Free If You Had Controlling Parents by Dan Neuharth Page A

challenged, some parents respond with violence.
    This is not to say that children in controlling families don’t seek out ways in which to keep alive the flame of their individuality. The day Caitlin graduated from high school she packed her suitcases. That summer, she slept next to her packed bags, counting the days until she could leave for college.
    Her on-edge childhood has left Caitlin struggling with workaholic and perfectionistic tendencies. She has lived much of her life with a low-lying sense of fear and foreboding. Recently, trying to conquer her fears, she sought out the scariest challenge she could imagine and began taking sky-diving lessons. When interviewed, she had recently completed her first solo free-fall dive.
    Fundamentalist Military Families
    Jonathan, a thirty-five-year-old financial planner, grew up with a Cultlike double whammy: a zealous military father and a strict Catholic mother.
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    One bright Saturday morning when Jonathan was twelve, he dutifully spread newspapers on the kitchen floor and set out his father’s scissors and razor. His father, an army officer, marched in and, as he did every other Saturday, cut Jonathan’s hair in a half-inch butch cut .
    The ritual devastated the boy, who hated his hair so short and, in addition, was forced to assemble the implements and clean up the results. As his father finished his haircut, his mother came in and asked Jonathan, “How does it look?” Near tears, Jonathan didn’t answer. His father immediately shaved Jonathan’s hair half again as short. “That’s for not responding to your mother’s question,” he told his son .
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    Before dinner, Jonathan’s father would shout, “Inspection: hands!” Jonathan and his brothers were to thrust their hands forward to showthey’d been washed. “My father had a military model for how cadets were treated, and he applied it to us,” Jonathan comments.
    Jonathan’s mother, a devout Catholic, blended military discipline with religion. On wash day his mother hovered as her children methodically folded linens three times, crisply, repeating “the Father,” “the Son,” and “the Holy Ghost” with each respective fold.
    In junior high, Jonathan realized that he was gay. He felt that he could never tell his parents: “I was a people pleaser, always trying to smile, hungry for approval. It was hard for me to say what I thought.” It wasn’t until he was twenty-four that he came out to his parents. To his surprise, his father had little reaction, but his mother collapsed into the arms of a church friend and sobbed off and on for three days. Finally she said, “Jonathan, I know you think you’re a homosexual…” Jonathan recollects that, “It went downhill from there. It epitomized her cookie-cutter mentality. Here was my mother thinking she knew more about her grown son’s sexuality than he did.”
    Whenever Jonathan brought up his sexual orientation, his mother would quote from the Bible and try to talk him out of being gay. For a time, he stopped speaking with her. “That was hard because I knew family was so important to her,” he admits. “But what hurt me more was that nothing I could do or say could change her mind. She was willing to lose her relationship with her son to keep her religious belief system.”
    After several months of little contact, relations slowly warmed as Jonathan and his mother agreed that discussions of his sexual orientation were off limits. Since then, he has spoken with his mother about how she failed to protect him from his father’s abuse and how unhappy their “code of silence” about his being gay was making him. His mother apologized: “What she did say was from the heart. Now it’s a relationship I can deal with. I used to cringe when I thought of talking with her.”
    As for his father, Jonathan struggles to