2104 Stories Behind the Curtains

Friday, November 7, 2008

When I travel at night, I look at house windows as I pass. Sometimes the curtains are open and I can see decorations on walls, a flickering television set, or a dining room chandelier. Rarely actual people, unless there's a party with people standing around.

But the ones that fascinate me are the houses with lights on, and closed curtains. I always wonder what stories are behind the curtains. Every house has a story, and some of the stories are horrifying, and very likely no one but the people in the house knows.

When I was young, I was always surprised at how many people really liked my parents. They were very popular. They described my father as funny and intelligent, and my mother as beautiful and caring. They didn't know what went on behind the curtains. There was no fun, and no caring. Quite the opposite.

It has affected my reactions to people. I don't trust my first impressions when people seem just too nice. I can't help but wonder what they're hiding. Sometimes people have curtains inside, too.

When I first met Jay, I thought he had lived an idyllic childhood - in the same house the whole time, in a beautiful neighborhood, neighbors he'd known all his life, the same schoolmates, a close financially comfortable family who took family vacations and did things together, parents who wanted the best for him, a mother who was a gourmet cook and magazine-perfect housekeeper. It sounded like a '50s family sitcom.

It was so different from my childhood, I was foolish enough to envy him.

That was just how it looked from the outside. Behind the curtains, Jay's mother had experienced postpartum depression, and had rejected him for most of his first year. It looks like his sisters weren't very involved with him either, because they can't remember much of his youth. His father belittled him whenever Jay made a decision or did something in a way different from the way he would have done it. If Jay didn't think exactly the way his father did, his father told him he was stupid (literally! I have heard him say "That's stupid" to comments from Jay) and took the decision or project away from him, and did it himself, including school science fair entries. Going through the files after Jay's father's death, I discovered that Jay's father had filled out all the applications, and had written all the letters and all the essays for all the various summer classes and internships, camps, and schools Jay had applied for, including college. Jay then copied them over in his own handwriting. Obviously Jay was incapable of doing it himself to his father's standards.

I suspect the glow on the curtains hid a very cold atmosphere inside.

The result was that the adult Jay had great difficulty making decisions, and very little confidence. If he could hold something close to his chest, he was confident that it was good, but if he had to turn it over for someone else's judgment, he wasn't so sure. That's why he blew Company schedule after schedule. He was never sure his work was good enough to call it finished.

Jay also was not sure that he was worthy of love. At first, I saw that he was very attached to his mother. She died several years before we married, and later I came to realize that it was not so much that he was attached to her, as that he wanted her to be attached to him. The 45 year-old Jay had nightmares about her walking away from the child him, and not looking back, turning a corner and disappearing so that he couldn't find her.

Behind the curtains they weren't such a perfect family after all.

I wonder if there are any perfect families. I don't mean perfect perfect, I mean families where people aren't being damaged over and over.

In fact , I was fortunate in a way. My childhood home was so extreme that even as a child I knew it was wrong, that it wasn't at all the way it was supposed to be, so that eventually I was able to dump the feeling that it was all my fault. Jay's family's disfunction, on the other hand, was more subtle, and it was more difficult for him to push the faults and blame away from himself. He never did, actually. He died too soon. At least before he died, he did learn that he was worthy of love and admiration.

I was aware when I met The Man that because of my total lack of a tan and the depth of his tan, we would have had very different experiences, and that it would affect our different attitudes and responses. It does. We are both fairly intelligent, so there are a lot thinking patterns we have in common, and we are sometimes able to address the superficial things we don't. What I didn't realize is that some of those differences are very deep and pervasive, and I am having difficulty with them. He probably is, too. For example, he's very closed emotionally. He doesn't trust easily. He doesn't "let you in" easily. He withdraws when he's pressured or under stress. He's fiercely protective of himself (and me). I tend to see him as paranoid, until I back up and remember some of the things that have happened to him, and I understand where it comes from. That doesn't make it any easier, especially when a criticism of those patterns is taken as an attack on him. If it doesn't work out between us, it will be because of my need to be "inside", and his need to defend himself from that.

His curtains are all inside. It's probably not safe to open them.
.