There was a little boy who lived with all the classic handicaps and disadvantages.
His mother was very powerfully built only to reflect a dominating attitude to the near dear ones.
She found almost difficult to love anybody.
She has been married three times; her second husband divorced her because she used to beat him up every other day.
Her third husband died of heart attack a few months after the birth of the child I am talking about.
So the mother had to rear the child on her own.
She had to work long hours from the earliest childhood years of her child.
She could not give him any love, affection, discipline or to say any motherly attention that a child deserves.
The boy was strictly instructed not to call and disturb her mother during her work hours.
As a result he had to spend most of his time alone.
He suffered from rejection from his early childhood.
If he had to rate himself, he would find himself ugly and poor and untrained and unlovable.
When he entered in the teen age, he started to get rejection and ridicule from his teachers.
A school counselor once criticized him by saying that he did not even know the meaning of the word 'love'.
When he became an adolescent girls would never give attention to him, so he used to fight with the boys.
He was definitely a boy with high IQ, but miserably he failed in academics and finally dropped out during his third year of high school.
Then a ray of hope came to him with the acceptance in the Marine Corps; they reportedly built men, and he desperately wanted to be one.
But as usual he stayed with his internal conflicts.
He was ridiculed and looked down upon by other marines.
He fought back, resisted authority only to be court-martialed and thrown out of the Marine Corps with a dishonorable discharge.
So now when he looked into his own self, he found a young man in his early twenties - completely friendless, shipwrecked.
He had no talent, no skill, and no sense of self worth.
He did not even have driver's license.
He did not know what to do with his life.
Then he went to a foreign country in order to run from his problems.
But there also he got the same response as he used to get.
He married a girl who herself had been illegitimate child and brought her back to America with him.
Soon she began to show the same contempt for him that everyone else displayed to him.
She gave birth to two children, but he never enjoyed having been a father.
He never felt the status and respect that a father should have.
His wife became more demanding day by day.
Instead of being his friend in the bitter world, she became his most vicious opponent.
She could outfight him at any occasion and she learned to bully him.
Once under the pretext of a trivial argument she locked him in bathroom for hours as a punishment.
Finally all this ended when she forced him to leave.
Although he tried to live his own life, yet he was terribly lonely.
After days of solitude, he went home and literally begged her to take him back.
He surrendered all pride.
He crawled.
He accepted humiliation.
He agreed with her terms.
Despite his meager salary he wanted to shower her expensive gifts only to get her approval.
But she laughed at him, ridiculed his failure to meet daily needs of her family.
She made fun of his sexual impotence in front of a friend.
When he could not take it any more he wept bitterly, fell on his knees.
Finally he realized no one wanted him, no one loved him, everybody rejected him, ridiculed him.
His self worth was shattered in dust! The next day he was strangely a different man.
He went to the garage and took down a rifle he had hidden there.
He carried it with him to his newly acquired job at a book storage building.
And from a window on sixth floor of that building, on November 22, 1963, he sent two shells crashing into the head of president John F Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald, the rejected, ridiculed, unlovable failure killed the man who embodied all the success, beauty, wealth and family affection he himself lacked.
Oswald's personal problems are not excuses for his violent behavior.
I don't even say that anybody with a similar childhood would become like Oswald.
Yet an understanding of his inner confusion and torment helps us to see him not as an assassin only but as a broken man.
Obviously as parents we are highly responsible to shape the present, future and sometimes past of our children.
Yes past, why I say past, a child may not be aware about the painful struggle it had as a child i.
e.
to walk, or to breathe, or to take toilet training etc.
he has all the positive memories as he has been successful in doing those.
As a responsible parent we need to recreate that sense of accomplishment by positively stroking our child regularly.
Even if it's true that that the child has a painful childhood, but the fortunate thing is he is not aware of it, lets create a positive past for the child.
Lets be an integral part in developing a healthy self-esteem in our children as it shapes their future in a remarkable way.
As a grown up, responsible man we need to accept ourselves with all the love and respect despite our challenging early childhood/adolescent years.
Lets understand that jealousy, anger, revenge, depression, feeling victimized are very natural for any social human being, but how we use these bitter emotional responses later in our life is very unnatural, hence our choices.
Life is all about choices, what we choose that we become.
Yes Oswald might not have chosen the events of his life; true; but surely he chose to respond to those vents in his own way, some naturally some unnaturally.
Let's choose to thrive in our life with inspiration as well with desperation.
Inspiration definitely gives us a positive stroke to move forward in life, similarly desperation gives us negative strokes, intolerable pain from which we want to come out, we want to get rid of.
Here comes the choice, how we choose to get out of the pain, one choice is giving pain to others, second transforming our life in a constructive way and giving pleasure to others.
Obviously the second choice demands more but it pays more also.
Whenever life pushes us to a corner, we should be hopeful as the only way we can move is forward.