Healing that confusion, the lack of wherewithal that comes from a family with crazy and hostile communicative patterns has a price which one is not particularly aware of when still in the midst or recovering from its throes…
As one heals, regains their natural emergent form, the poise of its perspective, one is suddenly confronted with the myriad of one’s own culpability in not negotiating these family and friend circumstances better; one is somewhat braced for the fact in that one is now essentially healed, but the memories of one’s own interactive failings, i.e., to negotiate relations better for one’s own sake and to make one’s way better with them, are on constant offer to the consciousness, really too many examples and presenting from any given day that one might reflect upon
One thematizes, taking examples, and tries to empathize with oneself as having done the best they could in the circumstance and remember that the person that you view failure with can bear some joint responsibility.
I’m thinking of my father, specifically.
Confusing, could not effectively and respectfully communicate his thoughts; questions about his confusing statements were treated like an affront, volcanic temper like you can’t believe, otherwise largely catatonic TV-watcher – infuriating the way he’d smile along with it…. but might turn away momentarily to literally paraphrase his WWII generation mantras – “you can’t fight city hall” and the liberal, “anything goes when the whistle blows”… he would say this with a smile on his face, like you were supposed to relate.
His worst characteristic, however, was his penchant to attack vulnerability – made it near impossible to trust him. This did-in my mother’s psyche; and having to deal with her broken psyche is another can of worms that we don’t need to talk about. Psychologically, intellectually, bad situation all around.
Materially, I’d be a jerk to complain. Weren’t rich, but had what we needed and a modest bit more…and that does, indeed, spill over into some opportunity to heal the psychological and intellectual deficit.
But as harrowing as my father could be and the fights that he had with my mother were (you could hear them around the block from our house), I eventually gained enough perspective to see how I might have done better as well.
First of all, a working class family without advanced education and four kids.
I could not have done better than my parents …oh maybe a little better in some ways, but overall, probably worse…
My mother did make efforts to improve our relations, but I want to first talk about the fact that so did my father. In the end, I rebuffed them both; if nothing else, this was a tactical error, and I could be a lot richer now if I had played it better ..but then, who knew, my mother’s own abuse and literal blockage of metacommunication and my father’s penchant to attack vulnerability cornered me into an inability to trust and talk about prospects – so, out the window went their olive branches and offers of cooperative relations. It was a mistrust not altogether unjustified, but nevertheless…. there was a flaw on my part going back to early childhood that stood in the way: pride/high self esteem.
All I needed was what to me was my parents dumb assessment of the social situation – there were black riots back then too, burning my grandmother’s city of Newark…incidents of black violence in our town of Montclair as well (where we moved “for the better schools” only to find they’d be a third black, where I didn’t get bused to one that was two thirds black) and what not.
I’m not going into the many instances where I found this paternal guardian of my EGI to be horrifyingly inept, but to give you a few instances of what might happen if I let my guard down for him to become friend and comrade, settle down before the TV with him….
Father (this was when I was about 10, when I got bused for school integration with blacks): “If you ever get into a fight with a black, make sure to hit them in the stomach; that’s their weak point from all the shit that they eat. … purple soda and potato chips.”
Me: I didn’t have to be an expert in his Lamarckian fallacy to know that I would have gotten clobbered if I took his advice.
Father (in front of the television sometime in late 80s): “This Italian woman who married Hershel Walker, I don’t blame her.”
Me: “She’s not Italian dad, she’s Jewish.”
Who knows what kind of stupid things like this he might say that would keep me on guard, not trusting him, even when he was really trying to be a friendly dad, taking long walks with me to Grunnings for a chocolate malt in the evenings…
I’ve related these incidents before but its relevant:
Father: (around 1987): Go to see Naomi (I now know Jewish “therapist” that my mother found for me), she wants to help you.”
Me: I could use some calm and steadying while I prepare for the Series 7, its a dramatic change of direction into a brokerage career, so, ok, I’ll try it.
Naomi crashes (“intervenes with”) the (first instantiation of a) final grammar that would have enabled me to participate in America’s liberal society, as this “grammar” would have allowed me to rationalize and participate in society with the kind of denial that my parents and older siblings had.
Me (Final Grammar): “I don’t want a woman who’s dated a black.” I didn’t say you can’t, I said I don’t want. For me, this was really too big a concession, but a minimal concession from a liberal society if I was going to be able to participate on its “normal” level.
Naomi: Tries to subvert this final grammar, “even if it was a long time ago?”
