family of origin

Gary Pence

May 24, 1990

My father was the first of five children born in northeastern rural Indiana to a poor farming family. His father was also a carpenter and lay Methodist preacher. My father quit school at 14, when he could not find transportation to school in town, and began working. He was admired as the oldest brother by his siblings. He left rural Indiana in 1917 (at age 17) to find freedom and his fortune 210 miles away in industrial Detroit. He gradually disengaged from his family and rarely visited them or had much to do with them during the ensuing decades. While I was growing up in suburban Detroit, we visited my father's family less than once a year, and I can recall only one visit by members of his family to our home. My paternal grandfather had died long before I was born, and I barely got to know my paternal grandmother or any of my father's relatives. Both my mother and father viewed the majority of my father's family as censorious (and hypercritical) religious conservatives (who had early labeled my mother "a painted vixen from the city"), lacking in ambition, poor, and exploitative. Visiting them was always something of an ordeal. Bowen would probably describe my father's relation to his childhood family as one of "emotional cutoff."

By contrast, my mother's childhood family was 30 miles away from Dearborn in Ann Arbor. She was the second child, but the oldest daughter, in a family of 3 boys and 2 girls. She described herself as the "workhorse" among her siblings, forced to help her mother with house work in the service of her three brothers, whose needs always took precedence over hers. Her younger sister, the baby of the family, was also doted on by her mother and brothers and required to make no contribution. She describes her mother as a creative, enterprising woman, who had been exploited during her own childhood and was totally frustrated by her station in life, humiliated by being a non-university person in a university town. She took out her frustrations on my mother by demanding much of her and berating her for any resistance or failures. My mother says she was made to feel guilty and worthless by such treatment. My mother was the only one of her siblings to complete college, not to speak of most of the units for a master's degree, and she began high school teaching of English in Detroit 30 miles away. All three of her children were born in her home town, and for years during my childhood our family would visit her father and other members of her childhood family nearly every Sunday afternoon. We were always involved in family gatherings and reunions. My sister spent several summers with a favorite great aunt. Yet, as long as my mother lived, she rehearsed the stories of her continuing maltreatment first by her mother and then by her brothers and sister. I would judge her childhood to have been at least emotionally abusive. Yet she remained emotionally fused with her family to her death.

My parents married when both were 29 years old. My sister and I knew that our parents had eloped. According to their story, they were married in Ohio by an old family friend who was a minister and then informed my mother's parents via a telegram home. Their motive for the elopement was allegedly that they did not want to delay their wedding following the death of my mother's older brother Edwin a short time earlier. It would have been improper, in their view, to have scheduled a wedding while their family was in mourning. Only shortly before my mother's death in 1980 we learned that there may have been more to the story. My father had been previously married to a friend of my mother's, and my mother and father met while my father's first wife was dying of tuberculosis. This was a family secret maintained for nearly 50 years! Since my father continues to respond vaguely and with some embarrassment to questions about that episode of his life, it is apparent that both he and my mother felt shame about the circumstances surrounding their courtship and marriage, and perhaps some guilt as well, even if they did nothing which people today would consider improper. The emergence of this secret, however, helps to explain something of my mother's fears about my father's possible infidelity to her, her oft repeated judgment that men are intrinsically untrustworthy and unfaithful, and her belief that my father would marry quickly if she were to die first (a fear not sustained by my father's behavior in the 10 years since my mother's death).

My parents were married in March 1929. The stock market crash followed soon after, so that the first decade of my parents' marriage suffered under the stresses of the Great Depression. My father was out of work or was employed in inadequate jobs during most of that period, and my mother, a schoolteacher, became the primary wage-earner, being paid during the worst of the Depression years in a locally produced "scrip" which was honored by local merchants. The experience exacerbated my mother's inclination to pessimism and cynicism, which hounded her during the rest of her life and continues to infect me at some levels even today.

My older sister was born in 1934, four years after my parents' wedding, when they were 34 years old. She arrived in the midst of the Depression, and my mother continued to teach full-time in order to help cover the family's expenses. A son, Larry, was born in 1937, but was dead at birth. My mother recalls him as a perfect, beautiful baby who, because of an incorrectly formed trachea, never took a breath. I was born 2 years later, when my parents were 39 and at the limit of their childbearing years, and given the name Gary, an obvious reminiscence of the "perfect" stillborn Larry, for whom I must have been a surrogate and whose untimely death made my birth possible. My mother remembers my birth as lengthy and painful and the first months of my life as one of constant crying which allowed my parents little rest. No doubt I was told this story in order to press for my undying gratitude and allegiance to my mother for all she had done for me.

