Off My Rocker

According to Grammarphobia: English has two etymologically distinct words “rock,” both dating from Anglo-Saxon times: a noun derived from rocca, medieval colloquial Latin for a large stone, and a verb of prehistoric Germanic origin meaning to sway from side to side. 

Among my earliest memories is an activity that I engaged in when I was just past my toddler stage and was able to sit on furniture like chairs and sofas or indeed on the side of my bed without falling off. Sometimes, without knowing why but finding comfort in it, I would scoot myself to the edge of wherever it was I was sitting and, putting my tiny hands under my knees, and I would rock myself, back and forth. Sometimes I would even make a rhythmic humming sound as I rocked. 

My mother didn't know why I performed this strange act and assumed that what I needed was a rocking chair. So, eventually, she got me one, and I went through a succession of rocking chairs until, inexplicably, I outgrew my rocking compulsion. But over the following decades, until I was 32, I never figured out why I started rocking myself in that strange way or why I stopped. 

Then, one afternoon in 1990, sitting in a trailer I was renting on the outskirts of a small town in Nevada called Fallon, I watched a documentary on television about Mother Teresa's orphanage in Calcutta. The camera crew were given a tour of the different wards. The children were segregated according to age, and they were filming in the ward reserved for 3 year olds. It was a small room, with tiny cots arranged along the walls. Some of the cots were occupied by children, and I immediately noticed that two or three of them were sitting at the edge of their cots, holding onto the edges with their little hands, and rocking themselves exactly as I had done 29 years before. Someone in the crew, through an interpreter, asked the Indian nun who was guiding the tour to explain what the children were doing. The nun said such behavior was a symptom of "deprivation of affection." The moment I heard the interpreter speak the words, I was overcome. As the old saying goes, a veil had been lifted from my eyes. So that was why, so many years before, I had scooted to the edge of the sofa and, putting my hands under my knees, had rocked myself. 

In the interval of the years since then I have survived two failed marriages and an equal number of relationships that didn't work out. After the failure of my second marriage I went to live with a friend in Des Moines. We had been in the same Army unit together, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, in Fort Carson, Colorado. He knew that I had served in the Navy before joining the Army and one evening in 2001 he noticed me standing in his living room, rocking slightly forward and backward from my heels to my toes and he commented on how, even then, I was still responding to the movement of a ship, even though I was thousands of miles from the sea. I didn't see the need to tell him that it could've been something else, some other compulsion. 

When I went to live with my sister in Anchorage in 2005, as often happened she reminded me of my boyhood and on one occasion of my strange rocking phase. So I told her about the Mother Teresa documentary that I'd seen in 1990 and how some of the children were rocking themselves just as I had done and the nun said it was a symptom of deprivation of affection. My sister insisted that I had not been deprived of affection and then she told me something I didn't know. During her pregnancy with me my mother suffered a stroke, a "major neurological event," that set her back so far physically that, after I was born, she had to undergo months of physical therapy in which she had to learn how to talk and walk and write all over again. My father brought me home from the hospital and, not making nearly enough pay as a career soldier in 1958, he handed me over to my sister to look after. My sister was 7. She was my substitute mother until our actual mother was released from her physical therapy. When my mother finally came home, she took over caring for me from my sister. I never knew my mother before her stroke, but I was assured by my siblings and even by my mother that she was the very model of a loving mother. "Butter wouldn't melt in my mouth," she told me. But after the stroke she was a different person. If she was subjected to the slightest amount of stress, she would fly into a rage. Emotionally unbalanced, it was her helpless way of dealing with the stress. When I was confronted with this frighteningly unpredictable person, I had to learn how to go unnoticed, how not to attract attention, and how to be invisible. I kept my feelings to myself because going to my mother with them would either be answered with her tenderness or her rage. I desperately needed, as every child needs, the former, but I didn't dare risk arousing the latter. 

Now I'm an old man and I live in the tropics with a woman I care for but whom I do not love. Whenever I'm sitting alone concentrating on something I'm reading or writing, I find myself giving in to the old impulse and I rock back and forth in my chair. My companion has often seen me doing this, but she has never asked me why, and I've never tried to tell her. We aren't always the best custodians of our former selves. There is a tacit understanding that the persons we once were may share with us a name and a certain resemblance, but that they are, in so many ways, separate from us. We are liable for their actions and their words, but it’s foolish to feel proud or sorry for them.