A few years ago a friend relayed a story to me.  An OB/GYN physician had become pregnant and was having her own child.  (Side note: I am not sure if it would be comforting or nerve wracking to become a patient in your chosen specialty.  Since I have always worked in emergencies and organ donation, I try to avoid this as much as possible.)  She was having a baby shower and many other physicians were in attendance.  In fact, this is a very academically accomplished family and as it turns out, most of the adults have gone on to be doctors.  But they are a very traditional family too and this is represented as well.  The mother of the pregnant woman has been a home maker all her life and never pursued higher education.

Friends and family were all offering advice to the future mother.  She may be an OB/GYN doctor, and very well educated, but being a mother was going to be new and the insights were welcome.  During this barrage of wisdom, her mother did something odd.  She proclaimed that the expecting mother should eat more butter in her diet.  This, according to her, would make the baby more slippery and make for an easier delivery.

At this point you can almost hear the record scratch.  I imagined everyone in the room doing spit takes and turning around to all say “What!?!?” in unison.  But that didn’t happen.  Her family is very warm and loving and they have learned to gracefully merge the traditions of old and the scientific world of the future.  This lady is the matriarch of the family, and she is given that respect.  Even though everyone in the room knew this comment was completely false and the simplistic causal explanation of an uneducated person, this in no way detracted from her wisdom or the warmth of the occasion.  I have to admit, I wish I had that sort of tolerance.  I wouldn’t have done a spit take, but I most likely would not have handled it as gracefully as her family.

And that has been a problem that has plagued me for most of my life.  I am tolerant of just about everything but ignorance.  Race, gender, sexual preference, nationality, social status…it doesn’t matter to me.  I take all comers.  If this is the case though, why can I not bear to suffer the foolish?

I think it is because I assign so much value to the prowess of the mind, and I truly believe it is the only thing on the list for which the person is solely responsible.  Race, gender, sexual preference, and other things that cause others to judge really have no effect on someone’s ability to perform in this world.  To judge someone based on this is just prejudice.  One can be physically adept through hard work and exercise, but that will even fail with age.  That baby shower was full of women who had come from foreign lands to become physicians in this country.  Many small minded people (many of them my coworkers) would balk at the fact that women, much less foreigners were allowed to do such work.  Any thought that the fact that they are female or from another country would make them somehow less capable is preposterous.  And even if these traits somehow did affect performance, it can’t be helped.  We can’t chose who we are when we are born.

But that is not so with education and intelligence.  Education, especially in this country, is free for the taking.  We are brimming with schools, libraries, educational programs, museums, and the internet.  Even pop culture has become educational in this country.  A good example is the show Myth Busters.  With all that 21^st century life has to offer, how can any rational adult with even moderate resources believe in old wives’ tales?  And I am not suggesting that everyone without a graduate degree in this country is guilty of laziness.  I never even finished college.  I am simply troubled by adults who wander the earth with free time and resources, and yet remain ignorant and devoid of common sense.  Barring some sort of mental disability or parental abuse during the formative years, there is really no excuse for any adult in this country to be ignorant of the basics.

Or could I be wrong?

Many people who are smarter than I am are much more tolerant of those people running around believing that storing batteries in the refrigerator will improve their performance.  These wonderfully tolerant souls just shrug and go on.  But I can’t do it.  I just can’t.  A 911 dispatcher once looked at me in all seriousness and asked me about computer viruses.  She had heard that I knew of such things and asked me in a very hushed tone, “I know you can get viruses from a computer, but can a human catch a virus from a fax machine?”  It was all I could do to keep from lunging at her across the desk.

There is something that snaps in me when I see a person mentally come off the rails like that.  The second that woman asked me if she could catch a virus from the fax machine is the very moment when I knew I could never trust her.  I thought to myself, “I am going to be riding on an ambulance today with her as my dispatcher.  I may get in a situation where my life depends on her acting on something I have told her.  And therefore my life is in danger.”  All semblance of anything like respect or trust just drains away.  This person cannot be believed.  She cannot be relied upon.  I will never ask her to do anything important.  I will never trust her.  She is broken.

