I Never Sang For My...

...Mother?

Friday night went to sleep on the couch, then had a vivid dream where I was literally flying to a house (dodging phone/cable lines in the air), where my mother told me that her house was sold, and then she tried to tell me about some money from a fund that was coming to me. I saw the graphics from the fund, and they made no sense, and I yelled at her that they made no sense. Disturbing.

After this dream, I woke up around 4am to "I Never Sang For My Father" on Turner Classic Movies. At the end, the elderly father, Melvyn Douglas, told his son, Gene Hackman, that he'd enjoyed listening to him sing a certain song when he was little. As it turned out, Hackman, as a small child, had sung the song with his mother at their piano. But whenever the father had come downstairs to listen, Hackman, as a boy, had immediately stopped singing. The latter-day Hackman told his aging father that he'd never sung the song for him. Douglas replied: "But I always enjoyed listening to it."

Kind of broke my heart.

Reminded me of a story my mother recently told me: In post-war Germany, she and a teen girlfriend were sneaking cigarettes. A hausfrau came upon them and expressed her disapproval: "Next, the Russians will be here." Fast forward to when I was an 18-year-old visiting Germany with my mother in 1983. We were waiting on a street-corner for a bus, and I lit a cigarette, and my mother let me know how disgusting I was. At the time, I didn't know that she'd ever smoked when she was a kid. All I knew was that she thought I was a scumbag for lighting a cigarette as an adult. (I immediately put my cigarette out; my German aunt later told my mother how respectful I was.) Point being: My mother had intentionally made me feel like a scumbag for smoking when in fact she'd actually smoked herself as a kid. Why? This same kind of thing happened over and over and over. I was always made to feel like I was doing something wrong.