A helping hand

There are things you just don’t know when you are raised by wolves.

While I’m mostly pretty good at dealing with people, it does not come naturally. My parents were barely domesticated, and it took everything I had just to fit in. Dad drank. Mom popped pills and slept through my childhood. They both had crappy low-paying jobs they hated. He was angry, and she was depressed. My sister and I were left to fend for ourselves.

Joining the Army at 18 was the beginning of a life I never imagined. I eventually became an executive communications advisor for a Fortune 100 company, but I always felt like I was making up the rules as I went. I listened, watched, copied and learned. It’s not that I wanted to be somebody else, but I wanted to be somebody. I thought I had it all figured out until the consultant arrived.

One of her first interventions was about conflict. There were about a dozen of us, and we sullenly gathered in a poorly lit conference room with a big oval fake wood table smack in the middle. She started at one end and asked everyone to take turns sharing how we dealt with conflict in our families when we were growing up.

Two hands found each other under the table, and we held on tight. Next to me was my friend and confidante, who also knew a thing or two about wolves. She was a secretary, and I was a senior manager. We had both lived with crazy, and we knew what crazy looked like.

One careful observation at a time, one quiet comment as I stood by her desk waiting for the boss to call me in, one look from her when the workplace madness was in full form, and I  knew. And she knew I knew. That’s how we learned to trust each other.

But here we were, in the big room with the consultant. At least we were on the tail end of the circle, so we had time to figure this out. She squeezed, I squeezed back.

The consultant asked, “How did you handle conflict in your family?” Someone said they discussed it like civilized adults over cocktails out by the pool.

Still holding hands, I thought about my friend, who didn’t even refer to her father as her father. First name only. I had my own father baggage, but I never called him Bill. I remember the fear of being exposed, the fear that we would have to reveal our dysfunctional childhoods after making it this far.

I don’t even remember what either one of us finally said. I only remember holding my friend’s hand as the consultant went around the table, one by one, person by person, inching closer and closer to us.