Advisor to men

I once did time in a provincial reformatory for shooting a guy. It’s a bit of a long story but the gist of it was I was attacked from behind and beaten with nunchucks over a girl. Not any girl, she was runner-up Miss Nude Ottawa and a good friend of mine. I wasn’t even fucking her, then.

To shorten the story, the owner took a dislike to me sitting there with all the strippers at my table drinking and snorting lines with the girls. I ended up a little drunk with a high school buddy who happened to come in looking to see pussy. The owner  waited until the afternoon lull before picking a fight, then siccing the headwaiter on me from behind with nunchucks. I went down but not out and left.

I came back and shot one of them and tried to kill the other one. Fucker kept throwing beer cases at me and hiding behind people as I fired, until I had only one bullet left which I kept to cover my exit.

I got away but turned myself in a few days later once the cops had raided everyone I knew. I was holed up at a gal’s place who was not my girlfriend, being looked after. From there, I arranged arrest on my terms, after a hospital visit with my lawyer to sew up my head 48 hours after I was injured, something rarely done..

I got bail after a few days, thanks to my brothers and sisters stepping up to vouch for me. This despite my having not lived at home for several years. It was also the one time my folks were not in town I found out later. My eldest brother even pledged his motorcycle as surety for bail. I guess you could do that in those days. We used a lot of the “out of character” phrase, a mantra for some time afterwards.

At the preliminary, I was suddenly thrust into a waiting room at #1 Nicholas Avenue with all the people who were going to testify against me. So, I went downstairs with my gal to the coffee shop and bought about 30 coffees and sandwiches to serve my witnesses. While asking if they needed creamers or sugar, I had a chance to give them my side of the story, impressing upon them this was “out of character” and resulted from being attacked first.

Not only that, the guy who had hit me from behind and whom I’d shot, taking out his spleen and leaving a bullet lodged up against his spine, suggested we make a deal. He’d admit he hit me first if I’d testify for him later at a criminal compensation hearing. I agreed.

Whereas my lawyer had told me straight up I’d get at least five years, waving the book with the attempted murder statute under my nose, I ended up with a deuce less. That is two years less a day. Which means I was in a reformatory. No pen time this bit.

As I returned from court and was being re-booked into the county jail’s maximum wing on Innes Road, one of the guards was a little impatient with me as he demanded yet another search at the Max Rotunda. “Turn around, hands against the wall, spread’em,” he said gruffly. I noticed some broad looking at me and stared back her with contempt, thinking she probably liked to see me humiliated in this way.

photo by Wayne Cuddington/ Postmedia

Not an hour went by before I was called out of my cell to speak through the bars at the top of the range to this very lady. Apparently, she was our new classifications officer and wanted to hear my story. Prisons were being staffed by women suddenly in our rush to progress.

Of course, I told her it was all a mistake, that it was an overreaction on my part after being brutally beaten for no reason other than petty jealousy. I did my best to convince her it was “out of character” and told her about my jewelry and furniture businesses.

By the end of the week, I had buddies deliver letters attesting to my businesses and how I was needed outside to keep things afloat. I got out within ten days of being in. The guys on my range—many of whom I knew from the outside—couldn’t believe it. I left them the rest of the hash I’d smuggled in up my ass on the day I was sentenced.

That worked out well for a while. I was in a halfway house out on Riverside, with an apartment on Innes just a few miles down the river. Meanwhile, my buddies had rented a place further out the river for the summer. I bounced between the three places.

Peanut Haven out by Manotick it was called, and I rented half of one of the three cottages with my buddy Flo. Every morning at ten while at the halfway house, I’d dress in a suit and tie, grab my briefcase and go outside to meet my partner. He’d show up in our Cadillac dressed in jeans and a T-Shirt with bulging muscles. He looked like my body guard and we didn’t deny it. Then I’d either go deal dope one place or another, the time away barely causing a ripple in my schedule.

Sometimes, my partner had other shit to do so I’d drive the Caddy around and take care of business myself. It so happened I walked into a buddy’s place to collect some money one evening, just as he was being raided. I’d almost forgot about this until my high school reunion a few months back. Someone there reminded me they were there when it happened.

I knocked on the door and when it opened I saw he was being raided and ran. They caught me on the stairs and found my keys. They searched the block and tried the locks until they found the right one. My partner had left a few ounces of pot tucked into a construction boot in the trunk without me knowing. I was busted.

I remember the ride downtown in the wagon with the other guys. How I had to push my handcuffed arms from behind my back and under me, and how they had helped me get my legs through one at a time, so I was cuffed from in front instead of behind. I remember that.

I was returned to the county bucket and reclassified. I kept telling them it was all a mistake; the pot wasn’t mine and was left there by mistake. It was still, “out of character,” despite how it looked!  I even had someone else claim the pot as theirs. We took a shot at it. The guards started calling me “silk.” My poor classification officer gal listened patiently and told me she’d send me to the easiest place possible. I was shipped out to a minimum-security joint.

