Mitteilungsbedürfnis – Compulsion to Communicate. 09/22/2019

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Rereading Tecumseh Fitch’s wonderful book on the evolution of speech, I am prompted (thanks, Felix) to post this repeat of a column from four years ago.  Why do I spend my time on this blog?

As you might have gathered from the very fact that I have created this blog, I love to communicate. I love to share my life's experience.

It's a very human trait. Eddie and Zoriana have it in overabundance. Eddie will talk the ear off of any audience willing to sit still. 

My mother had it.  She had the right tools.  She was a very proficient professional editor and typist.  She could compose a letter in her head and type it without error.  Very important if you are making five carbon copies, for kids and siblings.  I have a trove of her letters to me in Vietnam and Germany.

Tecumseh Fitch calls this trait by the German word mitteilungsbedürfnis.  Too bad for language snobs he never got it to catch on in English.  It would put schadenfreude to shame and made a much better showing than weltanschauung.  I must report, however, that the English translation, compulsion to communicate, conveys the idea perfectly.  Whatever angst or weltschmertz it may cause academic pedants, English is a perfectly functional language without the foreign embellishments.

Fitch writes in "The Evolution of Language" that the human species got a tremendous leg up when it evolved this need to communicate. A woman is able to tell her relatives what needs to be done. Sound familiar? The result is that a human mother can have a baby every two years whereas chimpanzees and gorillas have to wait six. They ask for and get help.  It worked.  Some might say, all too well.

Just as an amputee feels pain in his phantom limb, I still feel some pain at being cut off from my former family. There are events in my life I would like to share.

Two days ago Eddie came home with a rum baba and a chocolate baba. These were a family favorite when I used to buy them at the Bradley Center on Arlington Boulevard. I would like to remind my grown children of those good times.  And invite them to taste the real thing, which is much richer.

Two of Zoriana's favorite songs, Little Bunny Foo Foo and All the Little Pretty Little Horses, came from Aunt Rosie. I would like to thank her.  I sometimes think some of Aunt Denise's Philadelphia usages such as "looked like a smacked ass” are the most appropriate expression for a certain situation.

Oksana is teaching English using The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. If I remember right, my grown children got the book as a gift from Uncle O'John. I'd like to let him know that it still appreciated today. I would like to thank O'John as well for simple mathematical notions such as the inductive proof that there are an infinite number of primes.   I am passing them on to Eddie.

I would also like to hear how nephews John-O and Anthony are getting along.  Laney Decker as well. I would like to tell her that she has a namesake in our daughter Zoriana, who in turn was named after her grandmother.  It came in handy.  They would not baptize a Zoriana because there had never been a St. Zoriana.  St. Melania, there was.  She is thus baptized.

However nice it would be to have links to the family, it appears that I am cut off in perpetuity. For a variety of reasons.  Suzy cut me off ten years ago just after she spent her two-week vacation from university in Ireland visiting Oksana and me in Kyiv. The cutoff was so abrupt and complete that I don't know for sure what prompted it.

Her flight out of Kyiv was one day before Oksana and my long-planned and prepaid trip to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. We got her to the airport and said goodbye. She somehow missed the boarding call and had to stay another night in Kyiv.

I was in a difficult position. I had to choose between letting my 21-year-old daughter, who had made a careless mistake, fend for herself or my new love and a several thousand-dollar vacation. I figured that Suzy would make it somehow, so Oksana and I left. Mary Ann, who had not been happy that Suzy came in the first place, got involved because Suzy needed more money. Neither of them has answered my emails or phone calls since. I do not hear as well from Mary Ann's siblings. I think it is a matter of family solidarity. The siblings respect the sentence of excommunication Mary Ann has pronounced.

Naomi was a gracious hostess when I visited Washington DC in 2011, I tried to see Jack on that trip. We spoke by phone, but it was impossible to have a conversation without somehow giving him offense. Dealing with Jack had always been like walking on eggs, and I guess it got to be so painful that he simply refuses. I have not talked to him since. 

