Let me preface this blog entry by saying that when I talk about my father, I am talking about him in two parts: the early part and the latter. This is mostly the early part, not the part that I experience in relationship with him today. But the early part (part 1 of my father) is central to my story, and therefore has its place here. Early parts are never easy to write about or speak out loud (in fact, they're excruciating) because they include so many dead horses we want to keep buried, mostly to protect the people we love and the often hard-won relationships we may have with them today. But being the light requires us to dig down in the dry soil and resurrect the team of horses we buried so that we can see them in the light, to free them and to free ourselves through this act of integrating our shadows. I love my dad. I might even say that I have sometimes loved him too much for my own good, but that's kind of a degradation on love. Love is complicated, but it's also good. I will write about him from many angles over the life of this blog, as he has lead me all over the map of darkness and light, without even knowing it, and was ultimately the inspiration for me learning to lead with the light inside myself. For that, endless gratitude...
Part 1:
My father did not, and likely does not, nor will he ever, believe that he was an emotionally or verbally abusive person. He had many sayings he was fond of repeating over the years; simplified phrases that embodied his apparent life philosophies. One of them was about getting up every day and putting your pants on. This articulated the value of showing up every day, no matter what, I guess. It was similar to another phrase he’d said before, which had something to do with participating willingly and proactively in your life, because it will drag you with it if you don’t. I understood these philosophies, which are, of course, basic truths. I was lucky to have someone in my life who cared enough to tell them to me; I know that. But I noticed over time that my father’s basic truths left out other important principles which had significant, negative impact on others, and also on his own life, whether he knew it or not.
For example, “putting your pants on every day” did not account for the rest of the story, which is how you make people feel when you show up, what energy you bring into the room, what impact your decisions have on them after you put on your pants. Showing up is not enough. And if my father had really thought about it, he would have seen that some of the people he had known, specifically in his growing up years, who had “put their pants on every day”, had left out some of the most important principles, too. Like him, I imagine that they felt little culpability for the way some people felt in their presence, for the energy they brought into a room, for the negative impact some of their (smallest) decisions and behaviors had on the family day in and day out.
To be fair, this talk about being aware of the energy you bring into a room was not the language of the times, nor the South, when he was growing up in Eastern North Carolina in the 50's and 60's. Because the apple does not fall far from the tree, I think that for most of his life that my father thought that just showing up, writing the checks, managing the property, securing the material world under his care, creating some sort of shell of stability (though the inside of him felt to me overwhelmingly unstable in my growing up years) was enough. However, inserted into that formula was an undercurrent of anger and bitterness that made my father one of the angriest people I knew, even when the anger didn’t blast out on his children or wife or dog, which was frequent enough. It held itself in his body, ticking there until triggered by something mundane or deserving of correction in his eyes. That something often had to do with his kids, especially me, the oldest.
I understood my father’s anger (which translated to me as guarded cynicism, distrust for people and life, obsessive compulsive anxiety, resistance to connect emotionally, and an overbearing and sometimes volatile need to control) to be part of the very fabric of his being. My father relabeled this anger as practicality, common sense, "the right thing to do", but I perceived it as his defense against a long line of buried disappointments and hurts he had experienced in his life.
He could be a quiet person, one who showed one face to the world and another to his family, and still even another face to those few extended family members who bothered to keep in touch with him. He rarely, if ever, showed all of his cards to anyone, a fact which he prided himself on. But this meant that the intimate experience of knowing my father was a world different than knowing him at a distance. He could get away with not being accountable for the way he made people close to him feel or the energy he brought into a room because it happened quietly, one-on-one, only in the small circle right around his body. He had the power to tell the story of a conversation or interaction with, say, one of his children, any way he chose. And from what I could tell, he never chose to tell it from a place a real personal accountability. And most certainly, he never told the whole account honestly to himself.
So someone might say to me later in my life, “Whatever your issue is with your father, you need to get over it. It’s not like he abused you. He’s the only father you’ve got and one day you’ll regret…” I’d heard that refrain from his few supporters, and even from my father himself, when I became an adult and started to confront the complex, painful relationship I had with him. But, what they didn’t get was that I had been deeply affected by something they could not see, and something my father would not see. And that no matter how old I got or how old he got, this thing I could see did not change enough to make my father feel totally emotionally safe to me for any significant length of time. The undercurrent of some lifelong wounding in him and us remained. And I could dip my toe into it at any minute, almost any time I tried to connect with my father. The undercurrent felt post-traumatic in nature, like an anxiety living in my body. But I had learned to wade through this unnerving undercurrent in my life to get to him, to have a father. But it was like contaminated water -- toxic. The toxicity burned on the inside. It’s the same stuff that burned my father growing up; it’s in his blood...and mine, too.
But at some point in my mid-thirties I realized I needed a cleansing from this toxicity. I was tired of burning from the crimes of unaccountable, emotionally reckless behavior that my father learned, and repeated in his own ways, from the family (men), okay...one main man, from which he came. Let me warn you that he loved this man deeply his whole life. That's what we all do; we love our fathers deeply no matter how they fail us and themselves. But some of these failings leave a legacy that later generations have to wrestle and reconcile with, and not sometimes, but all the time. My father was the next in line and then, me...
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