No sooner than I arrived at what we called Burritts Rapids, I immediately applied for a half-way house. I remember that interview with the warden. He called me a con-artist and reminded me of the silk nickname which had followed in my classification reports from Ottawa. He denied me outright and told me to do my time. I told him I was happy to re-apply again later.

I worked at it. The thing was, you could be denied and re-apply the next day. So that’s what I did. I was turned down over and over for transfer out to the city. And the food at the Rideau Correctional Facility, as it was known officially, was terrible. By far, the worst food I’ve eaten in prison and where I was introduced to hickory tasting coffee. Horrible, I found punishing.

So I aimed for and won a day-job working at a local developmental hospital in Smith Falls. They had those at the time, since closed. I’d be bused to the hospital every morning and spend the day there working as a pool porter. I’d get a voucher where I could eat cafeteria food which was ten times better tasting than joint food. I’d also get to wear my street clothes and talk to women, good smelling gals. I could also swim in the pool if I wanted, with women lifeguards who worked there, and were nice to me! It was a good go, as they say.

It was there I saw what they used to do with all the kids no one wanted. There were kids wards and adult wards, male and female. They even had a series of cottage style buildings where some of the more high-functioning kids could live. I never met anyone from those.  Blind, deaf, dumb kids were dumped here by families, encouraged by doctors.

Autistic headbangers occupied whole wards, banging their hockey helmeted heads on the floor all day. Many were in diapers, toddlers who screamed and self-harmed in their self-soothing attempts, but some were older. None of those kids swam that I remember. Or if they did, I was sent to fetch them strapped in a wheelchair and brought them down one at a time.

Several wards held schizophrenics, separated into male and female. Those places were nuts at times, depending on when the meds had been given out. The male wards were tough. I saw attendants dressed in while smacking people in desperation when they were attacked, or someone was stealing an ashtray or a smoke. It was an angry place when meds wore off.

Many Down Syndrome kids and adults lived there. Every developmental issue was represented at the Rideau Regional Centre. If you had never encountered anything like this in your life, the only thing I can reckon it to is the freak shows at the ex. In those days, families gave these kids up to the state, to be institutionalized. The place had to house a thousand, I bet.

Whole wards of alcohol damaged individuals, Korsakoff Syndrome and tardive dyskinesia had a place there. Wards with people in straight jackets for their own protection and the protection of the staff. The developmentally delayed child who lives becomes a developmentally delayed adult in a place like this. Without good stimulation in these warehouse-type institutions of old, it becomes a horror story, far beyond Steinbeck’s, “Of Mice and Men.”

Everyone smoked in the place, and during the day it had clouds of smoke in every hallway and in every dorm, cigarette butts everywhere on the floor. I remember a kid who had really bad brain damage from a car accident. He was one of my first pool-porter patients. Because of him, I learned to walk on the right side of my charges with my left hand on the back of their neck and my right hand folded across my mid-section and holding on to their right forearm. This way I could pivot them one way or another in a hurry.

Big and tall and you could tell, once good-looking, Stephen was pica. And he was addicted to any stimulant, not just tobacco. He once got away from me and ran into a ward and grabbed their instant coffee and started to scoop it into his mouth by the handfuls. The attendants freaked and physically intervened and taught me how to hold on to him.

He’d run through his weekly allotment of smokes in a day or two and nic-fit the rest of the week. He’d gesture to me, two fingers tapping his mouth slowly while saying in a deep and clearly brain-damaged way, “mokee? mokee?  moke?” with a twinkle in his eye. Sometimes I’d oblige him, and become his new best friend. He could answer questions about his accident, but it took a great deal of effort. I’d bust his balls about how all the girls must have liked him.

I’d be walking him down the hall to the pool and I’d sense him looking at me out of the corner of his eye, sizing me up, getting just slightly more anxious. First time it happened he broke free and dove upon a cigarette butt on the floor and gobbled it down before I could stop him. After that, I see him start to twitch a bit and look ahead and spot his target, taking precautions.

In one of the male adult wards lived Birdman. Staff would get him up in the morning and dressed. Soon he would strip naked and sit up on the window sill in a crouch for hours and hours. His whole body, from head to toe, would turn blue from the constricted blood vessels while his tongue would dart in and out like a lizard. His penis would hang down over the side as well,  a vestigial long dong of blue. He was mostly catatonic, staring off into space.

I happened to be there when a kid with cerebral palsy sued the government for the right to make his own decisions about where to live and how to spend his monthly stipend. I can’t remember his name (Mike?) but he won in Ontario court while we were all pulling for him.

He used a Bliss board, and I had several wonderful conversations with him in his wheelchair, a big board of symbols in front of him like a table, and him awkwardly but effectively using Blissymbolics to communicate. He had a goofy smile and an intelligence in eyes that twinkled easily. I gave him my best props and pep talks as he waited his own reclassification. He was an amazing guy, really inspiring.

