Articulation in 2021

In the old days, on Open Diary, I certainly complained about my parents enough. And rightly so. I was fifteen, and I suppose that this is the natural course of events for fifteen year olds. I had various grievances with my father and with my mother, and rightly so. Nobody is perfect, and an overly intelligent teenage is difficult to deal with or to reason with. Now, removed from the need to condemn them or to justify myself, I believe that I know what was missing. Our family lacked anything resembling articulation.
Realizing this has helped me to overcome a lot of anger and hostility. Articulation is a tall order anywhere you go, and most families really don’t need it. It’s true that my family was bad at it, but we were well within the standard range of acceptable. The problem was that my father, a man with a language impediment, and my mother, a woman whose verbal skills are out of proportion to her reason, were uniquely ill suited to raising a genius, a mental case, and myself: a bit of both.
I do not know if it is possible to imagine what it would be like to be smarter than you are. If we could, we could presumably imagine ourselves to the top of the class by deciding to do what somebody smarter would do. I can’t imagine the kind of life, or the kind of family, that would have suited my eldest brother. I think that maybe if he had been born among the beautiful people, it could have helped him quite a bit. But if our parents had been able to articulate half of what they wanted to say to him, it would have made a difference.
My other brother was born two hundred years too late. He would have been happy in the woods, hunting, fishing, fighting, and farming. He would have made a frontier hero. But he was born into the middle class suburbs. He is a man who thrives in his own suffering and misery, and where he cannot find it, he will create it. And so he created it for himself and for everyone around him. He was like a Husky trapped in an apartment. Bred to run itself to exhaustion every day, and happiest when pulling loads, when confined to a house with a floral couch and decorative towels, it was only natural that he would tear it apart. And through punishment, and his own natural ill temperament, this became malice. Nobody was there to explain to him what was wrong with him or the world. My father certainly had an understanding of it, but he could never articulate it. My mother had no understanding, and said everything that she could, but it rang false. And the others who tried to help made everything worse. He needed to know what he was, but nobody who knew could tell him, and the people who could tell him never knew. He’s a man’s man. For all the good and bad of that. He would have fought Achilles, and sulked just as hard in his tent. He would jump the wall in Tyre, and mope just as hard for his own drunken misdeeds. The good and bad of a men cannot be snuffed out and transformed into the little girls that his teachers and shinks wanted him to model himself after. He needed to understand what my father understood: take up your weight and move.
I was a literal minded child, and to this day I struggle with being overly literal. Though I’ve certainly made progress in that department. I accepted what I heard as the word of authority, and I was generally a stickler for rules and things. I always tried to cheat through the rules, and I always sought to exploit loopholes or things of that sort. But breaking the rules was unacceptable! I was a consummate weasel. And my father knew this, but he could never tell me. I could talk circles around him in his sleep. He tried, in his own way, to show me better things, but I had no idea what he was trying to communicate. My mother’s hyper verbal skills had taught me to revere them, and my father’s reverence for rhetoric (something he could not master) taught me more and more that words mattered and shaped reality. I don’t know that I ever wanted to be a writer so much as I fetishized words and written language. I never understood that I had completely removed myself from reality by wrapping it in a gibberish of syllables. And nobody could tell me otherwise.

My father said to me that knowing something doesn’t mean much if you can’t explain it. To that end, he wanted his sons to have an excellent English education. I don’t know if he realized how right he was.