I could give many more examples of her interventions and manipulations but needless to say, the brokerage career didn’t work out, with me utterly flustered and determined to go back to school more directly (brokerage was to pay for “studying science”) to defend White men against anti-racism and feminism; i.e., experiencing the need for a new Final Grammar (if I were to be able to look upon the government system as at all reasonable): “We don’t want.”
Then there was that experience, culminating in the subversion of my second final grammar in class.
My second final grammar: “We don’t want” (not “you can’t”, but “we don’t want”).
The subversion –
Professor: “Of course, nobody believes in racism anymore.”
Melt down, need to get out of America and back to my home nations.
Before I flee, my father is entrusted to take me on a trip to Italy and tell boastful stories about how he was put before the Supreme Court to say that he “just wanted the same rights as anyone.”
…my father added, “You weren’t raised that way”… “I’ve talked to everyone and nobody thinks like you (racially)”
I know my father, and he was told to say that.
Over the phone, while I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth at UMass –
My father: “I want a black baby!” (grandchild) … this was his way of expressing bold, good natured humor, liberalism to grease the way in the American enterprise.
I did not feel comfortable with him, about him. To have witnessed blacks in the day to day and to hear him say things like that.
A perpetual anxiety is traceable to trauma, horrifying instances when required to “work” with him, whether at 34 Harvard St. (where he’d have fantastic temper tantrums if I brought him the wrong screw driver, clear to display intense hatred for me) or at my grandmother’s in Newark, where I remember a particularly horrible moment…
I was probably age 4, me and him alone in grandma’s basement, and there he was, gritting his teeth, shaking in rage, cursing to the skies and turning to give me a look of such intense and sustained hatred that it went into the center of my brain and part of my psyche retreated there.
When I got into my teens/early 20s and started fighting back, my older brother Tom gave some advice which, unfortunately, I didn’t take soon enough. “You know what I do when dad is like that? I treat it like he’s trying to help me.”
In retrospect, if I could have taken that angle it would have been much better; not that there weren’t other things to be taken into consideration….but… my pride.
Very recently, I don’t know which of the Youtubers were talking about it (I think it was somebody that Luke Ford – not an endorsement – was reading on his show), but the researchers were saying that all the attention has been on how parenting effects children, while recent research is showing that a child’s nature can effect parenting.
I think of me, age 3 in a rocking chair, saying over and over again, “mommy is stupid, stupid mommy, mommy is stupid, stupid mommy” …. then a chorus of “I want a Tootsie Roll, I want a Tootsie Roll” (repeat 1,000 times)…. and …
My father’s wanting to put the fear of Archangelo into me is a bit more understandable, as is my mother’s lack of patience and blockage of metacommunication…
I don’t want to get too carried away with self criticism (that was what I gathered to do from Christianity, and all I did in my early teens, thinking that it made me “good and innocent”), but my point is, that as I finally have healed from harrowing family circumstances, I am able to see my fault in this, how things could have gone better – my pride from an early age that countenanced my own deep distrust …ok, the society and what was happening to our EGI was a big argument on my side for not going into denial with them, not to suspend disbelief in the virtue of this society, but wasn’t it grandiose to not look after myself more on ordinary participatory levels, to place myself aloof, to where I would say to my father when asked, “how are we suppose to be to each other?”
I said that we are supposed to be friends.
He said, “Lets be friends then”
I said, “I don’t want to.”
That was stupid, and I’d be a lot richer today if I could have overcome my pride and mistrust.
He said to another counselor whom I sought out to recover from Naomi, “I want my son back!”
I should have been more moved and there were other instances where he tried and I reacted with some kind of semi hostile snobbery. I can make excuses but these were mistakes.
Nevertheless, there are more than a few lessons that I can take from him and I can still potentially reward him with another grand-kid (maybe. I plan to).
Anyway, when he broke a sunny side egg, he did observe that “better days are coming.” ..and, he would always say, “do the best that you can do, it’s all you can do.”
It’s a big lead-up to what is for me one of the most redeeming stories about my father.
A story which reflects the personality conflict between us turned salutary.
Oh, lets say its my mid teens and I’m discovering pornography and that the lived world is somewhat nastier than the stories told…not easy to reconcile, and not feeling a common moral order…
It’s true that I’ve taken acid a few times and a few were really bad trips, like hell on earth, world smells like burning plastic, trees are like robots making underwater nautical noises, the devil is trying to say that you are a queer even though you know that you are not, you think that you are going to hell forever and there is (Robert Johnson’s) Crossroads…
No deal.
