WAH

[Donovan]

I've made people cry many times. It's extraordinarily easy for me to see their hot buttons. I used to do it when someone fucked with me, typically teachers or authority figures. Loved ones didn't fare too well either. It takes a lot of concentration on my part not to become a complete bastard, and more than one person has mistaken that effort for weakness. I worry quite a bit that I will become my old man as I age. That prick was Machiavellian.

I've read posts of yours that are similar to that ^^^^^. Sometimes it reads like you have a poor opinion of yourself yet you allowed yourself to become a father and by all appearances you're a really good one, it's safe to say you didn't learn to be one by example so you're capable of loving and nurturing. Does your son's mother have a good opinion of you? Did you try to use your jedi mind fuckery on her? Ha!

I just have a very keen awareness of the douchebaggery that went into my upbringing and how easy it would be for me to become something similar. So I am extremely careful to weigh every parenting decision I make against what was done to me and my siblings, and then most times do the opposite . When I make statements like the above it's not to beat myself up so much as to identify and label behavior patterns: self-jedi-mind-fuckery.

As for women--well let's just say that I recently detected a pattern that always ends with me sitting in a raggedy apartment, surrounded by boxes of useless shit, arms crossed, and saying "Well I guess I told HER." And when that is the result each and every time no matter who or what woman I'm with, one must consider that the common denominator is me. So I am currently engaged in correcting and maybe breaking that pattern with the most recent GF.

As my son once put it, after one of my endless amusing misadventure stories: "Hey dad, did you ever notice all your stories end with 'And then she got really mad'?"