Today is Father’s Day. It’s a hard one. My father is dead 5 years and yet, I feel that I am still carrying the burden of his failed dreams, dreams of being a famous musician, of finding love. He never knew it was always in place with us. He loved me, I believe that now, but his search for that missing something, took him away from me countless times.
This morning, or mourning, I see his legacy to me was the feeling of being unloved, of not being enough, of being a failure because he never stayed. Being unloved was something I learned to feel – not sure I am saying this correctly – I guess I believed that I was unlovable because he left me, over and over again. Even the day he died, I told him not to leave without saying goodbye, but he did, the second I left the room. Is it possible that he couldn’t bear to say goodbye, because even in the last moments, he knew he couldn’t face my loss and my grief because he was and had always been helpless to do so? This occurs this minute and changes everything.
As a child, I had no problem expressing my feelings but I learned over the next years, that expressing feelings and thoughts was dangerous: it upset the balance of what my family was trying to achieve, which was to maintain silence and deny all that was happening. And if we were quiet, so very quiet, the situation would pass. Children intuit these issues, act out, withdraw, cry constantly, however they express it. Adults caught up in their own dramas, don’t see this and wonder what is wrong with the child. I would shake sense into them if I could.
What was happening during my early childhood was a fishing disaster in which my grandfather barely survived and 35 of his friends and family died; my father leaving the air force which, I see now, provided a discipline for him. When he resigned and went to work at Air Canada in Dorval, Que., he couldn’t cope with this responsibility. He drank a lot. His family consisted of five children, and his wife living in a shitty basement, spider-infested apartment in Lachine, Quebec. My mother became sick, TB of the kidney, after numerous other health issues, a hysterectomy while my father was in a mental hospital – I wonder if it was the infamous Allen Institute – he talked about being a CIA operative for years after and it was the story he used when he was absent and screwing around with every woman who gave him a glance. We went to foster care, no fun at all and as always, my grandparents arrived to save us and took us home to Black River. Their home was our/my sanctuary and though destroyed, I can visit it in my mind.
My father remained in Quebec, and while my mother was sent to a Sanatorium for Tuberculosis in St. Agatha, Quebec, my father hit bottom, discovered Alcoholics Anonymous, got a sponsor, a man I couldn’t abide, and was saved. AA became our new religion and he talked to me all the time about it when he was present.
My other father, the stable man in my life was my grandfather Sterling. He was true sterling. All his actions showed us love. When he drove my grandmother on her business, all five of us were sprawled in the car, hanging out the windows and singing thousands of choruses of Jesus Loves Me, Henry the 8th, Jingle Bells, anything to stop the fighting. There was always ice cream at the turning point to the road home. He suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from the disaster and had no help for it, or compassion from Gram and my great grandmother, Gauma. For Christian women, they were very unkind to him. I have a novel almost completed about him and while it took directions I couldn’t imagine, the story made him into another character altogether, but the core, the heart of this story is his unresolved pain. Yes, I guess that’s mine too. The novel is my release and his. He died in a mental hospital when I was 18. I was banned from the funeral because I was pregnant.
When my mother recovered enough to come home, my father came with her. We lived at my grandmother’s house and I was very happy. My bed was the couch in the living room and I liked being on my own downstairs. As I write this, I realized how much I like being alone to do as I wish. The books I read as a child were about little creatures that lived on their own and had to make new friends. I am sure this would be significant to a therapist. Blah, blah, blah, but, I don’t care.
For a short time the marriage seemed to work. My parents bought a farm we christened Green Acres after the TV show in which a rich couple moves to a farm from New York. The house was really that bad but my Mom could make anything look good and soon we were living there. Secretly I wanted to be with Gram and my parents were upset with me for wanting to visit so often.
