In Part 1, I described the six marriages Carlin and I have had. The first two were with our previous spouses and the last four were with each other. After two marriages and divorces, it became clear to us that making life-long vows didn’t make good sense. We agreed we would evaluate our marriage every fifteen years and make new vows that were alive for us at each new stage we were entering. So, these explorations are titled Love 6.0.

                In the previous article, I described my parents’ early married lives in New York and went into detail about my father’s challenges that led him to take an overdose of sleeping pills when I was five years old. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved and he came to believe we would be better off without him. “Love Lesson #1: Our Parents Love Lives and Losses Impact Our Own,” has helped me make some sense of my own complex love life.

Love Lesson #2: To Thine Own Self Be True

                After my father was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, my mother charged me with the responsibility of going with my uncle every Sunday to visit my father. As a dutiful son, I did what I was told, though I remember being confused and unsettled wondering why she didn’t visit with us.  When I asked why I had to go, she simply said,

                “Because your father needs you.”

                I learned early to be my mother’s brave little man, to try and be a good little man, and to be a successful caregiver for my mother and father. I also learned early that I must suppress my own needs in favor of taking care of others. It took me a long time to realize that I had been given an impossible task and even longer to overcome my feelings of being a failure because I couldn’t make my father healthy and happy.

                My father continued to deteriorate under the “treatment regimen” that was available at a state mental hospital in 1949. On one of our visits, my father turned to my uncle and asked, “Harry, who is the kid you have with you?” I was devastated. I felt all my efforts to help had failed and my father didn’t even know who I was. In my first positive act of selfcare, I told my mother I was no longer willing to visit my father.

                She accepted my decision, though I felt guilty giving up on my father. She gave up herself when the doctors told her he needed ever more treatment even as his mental health deteriorated. Eventually, they told her he might need treatment forever and my mother finally filed for divorce.

                My uncle continued his weekly visits until one day my father escaped. These days, if you leave a mental hospital, staff are happy to have an open space for the next person. Back then, it was like escaping from prison. They went after you and when you were caught, they brought you back and locked you up again. My father never went back and I described his healing journey and my own in my book My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.

                I grew up raised by a single mother who lived with the sadness of lost loves. When I was 12 years old and just beginning to get interested finding a girlfriend, my mother wrote in my Junior High School yearbook: This above all else to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

                It seemed like an odd quote to give to a young boy. She explained that it was a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has stuck with me my whole life and its meaning has shifted as I’ve learned more about life, love, and relationships.

                Over the years I’ve learned that this self we need to be true to is an illusive presence. The answer to the questions, what am I, is not simple and seems to have multiple aspects that change through time. For me, I have found that writing helps me sort out my thoughts and feelings about important questions pertaining to love and life.

                In a recent article, “Never Give Up on Love: Embrace the Four Marriages That Make Life Meaningful,” I quoted the author and poet David Whyte who said,

                “Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness.”  

                This was certainly true for my father who I wrote about in my first article in the Love 6.0 series and in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.

                It was also true for my mother who had a complicated love life which I learned about gradually throughout my life. It was only after she divorced my father that I learned that she had been married once before as a young woman. The marriage was short-lived and she went on to marry my father. I also learned that my father was not the only man in her life during the time they lived in New York between 1929 and 1943 when I was born.  

                My father was an actor. The other man, Milton Bracker, was a young New York Times reporter. It seemed that most were vying for my mother and she was hoping that Milton would propose to her, but he was somewhat nerdy and shy and didn’t pop the question. The next day he was sent to Italy to cover one of the major battles of World War II. My father asked her to marry him and she accepted.

                I was conceived and came into the world but often wondered who I would have been or if I would have been had Milton Bracker been my father. Later in life, my mother remarried again, another marriage that didn’t last. It was only late in life that I learned about my mother’s father, the man I was named after.

                I knew he had died before I was born, but she never talked about him. Once I learned the details about his life and his death, a lot became clear to me about my mother’s love life and my own. The final chapter of my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound, was titled “Finding My Mother’s Lost Father and Healing the Father Wound I Never Knew I Had.”

                Following my mother’s death in December 1987, I had an insatiable desire to learn more about my mother’s father, John Kohn. I found out that he died when my mother was five years old, the same age I lost my own father to the mental hospital. When her dad died, my mother, her sister, Florence, and her mother Jenny were forced to leave their home in Toledo, Ohio to move in with relatives in Savannah, Georgia. It was very traumatic for everyone.

                It was clear that my mother never dealt with the loss of her father or the impact it had on her life. It certainly contributed to her own problems with love and intimacy and her placing me in the role of her brave little man, when I was a five-year-old little boy.

                In recent years, Mark Wolynn’s book, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, helped me see that trauma and its impact on our lives didn’t begin and end with what happened in my own childhood. It could ripple through the generations.

                One of the key language exercises Mark Wolynn describes is to find our “core sentence,” which captures our worst fear. Mine was I’m alone and abandoned and those I love will leave me and die. Even after a lot of therapy, I always believed the origin of these fears was from growing up with a depressed father and an anxious and wounded mother. Now I have come to understand who we are and how our wounding impacts our love lives has even more complicated origins that can go back generations.

Learning to be true to myself has forced me to open doors in rooms that had been closed or hidden for much of my life. Love lives are complicated. There is always more to learn and experience. I invite you to do your own exploring. I’m happy to be offer guidance along the way.

                I look forward to your comments and questions. Drop me a note to [email protected] and put Love 6.0 in the subject line.