Perhaps it was these kids and adults who first awakened in me a dormant caring I’d suppressed on the street for many years. They were doing time like I was, society’s refuse, shuffled aside and locked away. I was a prisoner and so were they. We were on the same side, with me at Rideau Correctional Centre, while they were at the Rideau Regional Centre.

In 2013, the Ontario liberals awarded survivors of the Rideau Centre 20.6 million. David McKillop, then 63, placed there when he was just four years old, was the representative plaintiff. “I got beaten up by staff, sexual assault, everything… You couldn’t do anything about it… You couldn’t say anything about it at that time” he told the CBC after the settlement. “I still dream about memories about it… We’re going to get help for that too.  I wanted to make sure the government paid for it, what they did to us.”

Bless your heart my man. Seeing what I saw late 1970s during the day when it was at its busiest, I can only imagine what it was like at night. It’s horrifying to think of now.

It was later while studying behavioural sciences in the late 1980s where I was exposed to the Cornwall project, an initiative to keep developmentally challenged kids with their families with the support of the community. I attended “People First” meetings and became friendly with some of these charming ambassadors living with their families of origin, or in small community-based housing. It was better than what I saw by far.

We’d learned by then the more stimulation challenged kids gets in the first few years, the better their chances later. It was also admitting the best place for a kid is usually at home. At the same time, it was forcing families to take greater responsibility for their offspring, despite the problems, but with support from the state. With that, the stigma of the retarded child began to disappear. I like to believe I witnessed that turning point when my little buddy and his bliss board won his court case.

As for me, I kept applying for release and getting shot down. Each week or two, I’d appear before the warden flanked by two guards and make my case. He’d say no, and compliment me on my improved story, with a smirk on his face. Off I’d go to my dorm.

Then a miracle happened: a prison strike. The Canadian Army were called in to man the security of the province’s prisons. And you guessed it: anyone with an application for early release or transfer to a halfway house in town was automatically approved.

I was out again. Fuck you warden.

A few years later, I encountered the guy I shot at a bar, Billy’s on Somerset where I’d taken my new gal for an afternoon beer. He was still dragging one foot as he walked and thanked me for not killing him. Turns out because he admitted he attacked me first from behind in the preliminary hearing transcripts, the criminal compensation board turned him down for any award. Tough break lad.

Besides the kid with the Bliss board, and Stephen the pica, what haunts me most from those times was pulling up every day at the Rideau Regional Centre in our prison bus and seeing a big black hearse at the back of the place. I don’t remember not seeing one there in the months I was privileged to work outside of prison among these brave souls.

Sometimes the worst places teach you the most. Without contrast, what would we know about bliss?

Stay powerful,

Christopher K Wallace
© 2018, all rights reserved.

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PARENTING SIMPLIFIED FOR MEN

Kids need to orient towards a parent.

It is how nature made us.

If that orientation is broken or weak, your children will orient elsewhere. That’s how it works.

It’s just like a parent-less baby duck or goose whose mother is run over or killed. Rescue one and it bonds with a human (or a doll or a cat or a dog), imprinting and following them around as if they were its mother. You don’t want that.

Video games, drugs, risky behaviours, poor choices in friends and an over-reliance on peer groups are some of the ways a kid or teen will make up for a lack of connection with a parent (or parents and/or family).

By the way: what the heck do peers know? In general: not much. It’s scary how little.

Orientation is often the issue when kids go off the rails. And, after age 14, it becomes more difficult to maintain parental orientation as time goes by. Can you reclaim orientation? Yes, indeed you can.

Why? Because teens want desperately to be rescued from themselves. Desperately.

They are born with a sense of justice and can compare your family to the families of their friends. They know who is happy and who is not. They can see what works and what does not. They crave love and attention. ALL communication is a bid for connection.

So the heart of parenting is connection. It’s worth repeating. It keeps it simple. The key question to ask your self is this: Is what I’m doing going to increase connection… or weaken it?

If it increases connection, you are probably doing what nature intended. If it weakens or severs connection, that is wholly unnatural. Unnatural, I say. It goes against the natural order of things.

Ask yourself this connection question often; make it part of your approach.

To me it’s ALL about connection. Focus on connection right from the start. When parents realize it’s really this simple, many aha! moments ensue from its simplicity. Connection is surface simple but vast and deep in practice. The best concepts are like that.

To connect, you need time. Not “quality time” so much as just time spent in connection. Safe, secure, predictable. The need to belong is universal. It’s largely what drives us in life. Ostracism is the real scourge of mankind.

From connection, the child will feel “valued.” Feeling like you matter to someone or a group of people is at the heart of attachment–our primary psychological need.

Connection’s opposite is loneliness. We do a lot of messed up things out of loneliness. How many of us have been in a group of people at some point in our lives… and felt lonely? It sucks.

Imagine a child or teen feeling lonely while in your house? As part of your family? Happens all the time.

From connection and time and a sense of value, you can coach a child or teen to anything. What you want to teach them is self-discipline.

