guilty until proven innocent

Art Burshy struggled today with comforting his daughter; she had had a bad experience with her boy friend and initially Art was patient, listening to her sorrow and sobbing, her repetition of sad lines and thoughts.
The boy had done something bad and she needed to talk about it.
It lasted for 5 minutes, 10 minutes and then went on and on...
And Art, really trying to be a good father, kept listening, asking different questions... but the answers resulted in the same repetition, including:
- did I push him too much
- he can't be that much of a monster
- why does this happen to me..
- maybe I am just not good enough for him
- I am sure he will discover what he misses and will come back...in the end...won't he?

After many repetitions it caused some sort of impatience to fill up Art's inside, a feeling of anger....
He felt like all the talking needed to be transformed into action; move forward, find solutions, have a life.
Art was aware that the basic reaction to issues between men and women differs:
- men always start looking for solutions, and feel that that is what they can contribute whenever someone has a problem
- women just need to talk about it...and talk about it...and...
But he just could not help it.
How could his daughter sit here sobbing over a piece of shit...

In the end he could not hold back his frustrations:
"darling, how can you mourn over losing this boy....
it was clear he did not deserve your love...
men are a bunch or retarded testosterone bombs, and only few succeed to rise to a higher level of sophistication... and your boy friend was not one of them..."
Ooops, this caused her to cry even more intensely...
Art realised he had just told his daughter she wasted a year with a fucked up son-of-a-... so he realised he had to take a step back.

He sat down next to his daughter and explained her:
- how much of a beautiful woman she is (Art had learnt that for a girl confirmation of her beauty by her father is essential in her development, and as a hobby-psychologist he tried to bring these sort of lessons in practise - not always with a good result though...
- how much he wished for her she would run into a man that would admire her, worship her, respect her...
- he told her his youth love-sorrow and frustrations such as:
- how he discovered girls would fall for guys with self confidence, but that would at the same time be completely disrespectful, and hurt them all the time
- how he was frustrated that the girl he worshipped did not choose for him; the artistic shy innocent boy that truly admired her and would never want to hurt her...

It seemed that this calmed her down, and after this even Art felt their exchange of stories helped push away the initial hefty emotional sadness.

I complimented Art with intervening in his own dysfunctional behaviour, and turning it the right way...
But Art did not seem impressed with the compliment, he told me:
'the difficulty as a father is that you are never ready raising your children....
every 'victory' is short term, and new temptations and challenges are around the corner...
and even when you feel for a moment you really made a positive difference in their lives...
years later the kids tell you these moments traumatised them...'
and...
"When you become  a father you basically accept making an art work that will never be ready, where outside factors keep ruining your art piece, and in the end you have no control at all...and you can only hope kids come to you for help in case they are in deep shit..."

A "Wow" escaped my mouth and Art looked at me, seeing my surprised and puzzled face.
He added:
"I am not really proud of being of the male race...
and I sometimes wonder whether there ever has been a purpose of creating male and female versions of mankind...
Although sometimes when for example in an organisation you have many women working together, it can become sort of a sick-mistrust-paranoia-atmosphere...but not sure we can only solve that by adding something like a 'man'...
men repeatedly show bad behaviour, as husbands, in groups and as leaders;
- strive for power and putting others at a lower level or even destruct opposition
- a continuous competitive nature
- abuse of their position in the pack
- disrespect to women, and keeping male-network intact
- suppression..."

I asked him whether he thought all men were like this... and he though for a moment...
Basically, man has many flaws in his nature, deep drives that maybe one day long ago had some sort of purpose...
Every man needs to conquer these deeper patterns in himself
This is a lifetime struggle only to be helped when a man finds his true muse...
So, I do not trust men...
for me men are guilty until proven innocent..."

a proper youth trauma

Art Burshy is an open-minded man, and he is happy when he sees his children speak their mind.
But he is now getting a bit tired of his son, complaining that Art has always been such a bad father.
That this has created difficulties for the son to normally behave with others, as his father is such a freaky, socially corrupted, extremely vulgar, cynical loner.

And Art does understand somehow; he himself still frequently speaks about how his childhood has shaped his existence. His role in the family, the role models that his father and mother gave him, and how he dealt with difficult situations, under pressure.
He still observes that the way he acts and reacts in case of issues is linked to the odd way he felt and behaved as a child.
There are some moments he really remembers:
- how he would fight with his brother, who was much stronger than himself, and how he then took revenge, making a crazy caricature-cartoon of his brother... and then his brother just found the drawing very funny, corrupting the revenge
- how he developed his humour to deal with tricky situations and tension between his parents, being the clown
And many things more that make Art have flashbacks combined with emotions.

But whenever he talked about his experiences with his parents at a later age he discovered that the events that he thought were very big, heavy, emotional and burdensome...his parents even did not remember...
He wondered how that was possible...and his son now mentioning this sh*t to Art brings back all these tiring memories.

Art read some books on raising children, and it is amazing that after so many years that humans are walking on this planet, and so many times they have raised their children, that still ideas of raising kids vary soooo much...
and it is very funny, but by the time his kids are getting almost adult he feels he starts to understand.
About how the purpose of raising kids is not to have them sit nicely at a restaurant table, like some book about French kids states...bullsh*t.
Or too religious ideas about guilt, sin and keeping your kids away from evil...hell no, they need to learn to make their own mistakes...
He feels more that raising kids is about respecting them, being there to help them become adults that can live a meaningful and happy life, learning to make their own choices...
And actually that is quite difficult, and there is no secret recipe for raising happy kids, and anyone telling you it is simple just doesn't grasp the depth of the challenge.

At the same time Art has observed that all the negative experiences from his youth have also been important in driving himself as an artist, pushing himself, finding direction, making him dive deeper for inspiration... and actually he feels he would not be at the same place, with the same insights without these things having happened. He even sometimes pities people that grew up in a 'happy' family...my God that must have been boring...and these people must live mediocre lives.
It seems that many famous people and successful business people had a terrible youth, so this could mean:
a) you need to be somehow traumatised to truly be driven to reach success, or
b) it is much more interesting when you are famous to talk about a terrible youth, then to say it was all so jolly happy, or even
c) famous people are just a random statistical group, implying that almost everyone ends up having traumas about their youth, like we always take the worst experiences as a sort of reference and emphasising how special it has been that we have reached our success...

So, Art wonders whether he should tell his son all these thoughts and reflections, but his son will definitely not want to listen anyway...
So, Art decides to tell his son that - if he wants to be famous - it is actually quite good to have a proper youth trauma...