In the coming weeks she uttered a whole pile of quotable things that reinforced my opinion.  Soon I avoided talking to her.  Whenever she spoke to me I would keep my responses to one syllable.  If she told me anything I would check the information from another source for accuracy.  I often found that what she told me was wrong.  At first I used to return to her and correct her.  Not to be mean.  I was in a work environment and she was passing misinformation to the crews.  After a while I couldn’t even bring myself to do this.  If she tried to engage me in conversation I would often just cut her off to keep her from talking.  If I was in a position of authority at that job I would have probably found a reason to fire her.  This may sound harsh, but I am being absolutely truthful.  That is how my mind works.  If I started checking out my truck at the beginning of shift and found that my monitor wasn’t functioning correctly I would take it back and demand another one.  I would never use a broken or faulty Lifepak monitor on a patient.  Why on earth would I allow a broken dispatcher to stay in service?

And whose fault is it that she thinks she can catch a cold from a fax machine?  I am aware that public school in Kentucky leaves much to be desired.  But they do require that everyone here attend grades 1 through 12.  I think if you are 18 you can drop out of high school, but I was told that she completed her schooling and emerged a graduate.  If someone has been made to go to school for twelve years I expect them to have taken something from that experience and to reach a base level of functionality.  If someone has been given resources, free libraries, teachers, counselors, and guidance for 12 years and has emerged that stupid it must be her fault.  She has failed through laziness.  She is a mental sloth.  She is disgusting to me.

And that is my intolerance.  That is my downfall.  It is a fault in me that I can’t seem to be able to escape.  Much like someone’s grandparent who out of ignorance uses the term ‘colored people’ in open conversation.  I am prejudiced against those of little brain.

But what happens when your own family becomes the subject of your prejudice?

My parents grew up on farms in rural Texas.  My dad went on to college, but my mother never tried.  I don’t think she even finished high school.  She was a kept woman.  My dad went to work and was quite successful, but his roots in causality, old wive’s tales, and antiquated sensibilities were his downfall in the end.  He was laid off from a long time job with a technology company and never recovered.  He settled out of court with them for an early retirement package that has supported him quite comfortably for the last 20 years, but he is bitter, angry, and depressed.

When I reached the age of 11 or 12 I really started to notice the limitations of my parents and I was suspicious of things they told me.  I would often ask a trusted source or research the topic myself and found that they were wildly wrong.  This was very disorienting in my teen years, and I became very distrustful of them.  This was not the only reason for the trouble in our relationship.  You can throw a bit of alcohol and good old fashioned mean stubbornness in the mix to complete the picture.

But I was brought up being told to respect my parents.  Actually, this was reiterated about every five seconds.  Oddly enough I have not found the need to once remind my daughter that she needs to respect me.  I guess people tend to concentrate on those things that are tenuous and fragile.  In my mind, if you respect someone they are not someone you should lie to.  I had absolutely zero respect for the fax machinelady.  So it was not uncommon for me to just shrug off her ridiculousness and walk away from her.  But I respected my own parents enough to correct them and say, “No, I’m sorry.  That’s not right.  Let me show you.”

And that’s it right there.  I have a different view of respect than the average person.  This wonderfully kind and well adjusted OB/GYN doctor looked at her mother telling her that butter made babies slippery and she shrugged and smiled.  Out of respect she let it go.  I have the exact opposite reaction.  If I don’t care for you at all I will shrug and walk off.  I simply can’t look at someone I respect and patronize them.  I can’t throw away what comes out of their mouth.  To me the most overt and aggressive gesture of disrespect is to smile and disregard what you have just said.  Why would you do that to someone whose opinion you trust?  How can you pick and chose what you want to believe from the mouth of someone who is supposed to be entrusted with your welfare?  Isn’t that person broken?  Do you simply disregard something you love, or do you try to fix it?

And so this opposite reaction to this problem has gotten me in trouble most of my life.  In my early 20’s I simply lost all respect for my parents and couldn’t stand them anymore.  So I started to ignore them and let go.  Guess what happened.  You guessed it.  My relationship with them improved.  This completely dumbfounded me at first.  But I soon learned to navigate it.

These people who raised me put some really strange notions in my head when I was growing up.  When I got to high school I made a lot of terribly embarrassing social missteps.  I cringe when I think back to it.  But I had some bad information.  When I asked them about social situations and stuff about growing up the answers were completely whacked out.  The information was not to be trusted.  So I groped around hoping for the best and learned about social cues from trial and error.  Now that I am almost 40 I think I finally get it.  I am not utterly lost in social situations.  I pick up on cues.  I still have my odd bits and quirks, but I have tried to spin these as things about me that are colorful.  Eccentricities if you will.  Shhhh.  Don’t tell anyone my secret.  I think I get away with it most days.

