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You could probably add to my list of temporarily irregular people, but all
of them have this one thing in common - - - your relationship with them
can be terminated in one way or another. You have a choice:
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You can call the
police on the illegally parked person, make a citizen's arrest, or
go do your shopping. |
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You can be as rude
as the old lady at the airport, and push her out of line. Or
you can stand there, tuck the experience into the back burner of
your mind, and remember it so you won't do that when you're her age. |
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You can watch for
that wild and crazy driver the next time you travel that route, or
you can accept the fact that you may never see that particular offender
again, and make sure that you drive safely and defensively. |
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You can be
transferred to another class with a different teacher, or better
yet, you can graduate from that school and get away from the whole
mess. |
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You can have a
confrontation with your pastor, seek out another more spiritually
mature pastor, or you can even begin the search for a new church. |
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As for your friends,
you can lovingly confront them with the conflicts, acknowledging
where you stand, or you can simply stop inviting them to lunch,
stop sending birthday presents, and terminate the relationships.
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I'm certainly not
suggesting here that these alternatives offer any instant cures.
There are no painless answers that will magically unravel life's
knots. But, the point is, there are several alternatives open in
dealing with people who temporarily and only occasionally interrupt the
flow of our lives. Not so with those who are related to
us. They are a permanent part of our lives.
Holidays, birthdays, funerals, the birth or
christening of a baby, weddings, showers, and family reunions all bring
home the fact that coping and accepting the irregular person or persons in
our lives is one of the most exasperating tasks of our existence. As
a friend put it, "Holidays...what are they? Pain and to
be dreaded!"
While I don't have specific documentation, I am
convinced that one of the major contributing factors to the high suicide
rate immediately after the Christmas holidays is that families have
been "together." Once more, new wounds are made, old ones
are opened up, and the scars continue to remain unhealed.
As a friend declared in January of this year,
"Well, this past Christmas both my wife's parents and mine
came to our house for dinner...The remarkable thing is that we are
still a family. Our children came through, our marriage held
together, and somehow we all survived another 'happy holiday'...but just
barely."
If you are one of those rare people who do not
have such an irregular person, then thank the Lord this moment. You
are like angels' visits - few and far between. But even if you don't
relate to what I'm writing at this moment, please continue to read.
There is always the possibility that you, without knowing it, are someone
else's irregular person. And while you might not have an
irregular person, I can guarantee you that someone in your family does
- and for their sake, if not yours, you need to become aware of this
almost invisible closet problem. Who knows? Maybe you will be
the heaven-sent person in your family to bring about a much-needed,
long-sought-after reconciliation between various members of your family.
Or perhaps you will be like the woman who, due to
being recently graduated from college with big bills and small income, was
financially unable to attend a day-long seminar of mine. When a
generous friend paid her way, she told me later she felt excited in going,
because she knew God had something very special for her to learn.
The young woman had a delayed reaction to the
seminar, especially to "Irregular People," as I spoke on this
topic that day. Six months later she wrote:
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On that Saturday, I was very
impressed with your statement, "God doesn't make
mistakes." It really helped me to give up some feelings
as God wanted me to. However, at the time, I really didn't see
how the main thrust of your message applied to me.
You spoke that afternoon about dealing with
people (mostly relatives) with whom we just don't get along. I
didn't see that I had any of those people in my life.
It wasn't until a month or so later that I
realized God had been preparing me for just that sort of conflict.
Always, in the past, I'd assumed total
guilt for a certain relationship and in a particular situation, even
though I didn't see a logical reason to do so.
Now, I see, we are two people.
We don't have to agree.
Also, I've finally been able to commit the
situation to God. The Lord is making such a difference in my
life. It just hit me that this wonderful change in my
Christian life began with that seminar that God brought me to so
wonderfully, and with a message I didn't really understand at the
time.
I just wanted you to know how the Lord used
you to help me, so that you might share in my praise to Him.
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I admit that for a
number of years I didn't think anyone but me had experienced this kind of
complicated and painful relationship with a person in their family.
Then, at the height of my frustration, when I was filled with anger and
feelings of guilt, I began whispering a question to a few close friends,
"Do you have anyone in your family who truly bugs you?"
