Pentimento: Chapter One

Sometimes an artist realizes a painting is a hopeless failure and decides to paint a new one over it. Such, thankfully, was the fate of my original “self-portrait.”

When I achieved the age of reason and reflected on the image I had presented to the world up until then, like an artist who “repents” and starts over, I set about to create the portrait my friends and associates have come to know as “me.” Deep within, though, vestiges remained of that earlier image. A constant reminder of who I might have been, they spurred me on to strive to achieve the best version of myself that the limitations of my natural endowment would permit. My habitual approach to life, overcompensation, arose from a deep underlying sense of inadequacy and shame that softened considerably over time but was never fully obliterated. There are better ways to be motivated, but this does not chagrin me. Without that spur in my flanks, I would have achieved far less.

As many readers who know me personally already are aware, I am suffering from the invariably fatal illness of ALS. Along with me, these blogs will soon cease to be, probably quite soon. Like many who are confronted with imminent death, I feel the need to tell my story. With the timeline of my illness uncertain, I decided to release this series now.

This first chapter will give you a sense of that now obscured portrait so as to present the remainder of my life in the context from which it arose.

Mine was a lonely and unhappy childhood, one filled with fear, shame and little hope for success. At the time of my birth, my mother and I were abandoned by my father. Until I reached age five, when she remarried, I was raised in the home of her parents. My grandfather was an aloof Old World type who had little to do with me. My grandmother attended to my physical needs during the day while my mother was out working, but she was illiterate in English and unable to read stories and the like to entertain me. When I was not tagging along after her on her daily food shopping expedition or watching with rapt fascination as she prepared meals, (See my blog, “The Music of Cooking”) I mostly amused myself during solitary hours, often listening to stories and music on my little record player. We had no TV. This situation perhaps gave rise to my proclivity toward deep inner reflection and my love of music. One record, a compilation of western songs, included one that resonated with me: “I ain’t got no mother, I ain’t got no father, my folks they both left me the day I was born. I ain’t got no sister, I ain’t got no brother. I’m a lonely cowpuncher a long way from home.“

I saw myself as so much excess baggage, a complication in the lives of my caretakers, worthless and unworthy of love.

My mother’s remarriage, at the height of my oedipal period, felt like another abandonment and reinforced that image. My step-father, a dour man, made it clear he would have been happier without my presence. Fortunately, over time our relationship developed into a good one, but at that vulnerable time in my life, there was little to instruct me on what it meant to be a man. In grade school and junior high I was a nerdy, nearsighted, chubby boy, the proverbial last pick in pick-up sports games. I was a C student and, being anxious and socially awkward and inhibited, not liked by most of my teachers.

As time went on I did develop a group of friends in the neighborhood who included me in their play. Another saving grace was that my best friend’s mother treated me like what they now call “the mother of my other brother.” I escaped to their home as much as possible where I learned what it would have felt like to be part of a normal family.

My father had returned on the scene when I was around four. We had lunch and went to a movie each Saturday. Sometimes I spent weekends at his home and accompanied him and my step-mother on vacations. This went on until my mid-teens when I decided to terminate our relationship. I was tired of being the proverbial ping-pong ball and felt weighted down by a relationship that felt merely like an obligation to a person I neither liked nor respected. The meetings were fraught. He was a vain man who dominated our conversations aggrandizing his imaginary accomplishments and derogating my mother. He conveyed to me that he expected me to emulate him, including his grandiose and inappropriate references to his sexual prowess, which I had no doubt I could never live up to. He made me feel all the more inadequate.

Things went on so until the day during my eleventh year that my mother decided to take me to a child psychoanalyst.

Dr. Theodore Cohen was a godsend. Over the next few years he and I worked to untangle the confusion that had formed my original portrait. Together we began reworking it. I was shocked when psychological testing revealed I had a very high IQ. That made me wonder why I had underachieved academically and motivated me to apply myself to my studies.

Dr. Cohen taught me to paint anew, to overpaint that first portrait with the one the world eventually has come to see as “me.” I owe my life, my happiness and much of what I have accomplished to that man who became a surrogate father. I honored him by ultimately pursuing a career in psychiatry, one that I knew, first hand, could make so much of a difference in peoples’ lives.

The new painting slowly, painstakingly, began to take form, and, by the time I reached high school, my life took on the trajectory that it has continued upon ever since.

In my next installment I will elaborate on how that transformation moved forward and shaped my character and value system throughout life.