High Price

Unfortunately, the jobs for which she was considered didn’t typically pay a living wage.
    In contrast, when I reached that age I had only one child that I knew about and was on the verge of receiving my PhD: I had resources at my disposal that they couldn’t even dream of. It would be easy to say that my parents made poor choices; the reality is that it is impossible to understand their experience and my early life without fully appreciating its context.
    And so, putting aside any thoughts of missing my mom, I focused on wanting to be with my father when my parents first split. As a boy, my behavior was continually shaped by my family’s notion of masculinity, virtually from birth. For example, when I helped my father mow the lawn or fix the car, I’d get patted on the head or be given other types of encouragement. In behavioral psychology, this process is called reinforcement. The more immediate the reward or reinforcement * following the behavior, the more robust and frequent that behavior becomes in similar situations. And so I quickly learned that emulating my father was what I should do.
    In contrast, I was encouraged to play with my sisters when I was very young, but this behavior was no longer reinforced as I got older. It wasn’t seen as an appropriately masculine activity for a growing boy. I gradually stopped doing it because this behavior wasn’t rewarded. This process is known as extinction. Behavior that was once reinforced but no longer produces praise or reward will eventually be discontinued and that’s what happened to my engagement in my sisters’ activities.
    Similarly, while my sisters would be comforted and soothed by adults if they cried or expressed sadness as young children, my brothers and I were quickly shown by example or experience that displaying such vulnerability was not appropriate male behavior. If my sisters were emotionally expressive, that behavior was reinforced. But the boys in my family were actually punished for engaging in such behavior, which decreased the likelihood of us crying in similar situations. Like reinforcement, punishment that has a high probability of occurring immediately after the behavior is more effective. Punishment, of course, is the use of aversive experiences—like reprimands, spanking, or other ways of inflicting pain—to decrease behavior.
    I didn’t know it then but I was being conditioned by the consequences of my behavior. Through the work of B. F. Skinner and others, I would later learn how those subtle and not-so-subtle reinforcements and punishments profoundly influence our actions. At the time, though, I just knew that what I had to do, what I wanted to do, was become a man. And the best way to do that was to watch and copy my namesake, Carl. I wanted to spend as much time with my father as I could, to get those rewards and avoid being punished, to try to become who I was meant to be. He treated me like I was the center of his world. He taught me how to mow a lawn, how to wash and repair a car, and when I wanted the much-coveted Daisy BB gun, he bought it. With a child’s unconditional love, I didn’t see any contradictions in idolizing the man who hit my mother and drove her away.
    Also, I didn’t like some of the alternatives that faced me if my parents split up and I could not stay with my father. My aunt Louise—whom we called Weezy—could not have been happy being saddled with one or more of her sister’s children. When we did stay there—and I would ultimately do so for weeks at a time sporadically throughout my childhood—we felt like she would sometimes take her frustration out on us. For example, her children received preferential treatment. If there was a fight or dispute with our cousins, we rarely got the benefit of the doubt. My sister Joyce described feeling like Cinderella when she lived there, with a wicked stepmother and treacherous stepsisters. Even though some of the ways that Weezy treated us were undoubtedly driven by lack of money and being overwhelmed, that isn’t something that children can understand. All we saw was that we were not wanted.
    Then there was my maternal grandmother’s place. At any given time, at least six grandchildren were staying in Grandmama’s Hollywood, Florida, residence, sleeping on thick blankets on the floor. My mom wasn’t the only one of her three full sisters to rely on her mother for long-term child care—but she certainly did it frequently. I’ve already mentioned