I don’t mean bootcamp discipline. Rather, the ability to delay gratification… is the single best predictor of a successful life.

Intelligence helps a person live well but the advantage stops at just above average.

It’s self-discipline that counts.

Know any intelligent losers? Of course you do. We all know plenty.

Know any self-disciplined losers? Doesn’t happen. In fact, the two are opposites.

Remind yourself that children desperately want to be parented.

Calm, steady, and authoritative parenting instills confidence and a sense of safety in children. It makes them feel like they matter.

It’s your job to keep the kid alive and socialize them. Use connection far more than fear. Use consequences so children see there is a price to pay for going against what the parent thinks is the priority. Use the minimum force necessary. A parent should be able to outsmart their kid. And if connection is lost, regain it as soon as you can.

We could talk about how feminism is ruining the cultures of the western world. Dare me.

Or how the banking system uses interest to create scarcity and competition; its unrelenting need for growth forcing more parents into work to earn for their families. Double dare me.

But in the end, it misses what’s important. It’ll be the rare person who gets to 80 and says they wished they worked more or took up yet another cause.

Very few get a diagnosis of terminal cancer with months to live and wished they had a Ferrari.

No. Time and again, in the end people wish they’d spent more time with their friends and families, especially their children. Connecting with loved ones, folks. Look up the Grant Study. It’s all about the love.

So just focus on connection. If you get that right, most of everything else takes care of itself. By putting connection first, everything seems to fall into place. It’s nature’s way.

Here’s a pithy quote:

“As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value.” –Bessel Van der Kolk.

Find it early, find it late, you must find love, I like to say.

We must all find love, and it starts with family of origin. That’s you. Ideally, it’s where we learn how to love and be loved. This must be part of your legacy to your children.

Connection is your key.

Stay powerful, never give up
cw

© CKWallace, 2017, all rights reserved

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Book I recommend:

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

an essay by Christopher K Wallace

We don’t often talk of spirit when discussing substance use. Go big or go home seems to be the order of the day: all-in belief or nothing. I suppose this might be due to our physiology. After all, our eyes see out. We should be forgiven for seeking answers to big questions out there somewhere. As if looking to the heavens will reflect some perfect truth we can use to guide our actions. There’s merit to this: it often does.

But first, let me ask you something: Have you ever been afraid? Where you momentarily had the wits scared out of you? What happens? 

Your breathing shallows, your heart rate increases, blood pressure rises and thinking narrows as you focus on escape or resolution. We all know these symptoms as classic fight or flight. Now, think of what happens after you drink a couple of beers or smoke a joint or take any other mood-altering chemical. Sure enough, it’s the same thing: breathing shallows, heart rate goes up, blood pressure rises, and most importantly, thinking narrows. Using these substances puts your physiology into a fight or flight state.

The body doesn’t distinguish between medicines; moreover, it has no idea it’s “just a joint,” or “just a couple of beers,” or “doctor prescribed.” It’s all the same, considered as a threat to your system from foreign poisons, where your body is put off-balance, out of something called homeostasis. And once in this state, the body counters by doing everything it can to restore itself back to normal, including engaging the sympathetic nervous system to help.

Perspiration, breath, heart rate, liver and kidneys are all put on overtime use. Adrenaline and cortisol course through your veins in preparation for fight or flight—or freeze or feint, the other two Fs of the 4Fs, and often overlooked when your being is under attack. Meantime, the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine provides cover for the habituated user, making them think the buzz means everything’s OK. It’s not.

Let me give you some examples.

If you think of your first experiences with any of these substances, you may recall how your body and mind reacted with fear. It could be dizziness or vomiting from alcohol use; or an intense fear from using cannabis. Some people say they don’t get off on pot the first time they try it, that’s how good your body is at countering its effects. People stick with it and adapt; eventually, they feel it. Cocaine is another one which induces intense fear. And for some people, first LSD use is the scariest thing ever, resulting in a “bad trip.”

Remember in high school being over at that one friend’s house with the cool parents, where a garage or basement became a drug zone after school or on weekends? Maybe you passed the bong around until you were all pretty much unable to speak. Oh sure, maybe someone says, “Hey dude, do you think your cat’s stoned? Do you think it knows we’re high, man?” We all thought we were buzzed; when in truth, we were immobilized by fear.

Nietzsche said, “All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth comes only from the senses.”

The brain relies on what comes in from touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight to log onto our world. Experience is derived from the senses; therefore, undermined sensory inputs means compromised experience. Alcohol and drugs create a fear response in the body while using dopamine to trigger your reward centers, keeping awareness of fear symptoms at bay. Beneath the surface, a tug of war is going on while you sit and get high.

The brain and body are not separate entities. In fact, your whole physical being is the universal address of your existence. As such, feelings live as equally in the body as they do in the brain through the tenth cranial nerve. Known as the Vagus Complex, it connects your brain stem to most of your internal organs, including the heart and gut.

