In one of the most common memories of my childhood I am sitting in the back seat of the car while my dad is driving and muttering to himself. Amongst the most common phrases my father would mutter, there was one that came through at a more audible volume, appearing seemingly out of nowhere, and always blurted out with a biting distain: “Canner, you’re a fucking idiot!”
There were many Canner’s in our family: both my father’s parents, me, my sister, and eventually my brother. But there was only one Canner he would consistently address in this way… himself.
This phrase could erupt out of his mouth at any moment, certainly not only while he was driving, but the correlation occurred often enough that at first I thought it might have been connected to other cars, other drivers, or the general goings on of the road. My mother cursed at other drivers so I knew that this was a thing that adults did. But over time I realized that there was no discernable pattern that connected the events of the outside world with my father’s self-deprecating utterances. He could just as easily be berating himself for missing his exit as he could be remembering a mistake made decades ago. What was consistent was the intolerance he had towards experiences of not living up to the expectations he had of himself.
If you were to ask him about this quality, he would have told you that it was one, perhaps the primary quality of his, that he did not want to pass on to his children. In fact, the times that he got the most upset at me throughout my childhood were the moments where he saw a semblance of this pattern of his beginning to show up in the ways I treated myself. Despite his wishes, a rigid intolerance for not living up to my own standards and a habit of self-berating became quite a large portion of my inheritance.
About fifteen years ago, in my early thirties, I was on a road trip with my then girlfriend and I missed an exit on the highway, a mistake that was going to set us back about thirty minutes. I immediately became livid with myself, blurting out, “Jonah, you’re a fucking idiot”, amongst other unintelligible but equilly violent mutterings. This was certainly not the first time I reacted to making a mistake this way, and I likely would not have even registered the incident had it not been for the shock that my self-berating utterances were met with. The presence of a person who cared deeply for me and was unfamiliar with this inherited habit of mine allowed me to see the sharp contrast between this particular response and my general way of being.
In the moment I defended my inheritance. I made excuses for the tone I took with myself. I downplayed the impact it had on me. But upon later reflection, I began to see it for the inherited pattern that it was, and I began to see that it was something I didn’t want to hold on to.
Over the last fifteen years I have spent a lot of time parsing apart my inheritance: the beautiful stories and traits that have helped me along my journey towards being the person I aspire to become, as well as the habits and patterns that are not helpful, that do not align with the vision I have for myself. It is one of the great projects of a lifetime: to disentangle oneself from the things we inherit; to cherish and fold into our lives the helpful, wonderful, and meaningful things that were passed down through the generations; and to identify, reckon with, and eventually release the unhelpful habits, patterns, and beliefs that we were never meant to carry onward.
I am certainly not finished with this project and imagine I never will be, but every once in a while I get an opportunity to notice just how much releasing I have done. The other day I was driving on the highway and the car suddenly lost power. I had enough momentum to pull off the highway and onto an exit ramp. At the bottom of the exit ramp there was a car stopped at the traffic light in front of me and I had to bring the car to a complete stop. When I tried turning the car back on, it would not respond. I had run out of gas and had no way of starting the car again. There was a gas station just across the intersection but I had no way of getting my car there.
I tried giving the engine a few minutes, thinking that with a little rest it would turn back on just long enough for me to get the car across the intersection. I tried calling the gas station. I thought about trying to push the car. None of these ideas worked. I sat there for about twenty minutes, not wanting to call a tow truck because of how close the gas station was. Eventually a young man driving by made eye contact with me and after parking his own car, came to see if he could help. I gave him some money to buy a gas can and fill it with enough gas to get my car started. Ten minutes later he returned, we got the car started again, I thanked him profusely, and drove right to the gas station to fill the car up the rest of the way.
Throughout this entire experience, from the moment I realized what was happening, through all of the not knowing how the situation would get resolved, through all of the waiting for this stranger to return, my old self-berating voice, that for so many years was eager for any opportunity to curse me out, was nowhere to be found. The fact that I let the gas level in the car get so low that I got stuck at the bottom of an exit ramp was not met with rage or self-flagulation, but with a mild eye-roll, an amused chuckle, and curiosity as to how I was going to get out of this one.
And this reaction: amusement at the absurdity of life, curiosity in the face of the unknown, and an openness to the help of a stranger… these too are elements of my inheritance, these too are traits that showed up in the stories I heard and the experiences I had with my father and his parents.
We do not get to choose what our inheritance is. For most of us it is a mixed bag of things that we want to cherish and things we want to shed, things that align with the values we hold and things that make us uneasy, things that reinforce the ways we want to be in the world, and things that upon further examination to not line up with who we want to be.
The gift of an inheritance is that it comes with some work for us to do. What we choose to do with it, that becomes the gift we get to give.