Despite (because of?) the rigors of those first months of my infancy, I became my mother's pride and joy. She did not return to teaching until I entered kindergarten and spent my pre-school years playing with me and doting on my needs. Even after I had entered school myself, she returned only to part-time substitute teaching so that she would be available to me at home as much as possible. In the following years we used to have long conversations at the kitchen table, in which she would talk about her life, her disappointments, her dreams, the injustices she had suffered, the accomplishments of which she was proud. She often criticized my father to me, first damning with faint praise and then adding that he had no creativity or taste or imagination or whatever lack was on her mind. She also criticized our neighbors as crude, uncultured, uneducated people lacking taste, refinement, or manners. She felt isolated in a community that didn't appreciate the life of the mind or culture as she believed she did.

In my early and middle childhood I valued this close relationship with my mother, sympathized with her, and adopted many of her values. My relationship to my father, while cordial and friendly, was more distant. Because my sister was five years older and a girl we played together very little after I was school age and were not close. I identified with my mother and with adults in general. In adolescence, however, when I needed to separate and begin to form my own identity, I began to resent my mother's controlling, overprotecting engulfment of my life. I was embarrassed and angry that she would speak badly of my father to me, and I became impatient with her repeated stories of the injustices done her by her childhood family. My sister had left home for college 90 miles away, and mother, father, and "golden boy" son were caught in a thoroughly fused triangle. I had clearly become, on the one hand, a male friend (very nearly my mother's only friend) to substitute for my "uncreative, insensitive" father and, on the other, the object on whom my mother had projected all her own unfulfilled dreams and aspirations. I was to be the vehicle for her fulfillment, a role I was reluctant to fill.

It is apparent that there were strains in the parental subsystem throughout my childhood. My mother's disdain for my father's rural "uncultured" origins and her frustration with his personal style were compounded by what she saw as the inadequacy of the income he provided to our family. Her father bought our family home in 1940 shortly after my birth, and money from her teaching paid for every family car, facts with which she would taunt my father during mean arguments that frightened my sister and me with the prospect of immanent divorce. My mother's aggressively demanding manner was matched by my father's rigid, passive-aggressive resistance. He would retreat to his garden and rage in silence.

After I left home for college I had as little to do with my parents as possible for more than two decades. After finishing my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan (my mother's alma mater) in Ann Arbor (my birthplace and home of my mother's family), I left for distant graduate education in Boston, St. Louis, England, and Princeton, and then for jobs in Illinois, Iowa, and California. My sister, meanwhile, lived in Michigan and Illinois, and returned to Michigan following a divorce from her first husband in 1970. She became close to (triangulated with) my mother during those years, while I kept a polite and respectful distance, a virtual emotional cutoff. Despite their internal conflicts, however, my parents' marriage held firm to my mother's death at age 80, and my dad is reluctant even 10 years later to say a harsh word about her. Her death was nonetheless a liberating moment for my father, sister, and me. Following my mother's death I have related much more closely to my sister and father and have a more satisfying relationship with both of them than at any time in my life. I have seen my father's personality flower, and my sister has been able to reflect on our mother much more objectively than while she was alive (a change that has helped our relationship immeasurably).

The rules of my family of origin largely had to do with how to avoid distressing mother, a woman with many worries and fears. The core rule had to do with paying attention to others and not bringing shame on the family. Part of the rule implied caring for and showing consideration to others, not selfishly thinking only of oneself. The other aspect had to do with attending to others' perception of our behavior. "What will the neighbors think?" was the common argument my mother used to inhibit behavior of which she disapproved. So I was not to play ball in the street, not step on the neighbor's grass, not dress comfortably, not show disrespect. Even if all other boys my age wore jeans to school, I should not, because jeans weren't nice and would put me in a class with the vulgar blue collar people in our neighborhood. They would also embarrass my mother in front of teachers at school, who were her colleagues and friends. (My mother obviously was replicating the town-gown distinction under which her mother suffered, except that now she was "gown" surrounded by a distasteful "town.")

The effect has been both negative and positive. You will now notice that I enjoy wearing jeans (whenever I believe others will not disapprove!). I continue to have my antennae continually attuned to what others are thinking of me and I will alter my behavior to gain their positive regard. A struggle with locus of control has continued lifelong. I will sometimes be too aggressively assertive; at other times too deferential and acquiescent. And I struggle with the need to be approved of and liked. However, in my present family I am the one most attuned to the feelings of spouse and children and the one relied on to iron out conflicts and misunderstandings in a way that maintains family harmony. My wife and I have avoided arguments from shame or guilt to influence our daughters' behavior. (We have scrupulously avoided asking "What will people think?") We have tried to help one another to be our own person regardless of others' reactions. But also a norm of consideration of and care for others has continued to be important in my present family.