Feelings come from experience. Think of what kinds of feelings a baby has compared to an adult. As the baby matures, it’s capable of a variety of emotions in increasing complexity as its experience grows. And, feelings are predictive, not reactive as we often think. Much of the brain works this way. Let me explain.

Your brain predicts your sleep and wake cycle and builds up levels of melatonin to prepare you for slumber. It predicts the eventual need for food by signaling with the hormone ghrelin well in advance of meal-times.  Even your visual cortex receives inputs from the eye, but also has neurons running the other way, from the cortex, which carry predictions affecting what you see. At any moment, beneath awareness the brain predicts what state is required and scans your bank of previous experiences for matching emotions in preparation for what’s ahead.

In this way, science tells us we live emotionally and use our thinking brain to explain things after the fact. Emotions rule because they occur milliseconds faster than we can think, acting as our early warning system. The line between reality and imagination blurs during substance use, while the body tallies the score. The brain’s memory doesn’t discern between stoned or drunk and straight. It’s all just input.

After decades of smoking hashish, the last ten or more years as a nightcap to my day the way others use a glass of wine to unwind, I noticed (and for the first time really took stock of) my physical symptoms. Then I asked myself this question: “Can you be afraid and confident at the same time?” Most people’s gut answer to this is to say: no, it’s one or the other as the feelings are mutually exclusive. If you are in fear, you may still be in action, but it is unlikely to be with much confidence. It’s more likely you are going through the motions, rather than giving things your best.

Moreover, if emotions rule my actions, without me even realizing it through my databank of recalled events, I had to ask myself what compounding effect substance use was having on my confidence?  I’m talking about real confidence here, the kind gained from trial and error. Sometimes, it comes from taking a great leap of faith; other times, it arises from a series of small victories adding up to a quiet competence. Either way, it’s always hard-earned.

Math is like that, so is spelling or writing. Even riding a bicycle results in a lasting physical confidence, whereas doing something like public speaking for the first time can vault a person into a new sense of self. Think of the first time you climbed high into a tree or jumped off the high diving board at the local pool. So much of our progress in life is because of these quests to add to our personal repertoire of skills and emotional durability. Life usually gets better when we get better at life.

The times on weekends where I’d drink a half-dozen beers on a Friday or Saturday night, or both, I’d find not much got done during the day. I would also fail to connect with my wife and children in a meaningful way. The things I’d planned to do on my days off were often put off or started but never finished. Once, I built half of a fair-sized shed, became unsure of my plans, so just dismantled it. I stacked the wood behind my house, and never returned to the task. Confidence.

And small things, ordinary demands a man rises to meet during life, were not being handled with any urgency. It didn’t take much to put me off my game. I came to realize with every beer I drank, what I was really doing was sipping on fear and pissing out confidence. Every haul on a joint meant inhaling more fear and exhaling a critical part of my power.

Who needs this confidence thing anyway? Turns out, we all do. I’ve heard it said confidence is the stuff we use to turn thoughts into actions. This has wider implications. Let me ask you, “How then, do you live confidently when you regularly subject your body to a fear state which cannot be resolved with action?” In my case, when I was honest with myself, I had to admit I could not.

I’d work hard at gaining confidence, and yet, doubt would creep back into my life. It meant I didn’t invest in all the technological wonders that have arisen in my lifetime and which I could have easily participated in. It meant I took jobs which kept me safe. It also resulted in me not standing up for myself when I should have. Overall, it kept me playing small. It was two steps forward, and one step back. Sometimes, admittedly, it was just one step back. Though, I had all the trappings of the middle class, I was living a charade.

I’m not talking about occasional substance use. I’m referring to habitual use, from more than once per week to daily consumption. Under the fear-load this engenders in the body, assuredly, confidence wanes. In time, this steady assault on confidence can become something called “learned helplessness.”

That’s when you tell yourself a story about confidence. You may realize it’s for other people, something off in the distance, far from your existence. Or, more likely, it’s something we don’t talk about at all because it means we have given up aspiring to becoming something more. In a measure, we abandon our dreams.

Can you live this way and survive? Sure. You can get by. But even now you’ll realize it’s not what Mother Nature or God had in mind when you defied the odds by beating all those other sperm to the egg, when you won the race of life. Damn it. This was not supposed to be our destiny. The Universe wants more from you, from me, and confidence is key to allowing our spirit to fly, to soar with the eagles in full view of the sun.

But here’s what happens. Twenty years may go by. If you’re lucky, one day you’ll have an epiphany like I did.  You may realize you have not lived those twenty years at all. Instead, what you have really done is lived one year…twenty times. 

Let that sink in a bit. I had to soak in it for a while.

