Child’s genuine anger at a parent is difficult to express

My lineage is very Welsh/Saxon/Scot. My maternal family tree, especially, is intense decorum and stuffy English good manners combined with this tribal earthiness and bawdy revelry. More to the point, when we get together there is wine, laughter, off-color jokes and sick humor. Family gatherings are one continuous Monty Python sketch.

What can I say? It's the way we bond.

There is one running gag, written and performed by my mother, that never fails to make me giggle. She has been doing it forever, but it still slays me.

It happened most recently during a Utah camping/fishing trip. Now, I think it's cool that my mom, age 75, still can go camping and fishing, let alone wants to go. My kids will tell you she's the world's hippest granny, having locked up that title, I think, the day she taught them to burp. They were all very proud.

But back to the gag ...

I ask her if she wouldn't mind remaining at camp for a few minutes to watch the dogs while I take the kids to rent a boat. "No problem," she says -- then she sighs, takes on this air of plaintiff melodrama and says, "Of course, when my mother was alive I probably wouldn't have left her behind to watch the dogs, but she's dead now."

Newcomers to our family gatherings often have this strained smile on their faces for the first little while. Like, is it OK to laugh at this stuff?

All good humor -- especially macabre humor -- is a simultaneous effort to celebrate and to manage suffering. When my mom pulls this gag, we celebrate the respect and ease we feel together, but she also renders an editorial, I think, about her mother who, while bright and creative and dear -- we miss her -- was also very manipulative.

I want to emphasize the word "very."

I think about this as I talk with the teenage girl. It has taken her one year, exactly, to articulate in words, "I'm mad at (my mother)." It's a holy moment, really. Sigmund Freud was oh so right when he said, "No one is more unattackable than a parent." In the best circumstances, it is painful to be truly angry at someone you love. Multiply that times 1,000 when you're a kid and the object of your anger is your mother or father.

Parents, I'm serious. I'm not talking about your child's belligerence or grouchiness or backtalk or even their shouting invective. Those behaviors aren't very pleasant, but they are usually more about your child's developmental efforts toward a healthy separateness from you. Not about real estrangement.

No, I'm talking about those moments in time when your child really gets a grip on a legitimate grievance with you. Disappointed in you. It's terrifying for them. Acutely painful to love you and be angry with you at the same time.

I ask the girl if she will tell her mother about her anger, or if she would like some help in the telling, perhaps invite her here with us so I could provide the girl an advocate in an act so uncommonly brave.

I always think of Yoda when I talk to this girl. She's 15, but she's like an old wise woman. "I think she's too immature to talk about this," the girl says, shaking her head. "She'd just get defensive."

But she agrees to think about it. I remind her that she's free not to talk about it, but she can't then go home and leak the enmity around the house for the next several years in the form of irritability and disdain. She can't have it both ways. She either risks the anger, or sucks it up and behaves respectfully.

A week later, she says simply: "I'm not going to talk to my mom about my anger. Maybe someday, when I'm a grown-up. But not now."

She tells me her mom had confronted her about her attitude, which the girl admits was poor. But just liked we'd practiced, the girl attempted in an even voice to delineate some differences in their personalities, some ways she struggled with those differences, some ways she'd feel more respected if ...

It ended in her mother crying and saying: "Maybe I should just die. Then everybody would be happy."

The girl manifests Yoda again: "If she's not strong enough to handle that conversation, you think I'm gonna talk to her about that other thing?"

Hard to argue with Yoda here.

And suddenly it occurs to me why my mother's gag is so funny. It's funny because there is nothing at all funny about threatening to die as a strategy for getting what you need from a relationship.

Way not OK.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. His columns appear on Tuesdays and Sundays. Questions for the Asking Human Matters column or comments can be e-mailed to skalas@review journal.com.