Very quickly, from all sorts of friends and
family, the response was whispered back: "Yes! I do!
You, too?"
I also never knew what to call my
person. Because, as I have already said, my intention in lecturing
or writing about this person was not to hurt or embarrass
anyone. Each time I referred to him, I desperately needed a method
of identification. I didn't know what to call anyone's person, much
less mine, until I saw a television movie.
This story, written by Bette Greene in her
award-winning book (which I read long after I'd seen the film) was
entitled Summer of My German Soldier. It was the author's own
story, and the events portrayed occurred in the early 1940's.
Since I was only about ten years old at the time
of the Second World War, I was unaware of the fact that small groups of
German soldiers were brought to several southern states and put into
internment camps. This forcefully written movie concerns itself with
one of those groups who were brought to a small town in Arkansas.
The drama centers around the German prisoner who escapes and is accidentally
discovered by a twelve-year-old girl named Patty Bergen. She is the
daughter of a Jewish couple who own the local dry goods store.
Patty befriends the boy and hides him in a small
playroom above her father's unused barn. She tells no one that he is
there.
As the days go on, a friendship/love relationship
begins to develop between the two young people, even though they are from
very different worlds. Patty is newly awakened to the almost
unbelievable thought that somebody in this world of hers really thinks
she's valuable. Somebody acts as if he actually likes her as a
person! You become aware, as the story unfolds, that perhaps she has
never been given or even had parental approval or acceptance.
The film depicts Patty's mother as being somewhat
insipid, like a lukewarm cup of tea. She seems to have no opinions
or direction in her life, and the only affection she shows is directed at
Patty's younger sister, Sharon. The mother seems to be neither
strong nor weak - she just appears to have lost the lemon and sugar of her
life.
But the father is depicted in quite another
way. He is a kaleidoscope of conflicting emotions - hot, freezing,
and then back to warm, even loving. Unlike most television
portrayals which paint their characters all black or all
white, this film gives the father many shades of gray. Sometimes
Patty's father is with her on an issue - he's loyal and supportive.
Other times he seems completely insensitive to her needs.
Occasionally, he is given to beating her with his belt. For a while,
I couldn't decide whether he was a hero or a villain, and since that is too
true of people in real life, I found the character portrait simply
fascinating.
At the same time, though, I was beginning to
experience some emotional discomfort of my own, because I know people do
have parents like this. I know of many people who are not all
bad, but at times - especially when their acceptance is needed the most -
they simply become invisible, or their reaction to a situation is very
abnormal or wildly bizarre. So I began to really listen for whatever
message this TV movie had to offer.
Near the end of the story, the German boy
realizes that the F.B.I. is getting very close to discovering his hideout
at Patty's home. So he leaves one night in the hope that she will
not be implicated or brought up on charges for harboring a prisoner of
war. But as he is fleeing for his life, the F.B.I. catches up with
him and kills him.
Earlier in the story, Patty has given the boy her
father's monogrammed shirt to wear instead of his prison shirt. It
is this same white shirt, now torn and bloodied by a bullet wound, that
the F.B.I. traces, in the early hours of the morning, to the Bergen house.
The film's scene that begins to take hold of the
jugular vein opens as Mr. and Mrs. Bergen and the F.B.I. agents come into
Patty's bedroom. She is awakened from a sound sleep by an agent who
throws the boy's bloodied shirt on her bed and begins questioning her.
Instantly Patty's face registers the whole
story. She knows now that he is dead. The shirt with the
bullet hole and the blood is in front of her, and it's definitely the one
she gave him.
Patty goes into shock. Her father comes
unglued. He is not about to believe that his daughter could be a
part of this. Yet the evidence is crushingly overwhelming. He
begins to realize she is guilty but, while the F.B.I. agents are there, he
controls his emotions.
On the following day, however, Patty stays in her
room, refusing to come downstairs. And the scene that will remain
very clear in my soul for a long time to come begins to
unfold.
Patty's father comes into her bedroom and makes
some genial small talk. He tells her that it would be polite for her
to let her mother know if she's coming downstairs for lunch or not, and
then he begins to verbalize what he has really come upstairs to say.
