I was talking with a friend today about words and they’re meanings. It reminded me of a time when I was a kid, a newly fatherless kid. I was outside of my home and one of the neighbor men called me a Bastard. I had never heard this word before. I was probably 7 or 8 years old at the time and I remember being intrigued by the word. It was unfamiliar and I couldn’t tell what it meant by the way the man had spoken it to me. I went inside the house and went to my mother’s room to ask her what the word Bastard meant. My mother asked me where I heard that word from and I told her about the neighbor calling me one. My mother started crying. It really upset her and she did not tell me what the word meant so I went to look it up in the dictionary and read the definition. I knew that my mom and dad had me while they were married so I knew that I was not a Bastard and really didn’t understand why that word had upset her so badly until later on in life. What I learned was that by calling me a Bastard was no big deal to me but that it was a very big deal to an honorable Widow with small children to raise on her own. As I told my friend today, it planted a seed of rage within me and I never forgot this occurrence. As I got older it became obvious to me how cruel some people are without cause or reason. Even later in life it dawned upon me how cowardly some people can be when there is no fear of the man of the house coming to look for them to punish their cheap and cowardly acts of dishonor. I had many such acts as these to take place in the church where I grew up in, schools and as mentioned before in the neighborhood. I wonder now how many times my brothers may have experienced being taken advantage of when there was no father to defend them. I often thought of this throughout my teen years and into my adult life and could always feel the burn of rage inside me, the desire to exact revenge against someone for their trespasses against me, the child of so many years before. As a kid I would fantasize about my father being alive and going to them and whipping their tails. As an adult sometimes I would fantasize about going back into time as the adult me and catching these persons tormenting me and beating them within an inch of their lives. Somehow these thoughts relieved a little tension but they never caused the rage inside to dissipate. I have always carried that rage with me and at times have allowed it to overreact to situations that caused me to lose my temper. I would later in life learn to try to forgive such deeds that happened long ago and even say that I have forgiven those people but deep inside I still feel the anger. I have done a better job of dealing with these issues over the last many years and know how to contain my anger inside me without it spilling over and becoming out of control. I have become a much more tolerant person than I was years before as well. I still have to deal with being overly sensitive in a few aspects but each of us has their own touchy points and hot buttons that can set them off. I also have the ability to recognize deep rage and anger in others and I can be very sympathetic with someone who suffers deep pain from their past. I try to remind myself that we as people sometimes bottle up and carry with us pain and rage that has boiled within us for years from poor treatment or trespasses in our younger years. Still though, I look forward to the day that the rage that lives deep inside will die and leave my body and mind. It really is amazing how a single word can cause someone to recall such unpleasant experiences from somewhere in our past.
