Today I want to speak to the idea of ‘perception.’ To make my point I am going to share what I learned from my father versus what my sisters told me they learned from him. He is long gone, having died at the age of 61 from a stroke on March 25, 1985. Do the math – that’s a really long time ago now. However, I feel his spirit around me all the time, and he lives in my heart.
To put some context into what I am going to be sharing I need to tell you the little I know about my dad, because he never spoke of his past, ever!
He grew up with a single mom, his dad passing when he was 12 years old. He had two older sisters, one 10 years older than him and the other 5 years older than him. So, he was the only male in a household of females – something that would repeat after he got married and lost his only son to leukemia leaving him with 5 daughters to raise with my mother.
He knew from the age of 5 in 1928 that he wanted to be a dentist. Dentistry was quite gruesome back then, but he saw the wonders of marrying the art of creating a beautiful smile with the science necessary to be a Doctor of Dental Medicine (DMD). It gave him much pleasure to take a mouth that had rotted teeth or just teeth that were unhealthy and needed to be removed to help create a gorgeous self-loving smile in a patient’s mirror. I saw how this worked many times during the 6 years that I worked in his office part-time through my high school and college years.
However, because he came from a home without a father, he needed to find a way to get through school. But, first, he was drafted into the US Army as a Private, a job he summarily hated, being in foreign countries with the US’s enemies resenting being forced to put his education on hold. It was the only job he ever had! That is all I know about his feeling of being in the US army at the age of 18. He was only in for a year then he was able to attend City College of New York for free as a citizen of the City of New York, coming from Brooklyn. However, that was not an easy feat for him as he had to spend an hour and a half on the crowded and noisy subway each way to make his dream of getting a college degree come true. Well, he had his goal of becoming a dentist so he did what he had to do to make that happen.
The next problem was that of getting into Dental School and paying the $900 a year to attend having no money. He was lucky in the fact that he had his two older sisters and they helped him to pay for this tuition as he lived on sardines, begals, and other inexpensive foods – foods he had in our home till the day he died along with lox (smoked salmon which is quite expensive, his beloved steaks that he cooked just right, and his favorite sweets, as he had a monster sweet tooth, even as he had a poster on the door of his patient’s waiting room telling them “To quit the sweet habit.’ Yeah, right dad! He told me one day to never forget from where you came, so this was one way he grounded himself having those foods to remind him of his leaner years.
He started his practice way down at what was then the end of the Saw Mill River Parkway, as far from the depressing place of his birth and childhood as he felt he could go at the time and set up his practice. In those days professional people were not allowed to advertise so he waited in his office for people to find his practice or to be referred by other dental specialists or medical doctors in the community. It was a very slow process and yet he built a practice. This process was detailed in the letters he sent my mother at the very beginning of his life as a dentist. That practice sold for $92,000 with antiquated equipment yet a great patient list 31 years later. His old dental school buddy and his dentist daughter ran the practice after my dad died keeping it active and valuable. The person who bought it was the husband of one of my tutors at my high school resource room where I spent many hours learning how to learn.
My sisters never realized, I don’t believe, what it took for a man who grew up without a father to figure out how important it was to be able to make his own way in life. He did not ever want some fool boss or the red tape of corporate to be telling him what to do. He was his own man making money on the streets of Brooklyn at the age of 12 to help his mom make the family’s bills. He was indeed a person who was willing to take the responsibility he felt was his from the beginning (maybe because he was the ‘man of the house.’ I really don’t know where the idea of him being a shoeshine boy came from, I just know that is what he felt he needed to do, so he did it – at the age of 12!
While I worked in his office, a place that I did not want to be working when he first asked me to come work with him as my two older sisters had done. I am glad I took him up on his offer as I learned many pieces of wisdom by his side.
It needs to be understood that I was very happy working at the Bedford Animal Hospital, which began as a volunteer job my mom found for me worried about what a learning disabled kid would do to earn a living. It was indeed the place where I could learn all about the science of keeping of value continuing the valuable animals’ progeny on one end of the spectrum while help others regain or keep their health. I was able to run the anesthesia machine during some of the operations, run the blood tests for heartworm, the fecal exams for other types of worms, help the groomer with bathing some of the animals and holding them as she did her artistry to upkeep their beauty, all the while helping the assistant vet who was a very cool woman with all things to do with helping the vets do their job.
My main job, of course, was to feed the animals, clean their cages while they were out in the runs to do their business, clean the runs, and clean the cats’ cages as the animal hospital was also a boarding facility for animals while their owners were on vacation. However, I had a lot of time to learn so many other interesting things. The most fun was sharing the stories of some of the more intricate things I learned of the medical side of things at the dinner table where my dad and I finally started to bond through our interests in bodily functions, while at times grossing out my sisters. To the two of us, it was just a part of the miracle of life.
One of the most important things I learned was how kindly we sent the very sick animals off to sleep forever because it wasn’t ‘humane’ to make them live in such pain. And, yet, when it came to working elderly humans much, later on, there is this conception that because of humans being so important to God, that they can never be released from their pain – they needed to be kept alive at ALL cost, regardless of how emaciated, how ‘tired’ of living they were except for when AIDS came and the world of hospice (only giving palliative care to keep them comfortable) came into being. One thing my father made very clear to my mother was that if the day came that he was no longer of service and was unable to make his own decisions, that he wanted his life to end, and so she made that decision when the doctors told the family that he was brain dead as he laid in a coma.
Now, my father was not always kind to all of my sisters, with him having real issues with his own weight even though he was indeed a very active person with golfing, tennis, racketball, and square dancing as his main activities other than going out to eat and going to the movies (including all the junk food one can buy there). One of my sisters was constantly being told that she needed to be more active (though honestly, she was almost always on her royal blue bike, till she got hit by a station wagon on her way to my dad’s dental office to have her teeth cleaned when she was 14 years old. Ironic, I know.