He tells her that he has already spoken with a
lawyer who will represent her if there is a trial. But at the same
time he gives her some bit of assurance by telling her that the attorney
doesn't believe she is "legally" a traitor.
Patty doesn't say anything during this
time. She just continues to rock in her chair. Then, very
abruptly, her father turns toward her, and his whole face becomes a
contorted mass of fury. He directs a mounting tirade of words to his
daughter in a voice choked by hatred. Michael Constantine, the actor
who played the part of the father, gave a superb and convincing
performance as he proceeded to annihilate his daughter with a polluted
stream of verbal abuse.
He goes back in his memory to when Patty was
born, and describes it as the saddest day of his life. And then he
recalls his own relationship with his mother - and how she had
"plenty of love" for his father and brothers, but not any for
him. He tells Patty that she looks just like his mother, and that
the resemblance showed even through the glass window in the nursery when
Patty was born. He goes on to tantalize her with something she never
knew about when he drops the hint that he and her mother wouldn't even
have had to get married if it hadn't been for her.
Patty has stopped rocking by now, and she stares
up at her father, trying to comprehend all that he is spewing out on
her. And then he snarls, "I knew right away when I saw you in
the nursery that you hated me...but I never, not in all my dreams, thought
you'd go this far. You gave my shirt to that Nazi!"
Although she's almost totally dazed, Patty
reminds him that he hadn't even opened the shirt or taken out the packing
pins, and she implies that he has a whole store full of shirts.
The father ignores her remark and continues to
pour out the vile and putrid memories of his bitter soul. He speaks
of the birth of her younger sister, Sharon, who was so "pale and
pretty," and how, then, he had thought that maybe they could be a
good family. However, because Patty, even at birth, hated him so
much, he can't stand to look at her. He calls her a bad person, and
then adds that because she is a Bergen he'll do his duty by her - what's
called for. He speaks of the fact that he knows he can't legally
cleanse his hands of her, and that the law can't legally call her a
traitor, but then he tells her she's done all she can to hurt him.
"A person can only stand so much. A man can only try so hard
for so long." With complete bewilderment, Patty murmurs,
"I never meant to hurt you."
Now, as a rule, I don't generally go around
talking to television sets or other inanimate objects. But, I
confess, I did that night. The damaging, vile accusations the father
laid on his young daughter brought me up out of my chair, and I shouted at
our seventeen-inch screen with all my might, "Stop it! Stop
doing that to her! Stop telling her those lies.!"
The father didn't hear me, of course, so he
finished off the scene. I could feel the inner rage boiling in this
man as he got nose to nose with his daughter to give her his
ultimatum. He pointed out that she would continue to live in his
house until she was eighteen, and then, with his mouth curled in utter
contempt and hatred, he growled, "But you...you are dead to me,
girl!"
The camera gave a close-up of Patty's face, and
you could see the shattering of her whole being as she absorbed the full,
forceful blow of her father's words. You also felt that what you had
just witnessed was a moment in two people's lives when one human being
had just raped another human being's soul. It seemed that nothing
would ever be right again.
Patty had been devastated - Humpty Dumpty had
fallen off the wall! The image of the famous nursery-rhyme character
materialized in my thoughts, and I realized that in every drawing I've
ever seen of him he was always portrayed as an egg. I found myself
wondering: Why an egg? Why didn't the now long-gone artists draw
Humpty Dumpty as a little elf, a horse, or even a cat? Did they
choose an egg to direct our attention to the fragility of life, or our
sensitivity to easily shattered feelings, or our vulnerability to a
fall? I don't know, but then, and long after I'd watched this scene,
the lines of Humpty Dumpty tumbled through my mind:
Humpty
Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a
great fall.
All the king's
horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty
Dumpty together again.
In the concluding scene of the movie, Patty runs
from her home and the shattering encounter with her father. She
somehow manages to reach the black part of her town. Patty finds
Ruth's house and pushes open the screen door.
Ruth is a large black woman. She is the
cook and housekeeper who had been fired some time before from the Bergen
home because Ruth had defended Patty once too often.