Jack spent his childhood as a lab rat in a bunch of expensive (for us) experiments run by PhD's. He wasn't quite like the other children. Lots of boys are not – it goes with the Y chromosome. Instead of asking him to suck it up, work hard to overcome his difficulties, the reigning therapeutic approach was "Oh, poor child! We will try to make him happy in spite of everything."

They certainly did not succeed in making him happy. They don't want to take responsibility for the outcome. One of Jack's most impressive decisions was to say "No more!" to the regime of amphetamines he was taking for his diagnosed ADHD. He quit cold turkey from taking an incredible 30 mg or so a day of dexamyl. It didn't change his life either way, better or worse.

The ADHD diagnosis was fashionable, but bogus in my opinion. A lot of people are now concluding the same. I would like to share with Jack a video on the subject with which I expect he would agree.

The experimental psychologist who prescribed Jack's meds was Dr. Jay Giedd.  Twice I have come across references to his writings in the books I review. I wrote to Dr. Giedd, again twice, to cordially renew acquaintance and to ask a simple question. Was he interested in following up on what happened to his patient 15 and 20 years later? He never bothered to reply. I likewise tried to contact Doctor Barbara Ingersoll who had made the introduction to Dr. Giedd. Again, no response.

I was tempted to call Doctor Dan Drake, the psychiatrist that Jack was seeing, but I don't even know what questions I would ask. Whatever he was attempting with Jack was confidential, between him and Jack, and perhaps Mary Ann. I think we can say whatever it was it didn't work.

I should think that professional ethics should require that they at least fake an interest in what happened as a result of their interventions. They are absolutely, flatly not whatsoever curious. In my opinion they just took the money and ran. I would be interested in hearing Jack's opinions on the matter 20 years later.

When Naomi visited us in 2014, we got along fine. It was an exciting time, right in the middle of the Maidan uprisings. Later that year she got engaged to Chris Dupre.  Our communication became distant as she attempted to ensure that I never had contact with him. We didn't talk much at all during the marriage. She renewed contact after it fell apart. Our last conversation was one hour over Skype in April 2017, at the end of which I told her that Oksana was pregnant with Zoriana. As is always the case, she did not tell me why she dropped me.

I got a clue when my distant cousin Adam Seibert unfriended me on Facebook, calling me a hopeless racist (and, of course, the entire litany of fashionable pejoratives) for having suggested that Angela Merkel made a mistake in opening the doors to a million African and Middle Eastern immigrants. Naomi and Suzy chimed in on Facebook to agree what a despicable follow their father was.

I am the same despicable fellow I always was, but the fashions of despicability have changed. My guess is that it was merely a useful pretext for cutting me off.

Within a year after Adam cut me off, Cousin Nathan up and died.  He was a handsome and smart fellow, yet never married, no kids, out of work and living with relatives.  He took vehement, profane exception to just about every opinion I posted on Facebook, but at least he maintained the contact.

No cause of death given, which leads one to wonder.  It appears to be an all-too-familiar story with white men of Generation X.  In any case, it leaves me with few contacts on either side of the family.  And it means my young kids belong to a very sparse cohort as far as carrying on the family goes.

There it is.  None of my grown kids talk to me, and neither does my ex-wife. A couple of you on this blog mailing are mutual acquaintances. I am sure that I will hear through you if anybody gets married or has children.

I would really enjoy having normal relations with them. Being able to talk about memories from childhood and what they are doing with their lives. If you have the occasion, please let them know that I would welcome getting back in touch. I don't bear them any ill will. I would be tickled to death if they would someday chat over Skype with their half-brother Eddie. Who, as I mentioned, always has a lot to say.  Even Zoriana can already be appealing over Skype.

I add, in 2023, that my kids have now heard quite a few stories about their older half-siblings.  I don’t directly put them down, but I do express how happy I am that Eddie, Zoriana and Marianna want to be read bedtime stories and hugged every night before going to bed.  They are interested when Dad talks about European history, biology or whatever.  They say please and thank you, at least some of the time.

I conclude that growing up without a car, without TV and without too many toys has probably been good for them. Growing up without vaccines, a weekly (or so) trip to the pediatrician and the intervention of school psychologists and feminist female Episcopal priests is without a doubt a blessing. 

Graham