empathy for other people. It’s like, what was his view of psychology? It’s a scary thought.
He liked psychology testing. That was very interesting to him—to give people psychology tests, Rorschach tests, and the thematic apperception test. He was very proud, apparently, he helped to develop the thematic apperception test, and he believed that was a good way to understand people. This man with his cold eyes and his charisma. I remember the thing that made him most comfortable with me was when I was silent. If I was silent, if I said nothing, if I had no opinion, just said, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” He liked it when I said, “I love you, I love you, Grandpa.” And then he’d say, “I love you too, son.” Well, he didn’t love me.
Ten years after this photo was taken, when I looked him in the eye and said, “Why are you having an affair? Don’t you know that it’s killing the soul of your wife, and it makes her cry and get drunk? Don’t you know that it killed my mother and made her get drunk and miserable and half ruined my childhood? Why did you do that? Why did you have an affair? Why are you having an affair with a former psychotherapy client? Don’t you care about how your wife feels? Don’t you love your wife? Do you love your wife?” And he said, “Get out of my house! Get out of my house!” And he threw me out, and I wasn’t welcomed there anymore.
And it’s funny. Was it that I was confronting him? In a way, I was confronting him, but I was also curious. I also wanted to know. I wanted to know what he was thinking. I wanted to understand his psychology. I remember a couple of years later, when he was starting to get dementia, he’d forgotten that I had confronted him or asked him these questions, and he welcomed me back in. I brought a tape recorder, and I asked him questions on this tape recorder, asked him about his childhood, and he sang a little bit, and he had a beautiful voice. And there was some part of him when he talked about his childhood he was gentle. But he grew up to become a cruel person. I mean, he was neglected as a child. He was the third of four children. He was the third boy. He was not really wanted. Nobody paid attention to him. His mother was a morphine addict, and my grandfather would mock his mother. Ah, she was nothing. She was just a morphine addict, and he would make fun of her. Apparently, the whole family made fun of his mother.
And oh, he had an older brother who was also having affairs with younger women, and his other older brother died young of a heart attack, was grossly overweight and unhealthy. And here I was trying to fit into this world, trying to get love from this impossible person, trying so hard. And eventually, more than 10 years after this photo was taken, 15 years after this, 20 years after this, I realized the only one in my entire family system who could even remotely adequately love me and listen to me was me.
[Music]