I read my bible. Book of Revelation.
Now this is days, probably weeks from L.S.D. experimentation, so its not that.
I get to the verse:
“Here is wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666”
“A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand”…
I look at the back of my hand and dark as magic marker are three sixes moving around. I say, “oh, no!” (for all its damning implications).
I wake up in the morning (it’s June 6th) to go to work with my brother laying the bricks on a house. I throw on a jacket (it’s a Phillips 66 jacket, but I can see the other 6).
We get to this house that we are working on and every smudge of dirt on the house or around it forms 666.
I carry wet cement and it spills onto the ground continuously in formations of 666.
All day long the radio station we’re tuned into is playing music from 1966 (really).
The New Jersey Lottery that day: 666.
I’m desperate. When I get home, I tell my father this story. I’m doomed. What does he say?
“You should have told me! I would have played that number!”
For that alone my father is redeemed in my eyes. And no, I probably couldn’t have done better. Maybe in some ways, but not likely overall with 4 kids, under the circumstance.
Genetics & Genealogy of Scott Daniel Corbo
Scott Daniel Corbo
Born 2 September 1961 (11:15 P.M.), Newark, New Jersey
Parents
Joseph L. Corbo & Sophie Teresa Sienkiewicz
Mother
Sophie Teresa Sienkiewicz
Born 6 April 1927, Perth Amboy, U.S.A.
Father
Joseph Lawrence Corbo
Born 19 March 1925, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Paternal Line
Grandfather
Alfonso Corbo
Born 22 July 1890, Calabritto, Italia
Great Grandfather
Arcangelo Corbo
Born 31 March 1843, Calabritto, Italia
Great Great Grandfather
Alessio Corbo
Born March 1803, Calabritto, Italia
Great Great Great Grandfather
Felice Corbo
Born approximately 1779, Calabritto, Italia
Great Grandfather Four Times Removed
Carmine Corbo
Born about 1738 in Calabritto, died 2 July 1817 in Calabritto
Great Grandfather Five Times Removed
Nicola Corbo
Perhaps from Northern Italiy, he married a woman named Camilla Casieri
Italian Grandmother’s Line
Italian Grandmother
Maria Malanga
Born Caposele, Italia 8 September 1903
Great Grandmother
Maria Giuseppa Cecere
Born Jan 1860 La, Valva, Salerno, Campania, Italy
Died, June 1967 Materdomini, Salerno, Campania, Italy
Great Grandfather
Gerardo Malanga
Born 25 April 1867 Caposele, Italia
Maternal Line
Grandfather
Jozef V. Sienkiewicz
Born in Wilno (Vilnius), Poland (now Lithuania)
Grandmother
Serafina “Sabina” M. Szumska
Born Zafinowa Poland (now Belarus)
Great Grandfather
Wiaczeslaw Szumski
Born, Zafinowo, Belarus (then Poland)
Died, 1913 Zafinowo, Belarus (then Poland)
Great Grandmother
Genetics of Scott Daniel Corbo
One site, MTDNA Family Tree, provides a genealogy of sorts:
U5b1e1
Birth Name U5b1e1
Gender female
Events
Event Date Place Description Notes Sources
Birth 1000 B.C.E.
Parents
Relation to main person Name Relation within this family (if not by birth)
Mother U5b1e
U5b1e1
Families
Family of U5b1e1
ChildrenU5b1e1a
Narrative
Mutations: A2757G A10283G T12616C
Genbank example: KC257380:
Genbank example: FJ493517:
PedigreeU5b1e
U5b1e1
U5b1e1a
Eupedia: U5b1e: found in Poland, Ukraine and Latvia
U5b1e1: found in central Europe and Scandinavia and north-west Russia
U5b1e is estimated to be about 8,000 years old and we have 14 FMS results mostly found in eastern Europe including Russia, Ukraine, and Slovakia. There is also one each found in Germany, Poland, England, Finland, Norway and the Czech Republic.
It is generally accepted that the most ancient European mitochondrial haplogroup, U5, has evolved essentially in Europe. To resolve the phylogeny of this haplogroup, we completely sequenced 113 mitochondrial genomes (79 U5a and 34 U5b) of central and eastern Europeans (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Russians and Belorussians), and reconstructed a detailed phylogenetic tree, that incorporates previously published data. Molecular dating suggests that the coalescence time estimate for the U5 is ∼25–30 thousand years (ky), and ∼16–20 and ∼20–24 ky for its subhaplogroups U5a and U5b, respectively.