Why did I need this jolt of fear everyday? When I searched a little deeper, it dawned on me. I’d been creating fear like this since I was a kid. I figured out my family of origin likely set me on this path through its uneven attachments and unpredictable violence. Paradoxically, I was a fear seeker. Early on, fight or flight had carried the day for me and I survived, thereby searing its red-hot brand upon my soul. I lived by it. It meant life or death to me. If there was no fear in my life, I’d seek it out, create it out of thin air if needed. As I recalled the decades gone by, I could see a significant part of my time was spent re-enacting a deep need for fear. Imprisoned this way as a little boy, I carried these emotional shackles into adulthood.

Fact is, I meet fear at an entirely different level than most people. I have been strangely attracted to it, mostly beneath my awareness. It’s as if my body survived it before and needed to prove it could survive it again. I was stuck in a loop. Perhaps it’s why I stand up to bullies. My first question when encountering people is to unflinchingly think or say, “How can I help you.” It’s why I act best when I’m protecting my tribe, a brother’s keeper. My self-concept silently commands: “Stand aside, this is for men.” It’s because I can, capably, fearlessly.

Yet, this was the gift I’d allowed to wane over time. The difference between how I saw myself and how I really acted caused me untold dissonance. Once I understood why I continued to use drugs and alcohol, and how this diminished my confidence, the allure soon faded. I must live true and free. I have a destiny to fulfill, a pact with the universe: to let loose my spirit as a guardian to others. When honourable men use their power for good, in service of themselves and those around them, life becomes meaningful.

This, then, is the key to our freedom.

More questions I asked myself: How much of your confidence are you willing to sacrifice to keep a fear habit for another year? How much more of your spirit can you compromise? We think we have time: we don’t.

And so, it was for me. I had been using drugs and alcohol to narrow my focus. Instead of finding my personal tract, where my spirit could expand and answer the universe’s calling, I was running from it.  Narrowing my focus was a good objective, but not this way. I have experienced the zone before: it’s a place where a mighty congruence of my ability and drive and concentration allow me to feel as if I am forcing time to stand still. It’s a place of command, where my spirit lets loose and flies high. And there, fully aware now, filled with meaning from serving myself and others and connected by purpose, I am set free: powerful once more.

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. who once said, “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”I say to you then: let this be one of those times.

Stretch, my brothers and sisters, and we will find each other up there.

CKWallace, Advisor to Men @ckwallace.com
©2018 all rights reserved

References:

Alcohol, aging and the stress response,  See Spencer and Hutchison (1999) Alcohol Research Health 23 (4) 272-83
And Allostatic Load, Bruce McEwen, PhD in Neuropsychopharmacology, Nature.com

(Nietzsche quote, “All credibility…”: Basic Writings of Nietzsche (2011 edition), Modern Library – ISBN: 9780307786791. Also, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, p. 134)

(Emotions live equally in the body and brain: See Stephen Porges, Polyvagal Theory, 2011, Norton Books ISBN 978-0-393-70700-7)

(Emotions are predictive: See Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made, 2017, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 978-0-544-12996-2.

And The brain is predictive: Diane Kwan writing in the March Scientific American issue, Self-Taught Robots, has a nice graphic about the predictive brain citing How Evolution May Work through Curiousity-Driven Development Process, Pierre Yves Oudeyer, Linda Smith is Topics in Cognitive Science, 2016)

(Holmes quote, “When a man…”, See Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table, essay series appearing in Atlantic Monthly (1857) and book (1858))

Christopher K Wallace, B.S.T., C.H.

Advisor to Men

© 2017 and 2018 ckwallace.com

WHERE MEN EXIST

Sometimes good lessons come from the most mundane experiences. It’s usually moments with few witnesses where little miracles play out in our lives. It’s especially true in matters of the heart. It’s these times I remember: find it early or find it late, but we must find love.

My boy shit his pants today. I know, not exactly something to write home about, but in so many ways it was. Poor kid. Missus kept him home from school because he’d been a little worn out yesterday. I’ve learned not to question her intuition regarding her boy. She’s usually right.

I heard him first from about 75 feet away, near the double outhouse just past the rabbit pens. It’s on the edge of the cut lawn, if I can call it lawn. It’s also where missus has a couple of nooses tacked up against the overhanging roof of the old double-seater outhouse there, just so she can string up chickens.

As usual, I was killing, she was processing. These were meat birds she’d let live long past their due date as an experiment. She wanted to know if she could turn them into egg layers. She got two or three eggs out of one of the four birds, total.

She’s from the city and all this is new to her. She can take the time and learn on her own in whichever way she wants as far as I’m concerned. If she wants to allow an 8-week meat bird to live to 16 weeks just to see what happens, she can.

Though, I’d been reminding her to whack these fowl for a month, she resisted. Today, she relented, if I do the “coup de grace.” Fine by me, men are used to doing the dirty jobs. We’re handy in that way.

In any case, I’d just strung up the last one and done the deed. The bird was flapping wildly and flinging blood all around. Missus likes me to leave them bled and with the head off. I oblige her, she does the rest.

And today, as that final bird’s head came off, I heard his cry: “Daddy, I pooped my pants!” I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly and since he was a way across the yard, past the rabbits and the pond and the burn barrel and up on the back porch, I got him to repeat it.