Patty rushes into the kitchen and stumbles into
Ruth's open arms. Ruth has heard that the boy is dead and, as she
holds Patty in her arms, she strokes her hair and begins to comfort her,
for she had known of Patty's feelings for the young German. The
gentle love which passes between them is sorely needed by Patty, and the
scene is extremely touching.
The girl asks Ruth if she thinks the boy really
loved her. Ruth assures her that he did, and confirms it by adding,
"I seen it clear as the Christmas star!"
Abruptly then, as she recalls one of her father's
remarks, Patty questions, "How come my mother married my
father?"
Before Ruth answered, and in one split second as
it were, a small flag raised up in my head and waved in the breezes of my
mind. Something whispered, "Listen up - you are going to hear
something important." I leaned forward.
Instead of directly answering Patty's question,
Ruth holds the girl at arm's length and says, "Now, here...when I
goes shopping and I sees something marked 'irregular,' I knows that I
ain't gonna have to pay so much for it. Girl, you got yourself some
irregular folks, and you've been paying top dollar for them all
along. So just don't go wastin' up you life wishin' for what ain't
gonna be!"
Then Patty, bewilderment and hurt all over her
face, counters with what her father said. "He said I was a bad
person ever since the day I was born...and that I was a dead person,
too."
Ruth shakes her head and tells Patty that she
isn't bad and she's definitely not dead. She reminds the girl that
the soldier knew it, and that she knows it, and she ends with, "An'
I'm telling you, Miss Patty Bergen, we is the only ones that
matter...cause we ain't irregular. Now, you stand up
straight! You is a whole person...a creature of God and a thing that
matters in this world. Straighten up, girl,. You got
person-pride from this day on. And I don't never wants see
you slopin' your shoulders or your soul again. Not ever!"
By the time Patty leaves Ruth, her head is up,
her posture straight, and the movie winds up as she walks slowly through
the hostile town and heads for home.
Although the screenplay has taken literary
license with the book's story, the ending of this remarkable movie was
simply and truthfully pointing out that most of us have an irregular
person in our lives, and we must not lay the blame for our upbringing on
this person. We have to stop reliving the past. But, most of
all, we have to stop navel-gazing and spending inordinate amounts of time
with daily introspection about our parents or family, and move on.
Some mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,
cousins, uncles, aunts, husbands, wives and in-law relatives are just irregular.
They don't act, react, speak, think or even write the way we would expect
them to.
More than one person has come to me after I have
spoken on "Irregular People" and has said with obvious relief,
"I never knew what to call my mother"..."I thought I was
the only one in the world to have a father-in-law like
mine."..."Thank you for telling me I'm not going insane - that I
am regular and my sister is not"..."Today, I have a name
for my father, and I finally am able to deal with him, now that I know he
is irregular."
It's the same kind of relief when, after weeks of
testing or going to several medical specialists, they all agree on what is
causing your illness. You're not thrilled that the diagnosis is
cancer, lupus, arthritis, or diabetes, but at least now you know its
name, and you and your doctors can begin to take medical steps to deal
with the problem.
A woman who attended my seminar on
"Irregular People" wrote: Thanks
for giving me a more acceptable word to describe those people. Being
a therapist, I have to diagnose from among 80 or so different categories
of personality and character disorders. It will be much more
pleasant for me now when among my friends and acquaintances to mentally
classify some as "irregular" rather than paranoid or schizoid,
etc. We attach great significance to names and labels in our world today. How well I know this. When I'm autographing books, I ask for the person's first name and, believe me, it's woe unto me if I sign "To Linda" if the lady spells it "Lynda." She wants the book signed to her - the person who is Lynda - not Linda. I can readily understand this desire to call things and people by their proper names, for we live in a world which works hard at dissolving our original individuality.
Learning from the Summer of My German Soldier
that these people in our lives are our "irregular" ones brought
an enormous sense of relief and a flow of tears which began a releasing
process in my own life. The identifying label helped me take my
first tottering steps toward dealing with and accepting this person.
The Summer of My German Soldier would
never have touched my life the way it did if it had not been that I have
had an irregular person for most all of my years. But now, for the
first time, because this film had given these people a name, I realized I
was not the only one in the world with an irregular person. I sensed
the beginnings of a quiet awakening of hope. Top |