Introduction
It has been argued that the most ancient European mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup (hg), U5, arose among the first European settlers in the Upper Paleolithic [1],[2]. Recent molecular dating results suggest that the age of hg U5 oscillates around 36 thousand years (ky), and it has been suggested that any early migration of U5 or its ancestors into Europe might have occurred between ∼55 ky and ∼30 ky ago [3]. There are two U5 subhaplogroups, U5a and U5b, dating back to ∼27 ky each, thus implying that they both originated before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) [3]. The frequency of hg U5 in modern European populations is on average 7% [1],[4],[5], but recent studies of ancient mtDNA have shown that U5 haplotypes were common among Mesolithic and Neolithic Europeans, especially of central and eastern parts of Europe [6],[7]. For instance, a high incidence of U5 haplotypes (about 65%) has been detected in European hunter-gatherer individuals.
Another individual adds:
The mtDNA U haplogroup is very old. U51b1e is located on the entire Baltic coast. I think she returned from Scandinavia to Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and several other countries. Perhaps she just branched along the coast. A hotspot seems to be in Lithuanian from what I’ve seen, but you’ll probably also get a lot of matches from Norway, Sweden and Finland. You can contact the administrator of U mtDNA, as it may be able to advise you more about it.
Speculative notes on Reddit as to the possible connection of the Vikings to my mother’s line.
Posted by U5b1e1 the Viking mother of Rus? on Fri, 25 May 2018 18:03 | #
Vikings might have started raiding because there was a shortage of single women (ehbonline.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Wagamaga
So… polygyny, hoarding of women by a few powerful males, was very possibly the impetus for risky Viking expansion.
This brings to mind the idea that the debts of men in modern societies are relative to the operational sex ratio in their area: less females means greater risk-taking exemplified by riskier (i.e. worse) economic investments by single men.
[–]herbwMD | Clinical Neurosciences 10 points 1 year ago*But really, the late Medieval warming was ongoing then too. It’s thought that for every degree the earth warms up, that agro can shift about 100 miles north from that warming. This would have likely applied to the Norsemen. Then cooling set in about 1300 AD or so, ending the Norse colonies in Greenland by cold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
This was also associated with very warm weather and drought in the Central America & may have played a role in damaging, even ecologically stressing the large Mayan population there, as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse
The warming could have created a population increase as well, in the north and the surplus population from surplus food would have had to move on. To which the polygamy of the nobles in the north, would have meant, also, fewer women for most men. So the Norsk sailed, after developing efficient ships, and raided, for women, sex, booty(grin) and land. Powerful, known stimuli for humans at any time.
They took north & eastern UK, founded Dublin, Island (Iceland in Eng.), settled colonies in Greenland, and took Normandy in NW France named for them. and Wm. of Normandy seized England ca. 1066, defeating Harald Hardrada at the well known Battle of Hastings.
At that time, too, came the Mongol invasions of Asia and Europe, India and the Middle East.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan
Many human activities are very likely climate driven. Many factors are involved as shown above. This could be another….
The article makes sense, and is part of what went on, clearly.
[–]knowyourbrain 1 point 1 year ago
Seems like kidnapping women is a primitive (in the evolutionary sense meaning older) function of war.
[–]codesnik 1 point 1 year ago
my girlfiend sequenced her mtDNA recently and she found that she belongs to U haplogroup, and she has some genetic “relatives” (only one difference in mtDNA) in Sweden and Norway (we’re Russian). I was a bit puzzled how the same haplogroup became common in populations with relatively different histories (slavs and scandinavians)
But vikings raided slavs for centuries! Looks like it’s not a drift of scandinavian genes to russia, it’s just a lot of wives and concubines were taken back to scandinavia from east.
[–]svarogteuse 1 point 1 year ago
What we consider the history of the Russian states starts with Vikings. Rurik and company who are recognized as the first rulers in the area were Vikings. So yes there was quite a bit of Scandinavian brought into the area.
[–]codesnik 1 point 1 year ago
Of course I know about Rurik, I just don’t consider amount of men who were brought with him considerable, though of course I don’t have any numbers. Also in that particular case I’m talking about mtDNA haplogroup (U5b1e1 specifically), so it should be a woman, not man, migrating from scandinavia to russia and giving a lot of offsprings, which is even less probable from common historic view.