But back to my early 20’s.  I finally had just given up on my parents and couldn’t be bothered to listen to their bullshit.  But I desperately wanted to be able to say that I had parents.  I didn’t want to be that weird guy who ever so often had to say things like, “Oh, I haven’t talked to my parents for years.  I’m not sure what happened to them.”  I was determined to be normal.  So I every so often my mental alarm clock would go off and I would think, “Okay, it’s time to call my parents.  Just do it.  Just call them and have an utterly boring conversation with them.  Ask them how they are.  Let them ramble on about how much they hate things and distrust everyone.  Count down the seconds and agree every so often.  It makes people feel better to hear an “Oh yeah,”  and an “Oh really?” every now and then.

Once every month or two I would build up a head of steam to go have dinner at their house.  I dreaded it.  I swear I would rather go to the dentist.  But there was a reward for my efforts.  I had parents.  Right?  I mean, I could say that I had parents.  I could say that I ate dinner with them and I knew what they were doing.  Right?  That’s a good thing, right?

It was awkward to talk to people I barely knew.  At first I told them all about being an EMT and some of the adventures that I had.  I thought they were listening to me.  When I first retooled my relationship with them I tried to tell them as many stories as they told me.  But one night when I was eating dinner at their house it backfired.  I started talking about my job in such a way that I was assuming that they knew a certain amount about what I was talking about from previous conversations.  I listened to all of their stories.  I could tell you about my parent’s lives.  But when I got a little bit into my story I looked up from my dinner to find that my parents were lost.  Their faces gave them away.  They had no clue what I was talking about.  I was insulted and I confronted them.

“Hey, can either of you tell me where I have been working for the last three years?”

Silence.

“Can either of you tell me if I am an EMT or a paramedic?  You guys helped me pay for school and I graduated.  Can you tell me anything about what I do?”

“You work on an ambulance, don’t you?”  my mother ventured.

“Okay, let’s make this easy.  Can you relay any story that I have told you in the past few months?  Can you even boil it down to the basics or paraphrase anything?”

There was more silence, so I just got up and left.

A few months went by and my parents tentatively called and tried to act as if nothing had happened.  And for the next ten years our new relationship was forged.  These were the salad days.  For the next ten years I managed to call my parents about every other week, and we never argued again.  What was my secret?  I never spoke.  I never even tried.  Sure, occasionally they would ask something about my life just to be polite, but I always answered the question as quickly as possible.  My goal was to keep my input into the conversation to a minimum.  After a while it was like a game.  Sometimes they would ask me where I worked.  I would say, “I am a paramedic for a local fire department.”

“Oh really, what’s that like?”

“You know, people call 911 and I take them to the hospital.  So what did you put in the garden this year?  It’s about time to plant, isn’t it?”

In two or three weeks we would be on the phone again.  They would have forgotten that I worked for the fire department and they would ask about my current job again.

“I am a paramedic.”

“Oh yes, of course.  Who do you work for again?”

“The fire department.  Hey, did you guys get those rose bushes planted?  Didn’t you say you were going to try them in the side yard last time we talked?”

I would mentally keep score.  I would think, “Man I got that done in seven words.  ‘I am a paramedic’ and ‘the fire department.’  How can I shorten that up for next time?  Could I shave it down to five or six words before redirecting them?

I got kind of reckless with it.  I found that I dreaded calling them unless I had something to do while I was calling.  So I used to play video games while I called.  I have a few vivid memories of lying on my couch in a dingy efficiency apartment banging away at my Playstation controller.  I would always start some innocuous conversation and let them ramble.  Asking about plants or the weather was pretty innocuous.  Pets and home improvements were usually safe.  Meanwhile I was racking up the kills in Destruction Derby II.  No matter how reckless I was, they never noticed and we never argued.

I used to ask myself, “Is this respect?  Is this what a relationship with your parents is supposed to be?”

Who cares?  I could say I had parents, and that felt better.  The conversations didn’t even cut into my free time.  The only problem I had was keeping the phone on my shoulder while playing.  It was a lot easier to play turned based games on the computer, so I took to playing Civilization II.

Over ten argument free years went by.  And then my parents came to stay with us for Christmas because they were in ill health and wanted to see me.  Now I had to listen.  Mom was diagnosed with leukemia and my dad had unknown ailments because he flat out refuses to discuss certain conditions with his doctors.  He doesn’t brush his teeth anymore and they are starting to rot out of his head.  Mom had talked him into having a few removed when he couldn’t eat anymore, but that is about it.  Nothing else has been addressed.  His legs are swollen to an alarming degree.  They weep clear fluid and his toenails are barely distinguishable poking out from the doughy crust.