“I pooped my pants,” he repeated, along with an explanation about what happened, but I couldn’t make it out from that far away. I just needed him to confirm what I thought he said. He did. He had indeed shat his pants—or had an accident if you prefer. His ma was elbow deep in blood and feathers. It fell to me.

Instructing him to not move, not an inch, I put away my tools and drove the Mule with its now empty cages back over to his side of the grass. I parked and put away the hatchet and utility knife, remembering in my haste to not take the chance of leaving them out lest I forget about them.

I found him impatient and concerned, standing at the top of the steps on the porch, and full of reasons. On mostly a liquid diet because of a collapsing windpipe, he has only recently began to eat fuller meals. I suppose that means his readiness in such a case is still in development.

He’d tried to make it, running from “over there,” pointing to where missus was plucking her chickens under the crab apple tree. He’d been hanging around her up the tree while she worked and couldn’t get inside on time.

Regardless of his condition, I knew precisely what to do and what to say and I’ll tell you why. I remember shitting my pants as a boy about his age, some 55 years ago.

MY FIRST MEMORY
It was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I was probably 4 but could have been 5. Ma had ten pregnancies in 12 years, so by the time I was 4 or 5 there were lots of us around. She was taxed to the limit. The brother two up from me was bronchial asthmatic, then she lost a girl before me—which she later blamed on painting the stairs with lead paint—and the sister after me was sickly. If I was 5 then there would have been at least a couple more in diapers and likely ma would have been expecting.

As a sensitive kid, I remember toilet training was traumatic under the circumstances. I was a disappointment and took more years to learn than my mother would have liked. Poor ma, she did her best, but I wore her patience out soundly.

But, that day she was nowhere in sight. Who knows where she was, maybe at the doctors, maybe giving birth? Instead, a fearful man was in charge. I’d been warned by ma to be on my best behavior.  I remember getting a pre-scolding about it, a finger-shaking and stern talking to before she left. I was afraid already.

And so, as it was every day, we were fed and put outside. I wasn’t allowed to leave the property, so while my two older brothers and eldest sister were off doing something else, I lingered out front on the sidewalk.

When the urge to go hit me, it was sudden and forceful. From the sidewalk, eyeing the steps up the walk way and the distance to the front door and its porch, I knew I’d never make it. I needed a reschedule.  Desperately, I sat down on a cement step and wedged the sharp edge of its form into the crack of my ass, fully expecting to arrest the forward movement of my stool.

Not a chance. Nature had other plans and out came the inevitable. Only now, it mushroomed inside my underwear and immediately pancaked against both cheeks. I’m sure at some point I realized the futility of my attempt to thwart its progress and probably allowed the rest of the number to proceed disastrously as it intended. I was helpless, all-in on failure. Ma’s warning foretold my misery. Of all the days for this to happen…

I was in a pickle now. Looking back over my shoulder at the door to the house, remembering ma’s seriousness before she left, fearful of the navy man home on leave whom I knew only as a stranger, the idea of him being my father not a concept grasped with any comfort, I was filled with escalating dread.

It was here I realized my options were limited. I could not sit there in my shit, it’s caking and sticking to my bum obvious to anyone walking by from the smell alone. It would only be a matter of time before either a kid from the neighbourhood or my own siblings would find me there. Either way, the man in the house would be alerted and who knows what would happen?

I decided to sneak back in and attempt my own rescue. Up I went, waddling, penguin-like down the cement walkway towards the front door. I didn’t hold much promise of pulling this off, just as I knew sitting out front of the house on the two steps down to the sidewalk with a full load in my pants was not viable.
DUDLEY STREET, HALIFAX, N.S

Approaching the door, carefully, legs spread wide most uncomfortably, with a serious demeanour, I reached for the front handle.

To my surprise, suddenly it opened from inside and there stood my father. He towered over me, handsome I suppose, looking poised in his sleeveless T-shirt and crew-cut hair,  smoking a cigarette I’m pretty sure. Looking me up and down, the paralysis of my body matching the stunned look on my face, he exhaled smoke and enquired something to the effect of, “Had a little accident, son?” How did he know?

He had a neutral look on his face from what I can remember. There was no hint of disgust or disappointment. It was all a matter-of-fact sort of thing. I know I stumbled a weak reply, affirming his suspicion and adding in explanation.

In answer, all he did was toss his finished smoke pass me onto the lawn or driveway and say, “Well, let’s get you inside and cleaned up.”

No lecture. No waggling fingers. No raised voice. No angry story about letting anyone down. No accusation about doing it on purpose. No nothing. Just sanctuary and the promise of cleanliness and fresh clothes.

Whomever this man was, I felt a physical shift I can still remember. He’d earned the right to be called my father at that moment. He was strong, powerful, undeterred by the problems at hand. He was unrushed and purposeful. He was in charge and that was fine by me. No tragedy was too great for him to handle. Unflappable and confident he was. It’s my purest image of masculinity.