A second, correlative rule in my childhood family was that only perfection is acceptable. This rule stemmed from my mother's perception that she was never good enough. The house was never neat enough. Her meals were never tasty enough. Her clothing was never stylish enough. Nothing was ever good enough. I could not invite friends to our house because my mother believed our house was not neat enough, and she was sure the boys would return home and tell their mothers how messy our house was. No amount of argument that boys don't care about such things would convince her. My parents rarely entertained because the work of preparing house and food was too exhausting.

I acknowledge a perfectionistic streak in myself. I tend to get overly involved in my job, though, like my mother, I often enough give up on tasks at home because I can't accomplish them as well as I would like. I dislike shoddy work and am ashamed to let others see products below my high standards. Probably my daughters have noticed this trait in me (and in my wife) and it must be an unconscious rule in our family, for they (especially my older daughter) also struggle with perfectionism. At the same time, the trait has enabled high levels of achievement in job-related activities, and in my family I have also demanded of myself high levels of husbanding and parenting. So I have been present for my wife and children and gone out of my way to attend to them and their needs. I guess I have always wanted to be a more than "good enough" husband and father. Although I have been loathe to place high demands on wife and children and have encouraged them to relax and to accept and enjoy themselves as they are (no doubt a displaced message to myself as well), in fact, I guess they have shown evidence of wanting to be more than "good enough" wife and daughters. It's hard to shake perfectionism.

A third rule of my childhood family was the insistence on the fundamental importance of learning, good language, and good manners. When my sister and I were growing up, our mother corrected our grammar constantly and instilled the drive to speak and write correctly. Apparently she had spent the years before my birth correcting my father's speech and filling in the gaps in his aborted education. My mother taught me to read and spell before I entered kindergarten. I would sit at a low table near my mother while she ironed, and we would work on phonetic recognition of words. I enjoyed this attention and the learning that came from it. She instructed my sister and me in good manners ("Don't touch people's things. Eat what is on your plate. Use your napkin. Don't be loud or roughhouse. Sit still.") She criticized those who were ignorant, used ungrammatical speech, or showed bad manners.

The emphasis on learning and language is clear in my present household. I married a high school English teacher. Our home is filled with books. We watch educational TV. I have been a student forever, have gained some facility in six languages, and teach in higher education. Our elder daughter is a high academic achiever, chose to attend a highly selective liberal arts college, studied the German language and German culture in Berlin during her junior year, and plans to begin graduate study (at, you guessed it, the University of Michigan!) in the fall. She hopes to be a college or university professor. Our younger daughter has struggled with school (in counterpoint to her high achieving older sister), but now, away from home, is thriving on a highly enterprising engagement with her study in her first year at UC Santa Cruz, and has come to view herself for the first time as a competent, effective student. (Her room-mate is flunking out.)

A fourth rule was, "Don't oppose Mother `after all she has done for us.'" My mother was extremely dominating in our family. She spent a lot of time thinking through how things ought to be done and then announcing or acting on her conclusions without prior discussion or negotiation. If we disagreed with her, she took our response personally, as though we didn't appreciate her and her deep, loving concern for us. To oppose Mother was to wound her. As I reached adolescence and began to disagree with her more often, my response was to argue with her (a futile effort). If I pushed too far, tears would come into her eyes: "How can you speak to your Mother that way?" I would retreat. I learned to be ingratiating with her and largely to withdraw and, like my father, to rage in silence rather than to confront her. After leaving home I generally tried to avoid any significant interaction with her.

The effect of this rule on my marriage has been that I have very strong inhibitions against openly expressing conflict or the affect that accompanies it. My wife has a similar inhibition. As a result, we have had no explosive arguments during our marriage, no shouting, name-calling, or violent verbal attacks. We have had slowly to learn to express our disagreements without fear of hurting our partner. My wife has helped me to be more open about my disagreements with her. Similarly, we have had no eruptive arguments with our daughters, no fireworks, ever. If upset with our daughters, we parents would talk with each other first, try to understand the situation, defuse the affect, and then talk with the daughters fairly objectively. We are able to handle conflict without surrendering to the immediate emotion of the moment. I think, ironically, my upbringing has helped me substantially to deal with situations at home and work. I don't hold rage inside as in my childhood, but I find constructive ways to cope with conflict.

These are only a few of the rules that governed my childhood family and which, I believe, continue to affect me today. I recognize their impact on my habitual reactions to authority, conflict, and responsibility, and on such values as education, peace-making, and caring. I see both the threat to my self-esteem and the routes to the neutralization of that threat that have derived from this family system. While I regret not having recognized these dynamics 20-30 years ago, when that recognition might have assisted my relationship to my childhood family, I value the contact my struggle has provided with the childhood experience‐equally and often even more seriously troubled‐of my colleagues, clients, and friends.