“A lifetime later, I visited Steve after he was married. Our daughter Lisa was about 13 and Steve’s son, Reed, a tiny baby,” Chrisann Brennan writes for The Daily Mail. “We were outside his house in Palo Alto, California, when, without warning, Steve blurted out the meanest, terrible comments at me, about why I was such a total failure of a human being. I gasped, but Steve’s wife, Laurene, yelled at him to stop.”
“In early October 1977, I realised I could endure our hot and cold relationship no longer. Steve and I had been dating since our schooldays. We were completely crazy about each other and utterly bored in turns. I had suggested to Steve that we separate, but he told me that he couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye,” Brennan writes. “The ups were hopeful and the downs were extreme – then I found out I was pregnant. It took me a few days before I told Steve. His face turned ugly. He gave me a fiery look, then rushed out without a word.
“After Lisa was born, Steve didn’t call. I was utterly bereft. Outraged, too. It was only the intervention of an old friend who nailed him for his despicable behaviour three days later that changed his mind. He came into the bedroom where I was sitting holding the baby. He sat next to me on the Japanese bed with our backs leaning up against the wall and I started crying. ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to…’ I couldn’t even finish my sentence before Steve cut me off. ‘You’re clean and dry, so you’re fine!’ he said sharply. Then he walked out. This extremely odd response startled me,” Brennan writes. “Before he left, we went into a field to decide on a name. We agreed on Lisa. Why Steve wanted to use our newborn’s name for his new company’s new computer, the Apple Lisa, while denying paternity, dishonouring and abandoning both of us, was a question I couldn’t answer.”
“Not long after, DNA testing was introduced. This was the game changer,” Brennan writes. “In 1980, after Steve started sending a monthly automatic transfer to my account, he came over to my house out of the blue to speak to Lisa, who was not yet three. He sat on the floor with us and then proudly announced to Lisa: ‘I am your father.’ It was like some kind of Darth Vader moment. Then he waited for a response with a big, slightly fake smile on his face. I knew he was trying to do the right thing, but Lisa had no idea what he was saying. He literally said: ‘I am one of the most important persons of your life.’ I looked at Lisa and then Steve and then Lisa again. Suddenly, I understood that the person I was longing to save the situation didn’t have the basics of emotional intelligence, much less a real conscience. He was somehow just blank and theoretical.”
“It is only because of Lisa that I have felt obligated to comprehend the many broken shards of Steve’s glittering brilliance. For all the sparkling, spacious beauty of the Apple Stores, Steve was a haunted house whose brokenness was managed and orchestrated by Apple’s PR team in an extremely masterful way,” Brennan writes. “He told me once that he would lose his humanity in the business world. Though he came to lose sight of what was human and ethical all too often, the fact that he at one time knew the difference between who he was and the role he would play deepens my appreciation and love for him.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs had Asperger’s or something related; undiagnosed, we assume.
It’s not that difficult, Chrisann. Trying to deal with him as if he wasn’t an Aspie or whatever exactly he was, expecting him to react how you would react, would of course have been an extremely frustrating exercise, but that doesn’t make him a “monster” or “broken” or anything of the sort (see The Daily Mail‘s full tabloid mistreatment).
Steve Jobs was what he was. It was in his genes. It was how his brain worked. His mind wasn’t broken or in need of mending, he simply thought different than most people – and thank God for that.
