When I took Brandine for her walk today I listened to this week’s This American Life, which was called “Twentieth Century Man.” In his preamble, Ira Glass said that we Americans have the unique “birthright” to “recreate ourselves as someone who we prefer to be.” He then introduced the story of the week. It was about a man who did remake himself over and over again and became an embodiment of the cultural shifts of the twentieth century. I expected a biography of an interesting multi-hyphenate who was able to … I don’t know … really grasp and adapt to the zeitgeist of every age in which he lived. I looked forward to the story.
And then, for an hour, I listened to the life story of one of the most insensitive, selfish, abusive, egomaniacal fathers I had ever heard of. It made me so fucking angry. I even got pissed off at Ira Glass for bait-and-switching me like that.
Keith Aldrich married 5 times and had 9 children. He basically had a separate wife and set of kids for each decade of his adult life. He:
- was a Christian minister-in-training, an aspiring playwright, a publisher, an actor, a radio program writer, a 3-martini New York sophisticate, and an anti-establishment acid dropper, among other things.
- hit various wives and children.
- would systematically reject, then abandon his older children while manipulating his younger children into thinking they were the center of his universe.
- sexually harassed his son’s girlfriend.
- near the end of his life, wrote a letter to his youngest son that said that his wives and children were to blame for all the shameful compromises he made during his life and that basically he never really lived up to his full potential because of them.
Here’s a man who left a lot of people in his wake – and then he had the gall to blame them for his horrible lapses in decency and good judgment! I was angry that he died so long ago because I wished that strangers could have told him that he was an utter cock to his children.
And I was angry that he never had a vasectomy. This is kind of terrible, because I assume that all of his children would prefer to have been born to a bad father than to have never been born. But they really got a shitty (and I mean shitty) draw in the dad lottery.
Of course, this makes me think of our evil college roommate. You know Bunny, the one whose stories of family were always about screaming, power struggles and emotional abuse. Whose sister was deprived of basic things while she lived with stepsiblings that got lavished with presents. Whose father drove her like 200 miles to a police station to do a lie detector test on her. And who was a paranoid, closed-off loner who looked out for no one but herself.
And the one hopeful thing about our evil ex-roommate was that I believed her when she said she’d never have children. We were all 20-year-old youngsters and she recognized then that she would not be the best mom. That’s a mature attitude to take – “I’m not capable of providing a loving and supportive environment to my future progeny, therefore I will stay childless.” Stop the cycle and all that. Good for her for knowing herself. But why on earth did Keith Aldrich have 9 children? He never earned the privilege of raising children. He didn’t deserve all the unconditional love his children gave him. And why are people like this continuing to have kids without any consideration of the well-being of those kids? Like they do it for their own vanity or because they don’t have birth control? Do you think some people are compelled to have children because they feel like everyone should have kids? It doesn’t make sense, especially when you consider the long-term, generational effects.
“NoMommy” to “Mommy”, what’s your take on this?
Do you copy, MommyNoMommy?
Oh, brudda.
