Growing Up Carlin, A Comedy Story
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/20
Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall, B.A., M.A. is known for her work in comedy and writing. Here we discuss a wide range of issues in an extensive talk on comedy and life. Here is session 4.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You mentioned this as feeling, with respect to wanting to master school, “the charge of having power over something”. Between the transitional object of clinging to Brenda, to then clinging to Miss Morgan, and then wanting to master school to have power over something, both of those speak volumes to a lack of control you felt in your own life up to 4 years old as well as not knowing what to attach to – other than another caring object or person, in this case, Miss Morgan.
Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall: Yes! Yes, we moved to LA. My mom was falling apart. You need a safe place for the storm. School became that for me. Having a good mind, and being able to master school, and soak it all up, it was a sense of control and power. Thank God! Thank God I had that, who knows where I’d be without that? All of us have to find some sense of stability internally in order to develop into adults. Without that, there can be some serious mental health issues. Attachment disorders and all sorts of things.
I had this true foundation. I knew my mother deeply loved me. I knew my father deeply loved me. I didn’t have a sense of being thrown out on the curb and not loved, but things felt very unstable at home because dad was on the road so much and mom was having intense anxiety and panic attacks. She was self-medicating with alcohol. Thank God, I had 6 hours or so a day with a stable adult to connect to, and an environment that fed me.
Jacobsen: Your father, in an interview with Jon Stewart, described his mother as wanting to control his life. You describe your father controlling whether your mom worked or not, and heavily leaning towards the latter option.
Yet, what I am getting from you a little bit is there was almost the opposite, a lack of control, but that might be because he was on the road and gone so much. I want to get your perspective on if you felt as if there was a lack of oversight and control of you from your parents.
Carlin-McCall: My mother had to be both mother and father because he wasn’t home. She resented that. My dad really didn’t know how to be an adult, let alone a parent. He didn’t have a father himself. He was raised by a single mom and rebelled against her authority. He didn’t want to impose her controlling nature on anybody.
The only thing he asked my mother not to do was work because his mother worked and he had no one around, so he wanted to make sure one parent was around the home with me. My parents were busy getting screwed up on drugs and alcohol. My father was busy with his career. Because I was very precocious and a good girl, there didn’t have to be a lot of parenting.
I didn’t create a lot of a challenge around that. I was great at school. I was a great student. I did what I was told. When there is a lot of chaos in your environment, at least as a kid, my reaction was needing to be in charge of myself. I needed to figure out the rules by myself and live by them. I could discern the rules pretty easily. I was pretty smart. I knew what it was to be a good kid, so I was. My mother used to say, “Thank God, we didn’t have a boy.” She didn’t know what might’ve happened if I’d been a boy.
Jacobsen: [Laughing]
Carlin-McCall: Because in some ways my dad didn’t know how to father, but he did. He did the best he could. He did it his way. He didn’t know how to father like the regular run-of-the-mill guy. He might’ve been great at it if I’d been a boy. But who knows? But that laissez-faire parenting became more dramatic and more of an issue around my adolescence when I really did need parenting and guidance.
My parents were pretty hands-off with me. That was the circumstance of it. They were always there in the end. They were there for lots of things. They protected me, in some ways. They paid for everything. They put me in good schools. They made sure I had what I wanted, but they weren’t good at setting limits with me. That would have been helpful in adolescence, but it didn’t happen with me.
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