There were other family issues that came into being that caused my dad to feel bad about things that happened to me and my younger sister that though he tried to prevent in some ways, couldn’t prevent because he had no idea what was happening outside his own home. Well, he didn’t really know what was happening in his own home either where my mom was concerned and her abusive behavior due to her severe mental illness of borderline personality disorder. At times she would go into rages – he knew she had the propensity to do that, but I really don’t know if he really ever was told by my sisters what was occurring while he was at work or involved in his physical activity – something he needed after sitting in a chair for his 8 hours of providing dental services all day. I believe that they each believe he “ought to have known.” However, I wonder how they know what is going on with others when they are not present and are never told. I just wonder…because, though my mother did indeed create some situations that were rather abusive duing my childhood that could be seen as abusive to me, more so while I was a teen, I don’t believe I ever told my dad, I just handled it and went on…I was and am not a person that shies away from doing what is called for and for this I am very grateful. I never felt the need to blame anyone for someone else’s emotional issues – including the person with the emotional issues. This was a good thing as years later when I developed bipolar 2 there came a time when I did all sorts of idiotic things and the best I could do was to make reparations for the lack of judgment – I never blamed the illness for it, though many do find myriads of ways to blame their problems and therefore their lack of taking responsibility onto others or their ‘illness.’
So, what I learned from my father was that one takes responsibility for that which they realize is theirs. One does whatever one needs to do to realize a profession that fortifies and brings a sense of fulfillment to one’s life while being of service to one’s community. One need not make money on every case, because sometimes there are people for whatever reason who were not given the abilities to do what you have, so you do what you can to help those people. When he died, he had $30,000 due to him and though there were some people in the community with whom he traded who never paid the bill even to his estate, there were others who he never expected to be paid in full having set up a payment plan that they could make monthly without killing them financially fully knowing that the bill wouldn’t be paid in many years given the expense of some of the work that he had done for these particular patients who truly needed the dental work to be done anyway. My way of following in his footsteps is to give sliding fees to the college kids who come to me who are working part-time jobs and allowing them to come up with the amount they will pay for the services and the monthly payments they will make. For the record, every single one of them paid me in full!
I learned from my dad that the only way that one loses authority over one’s self is if one allows another to take one’s authority away. He worked for himself to ‘own his own life, instead of being owned by another.’ In the many jobs I had over the years, I can very well understand why he felt this way because there are idiot bosses who are unwilling to look more deeply into the needs of their clients and patients blindly following a protocol that takes the patient’s agency away in some cases and worse, their safety. In the world of business, it was obvious that people like to yield power over others, even in the world of mental health where our job was to help our clients aspire to be as independent as possible, yet my bosses treated these adults as if they were less than children. This is the reason I left conventional mental health and migrated to hypnotism where we are all about bringing out the magnificence of our clients while helping them become whole. We leave behind the pathological descriptors. Those same descriptors allow conventional mental health providers to merely ‘manage’ the symptoms instead of getting to the ’cause’ of the problem which is always going to go back to a lack of self-esteem based on trauma in the client’s past. I luckily was taught to help my clients not only to dispose of their diagnoses, more importantly, to help them to fulfill their compelling futures – their mission in life.
So, though my sisters found it very easy to dismiss many of the very real and powerful life learnings that my dad demonstrated every day in the manner in which he lived, I found him to be the best role model ever. No, he wasn’t perfect, but neither am I. Far from it. And, that fact is not a fact that needs to be dispensed with disregarding the really important wisdom to be had from a person who had overcome so much to become the man he was. Not at all.
I would hope that the fact that I have regained my sanity, quite literally and become a force for healing many others who have been down a similar path, some much more serious in nature than my own, that this would be my legacy – not the stupid things I did along the way either due to my illness or maybe only due to my ignorance (which has nothing to do with stupidity but has much to do with not knowing what one doesn’t know at the time.)
Yes, I celebrate my dad’s life and his legacy because it was he who allowed me the option of looking deep inside myself to figure out that which I wanted to be doing with my life’s energy, regardless of all the learning disabilities I needed to compensate for along the way. It took 23 years from college graduation till I found it, but I had to clear my own mental health issues first, and then continuously search till I found the exact right work for me. It hasn’t been easy at times, but this is what I can share with you – though there were times when I was going to give up I always had friends (Sam, my Webman though he does much more than that for Dawning Visions Hypnosis and for me personally, some of my clients, including Donna N. the Martin family, my Godson, and my Cousin Bill Fern who believed in that which I was doing and would never allow Dawning Visions Hypnosis to fade into the darkness – because many of them have been able to be helped themselves by the work that I do along the way.
There is nothing better to prove the efficacy of one’s work than to share it with those closest to you, if they are open to it and wanting the work to be done – otherwise, it is a matter of running over others boundaries, and that is not a something one in health care EVER does to another, EVER!
Learning: One’s perceptions of a person can be and will be significantly different from another’s even if you grow up in the same household as each person’s interpretations are going to be different based on what they choose to remember. Our memories are quite fickle and mostly not particularly aligned with the reality of the situation. So, who knows, maybe the points that I made here regarding my dad have no merit in the fact that they are merely my own perceptions. However, I do find these particular perceptions to allow me to know how it was that I came to be the woman I am today, relentless in my pursuit of being of service using my talents and interest to empower those whom society has stigmatized from ignorance – until someday, they too find they have similar challenges to those they so easily condemned as not ‘as good as they all the while hoping others will help them through those challenges.