They arrived angry.  They had a chip on their shoulder.  They knew they needed help but they didn’t want to admit it.  They would ask my advice on things but quickly dismissed my answers.  You could see the anger welling up in them as I talked.  Oops.  This was a real conversation.  We weren’t supposed to have those.

Perhaps if I really had respect for them I would have said, “Your legs look fine.  I’m sure your diet is fine for a diabetic.”

But you see, I have this really twisted version of respect.  I looked at my father and thought to myself, “This guy is either going to die or get his legs amputated.  He needs to hear the truth.  He won’t be able to accept it but he’s an adult and I can’t let his legs get sawed off without making one or two appeals to reason.  So I talked to him.  And I talked to mom.  I never raised my voice once.  I never got angry.  I got frustrated, but never angry.

The plan backfired.  I can’t say I have parents anymore.  They sent me hate mail for months.  Real hate mail.  I’m not kidding.  There was cursing.  There were insults.  Things were in all caps.  I resolved not to stoop to their level, so I sent a couple of replies that were well worded.  I told them that they asked for my help because I have been in the medical field for almost 20 years.  And I decided to give it to them.  I knew that some of the conversations and dialogues I was starting would be uncomfortable, but that life and limb was at stake.

It just caused more hate mail.  After a while I started to send letters back by writing “return to sender” on them.  I thought that people only did that in the movies but apparently the post office takes it very seriously.  They started to send hateful emails.  A few times I opened them and read the first few sentences to see if they had let up a bit.  But it was usually just shocking.  So I accessed my email server and blocked their address.  I set it up to return an error message stating that there address had been blocked.  There were a few weeks of blissful silence.  But one day last month one got through.  There it was.  In my inbox.  Another email from my dad.  Had the server reset?  Did I lose my settings?  Well who knows?  Maybe this happened for a reason.  I thought I would sneak a peek at it and see if his tone had changed at all.  Nope.  It looked pretty venomous.  I scrolled down a bit and read, “YOU ARE A SORRY EXCUSE FOR A MAN…”  So I just closed it and erased it.

Here is a song written about my father… 

I wrote one last email to them trying to explain that I wished them no harm and I hoped that they were doing well, but that I was not going to be their punching bag.  I told them that all of their letters would be returned and all of their emails would be deleted without reading them.  A couple of days later a card arrived for Zoe from my mother.  I drove it down to the post office and told them it came from a creepy relative that was sending inappropriate mail to me and now they were addressing it to my children.  She put a big red “REJECTED” stamp on it and sent it back to them unopened.

The last few weeks have been thankfully hate free.  Oddly enough I do not miss them.  I miss the idea of having parents.  I miss the ability to say that I had parents.  The string of hate mail was just an absurd David Lynch sort of thing that made me feel less uncomfortable than not being able to answer the question, “How is your mother doing?”  Quite a few people know that she has leukemia and they are nice enough to ask.  So I have done the worst.  I have taken to lying.  I tell them she is doing well and she really hasn’t gotten that sick yet.  The information is a few months old, but it is the most current I have.  It placates the asker just as much as ignoring my parents while they droned on use to placate them during the salad days.

So I guess this is respect.  I guess this is friendship.  I guess this is being an adult.  I guess this is being a son.

In the end I guess I should have just let the baby be slippery.  I should have let my dad get his legs cut off and my mom die alone of leukemia while I said “Oh really” periodically in an interested tone while I played Plants Vs. Zombies.   Perhaps that would have been respectful.  Perhaps that would have been tolerant.

The problem is, it just wouldn’t have been me.  The odd thing is that my parents raised me to be respectful.  And I am sorry but eating butter does not make a baby slippery.  Fax machines don’t give humans viruses.  If your legs look like tree trunks you should probably change some behaviors.  And eating handfuls of candy and four danishes is not good for your diabetes.

But the real problem is not any of this.  It’s the moments in between.  I am sure that the lady who thought the baby would get slippery is a warm loving person with much to offer besides old wives’ tales.  She might even know what her daughter does for a living.  That probably makes the awkward smile and the shrug a little easier.

If all you have is the awkward smile and the shrug, you don’t really have parents.  So I guess nothing has changed.  I still don’t have parents.  At least it’s easier to play video games now.

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