It was with great relief I submitted to my father’s care that day. I don’t remember much of how he got me whole again, but I remember a deep respect for him from the experience. He had modeled something I had not seen, and it’s never left me, not in the more than half century since.

BACK TO TODAY
It was not me answering the worried call of my boy’s lament this morning. No. Not at all. It was my father who exists inside of me who today rose to the challenge in the same way he had all those years ago.

It is he who calmly took charge and without judgment got the boy out of his clothes, washed him off with the hose and poured him a warm bath. It was my father who toweled off my boy as he chattered about the experience to me in broken images of how it all came to be. It was my father who listened patiently and joked with the boy so that he smiled and laughed and stayed connected. It was my father. It was all my father you see.

And now, my 89-year old dad is languishing in a memory care ward at an old age home. He was put there by my sisters for his own good, his dementia having progressed too far to live at home any longer. He’s busted both hips, one of them twice, and the falls were becoming too numerous for their care to allow. He’s sometimes incoherent, a travesty for a man who lived surrounded by books.

Of those ten pregnancies, he and my deceased mother raised nine children. My father has five sons, four of whom had sons. Yet, none named a boy after their dad, Howard Carew Wallace. I teased him it was because he was a drinker when a young man and pissed everyone off—so no one thought to ensure his name endured.

To be fair, neither did he encourage it. You see, my father’s father was also named Howard. Howard Vincent Wallace was a WW1 vet and had disowned my father right when he was about the same age as I was that day in Halifax. His first memory was of his father striking his mother and leaving the family destitute and abandoned, and not returning for over 30 years.

My father had attempted to reconcile with his father in the time since his return to live in Ottawa, but it never came to pass. I remember angry arguments between them as a boy growing up. Dad lived his whole life burdened with the self-loathing of the rejected. Named after his father, and his spitting image, he waited for some sign of acknowledgement. His father insisted he was not his.

When my grandfather died aged 98, it was my father who held his frail old hand, still waiting for recognition, for a sign of reconciliation and acceptance. It never came.

It was this understanding which allowed me the kind of awareness I needed to move past this part of my father’s legacy. Despite the odd glimpse of what could have been, his pain was too great and compounded over too many years to allow him to be much of a father himself.

He did his best. It wasn’t good enough but it’s all he had.

As I moved through my own life the effects of the men before me followed like a curse. It was my first son well over thirty years ago which forced me to confront the chaos that had followed us all. It was there I took a stand. If at first just an impulse to survive knowing there had to be a better way, eventually I was forced to go deep and find the wisdom I know my father would have wanted to teach had he been able to.

TAKING A STAND
I can trace five generations of Wallace turmoil through the men before me. It was up to me to stand up and decide as a father and as a man: the pain stops here.

Every so often over the years, as I’d tell dad something about my approach to parenting, he would remark to someone in the room, “Christopher is doing his best to not be like me,” and I would know it was his way of approving without contesting his own deficiencies.

At first I didn’t realize it was that obvious but later saw I was proceeding as a father exactly as he observed, with all my might.

When I got a second gift at parenting, it was finally time to give my father a namesake. Indeed, that little boy who shit his pants this morning is also Howard. Howard Thomas William Wallace.  I dare say, when Little Howie visits with me at Grandpa Howie’s, it’s magic between them.

It wasn’t a burden helping the boy this morning, it wasn’t at all an inconvenience. No. For my father, for us both, for all the Wallace men before me and after me, it was an honour; it was a privilege.

And that’s the way it works among us, isn’t it? It is insufficient to describe we each inhabit ourselves alone. The idea you are you and I am I, that you are over there, and I am over here, is a weak explanation for how we really live. For this is not at all true. We clearly exist in each other.

My father was once a cub reporter for the very Halifax paper which carried the news of his own idolized grandfather’s death. Thomas Patrick Wallace had been taking a shortcut with his horse and buggy and was struck by a train in 1919. I found the original article for dad a couple of years ago, when he was still lucid and could read. Still searching for an identity all this time after having his own robbed during his lifetime, he thought it was a great find, considering his grandfather a hero.

He spent the better part of three decades in Her Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy and rose to Lt Commander, visiting over 50 countries. He chaired the group which wrote the English style book for the public service of Canada. He taught me how to write when I was fifty.

Old soldiers never die, they just fade away, said McArthur. My father sleeps 22 hours most days. He has slightly better days and not so good ones. Probably soon, he will stop eating as he winds down like an old clock.

But he’ll not be gone, faded yes, but not gone. Instead, like any of us connected to each other, he’ll echo endlessly down through time in the people he affected along his way. Especially  in those he loved and who loved him.

Today, for a few moments, I was happy to be my father.

Unknowingly, so was my boy and hopefully, my father will appear in my boy’s boy one day too.

For better or worse, fathers exist in their sons.

Stay powerful,

True and Free,