When my mother discovered my father was having an affair – not his first− she left. He moved his girlfriend and baby into Mom’s house, the girlfriend posing as a housekeeper. That woman met us at the bus, making sure the whole countryside knew she was in residence. She was a singer. What do you think the first song she sang was? D-I-V-O-R-C-E by Tammy Wynette. V. was a woman done wrong, had married a gay minister- he did manage to produce a daughter. She stalked my father and wouldn’t leave him alone. Mom was used to him and could handle it if he was home but V., the Other Woman ( another song she sang and supposedly wrote ) never gave up. And to be fair to her, my father never thought with his mind. Soon my grandfather kicked them out and then the cycle of travel, break-ups, and reconciliations began.
Drama. Drama. Drama. No one believes some of the stories. They may show up in other parts of my memoir if this is what this is. I can’t believe them sometimes and this is just my father’s day musings. I do see a therapist once in a while and she tells me to breathe and that I am not insane, my life was.
Long story short, my father destroyed my mother’s confidence and left her open to a predator. Dad lived the musicians dream. He played his music, got divorced from his 2nd wife after countless, tearing the house apart breakups; her, not him. He wasn’t a violent man except for one incident with me as a child. He married again to another weird woman who walked away from her children. She had a son to my father. I don’t know where he is.
My father came home to me when he was postop from a spinal cord tumour operation years out of contact. My brother rescued him, or prevented him from going to a nursing home. A month into his stay at my brother’s house, my brother dropped Dad off for a visit and never came back for him. By then, he was estranged from wifey 3. Anyway, he lived with me and I helped him rehabilitate. He did it all. I didn’t baby him and soon, he was walking and managing well. When he pissed off his ex-wife and she dropped his son off at our house, I knew he had to go. He rented an apartment close to a mall and his son took the bus to school – I think. My father’s second wife showed up and stayed with Dad and looked after the boy. We moved east, thinking to leave them behind.
I don’t know where the child went but dad arrived in NB to live. Anyway, he managed for several years on his own but his health deteriorated to the point he was admitted to the nursing home I worked at. Ten years later, he died.
Grief is like a slithering green snake, always nudging memories. Conscious or not, they send me down to the bottom of a deep well. Today, by writing this narrative, I acknowledge my absent father. When I spoke about him, or write about him before this, I believe that snake was slithering around inside, reminding me of what I came to believe, that I was unloved. That, I see, is total bullshit. I howled and cried all morning for my fathers, both of them, and I followed the snake down to a round stone loneliness. There was nothing in that well, the shade of a scared child. But there were rungs to climb out of it. And I did.
I wasn’t unloved. I am not unloved. I’ve crawled out of that well and though I may fall into it again, and again, I see the rungs are there for me.
This morning I asked in my journal: “What is the point of forgiveness? Whom does it serve? And what exactly is it? And don’t give me any high toned bullshit from the self-help books. Reality woman, that’s what you need.”
By writing all this down I see another reality, and is an act of forgiveness and by publishing it on my blog, I am making a public statement, and not keeping silent as I have done for so long about so much. This is finding a deeper meaning for myself. Life around my father with or without him wasn’t all bad and it wasn’t all trauma.
My father was fucked up royally ( a term he used often) long before he married my mother. His mother was murdered, he believed, and he never got over her absence or his sense of injustice. I get that since murder runs in our family. Add two creepy uncles to the mix, a father in WW2, he struggled. Handsome, cruel handsome, he used his looks and charm with everyone and he had IT.
In the last year of his life, he shrunk to bone. His comfort was visiting with the dietary staff who fed him and tormented him (teased and he loved it) like one of their own. When he could no longer manage his wheelchair, they came to get him. During the last few days of this life, I leaned on the burning bone of his right arm. It was as close to a hug as he could give. He would look at me and smile and mouth some words. He didn’t have the breath to speak but know he was saying, “You’re awful good to me, Jude.” Awful on the Miramichi, often means very. He had said them often and I didn’t know what to say to him. I am not a bloody saint, I hated having to care for him. I resented him at times. But, I was good to him, very good to him and I am glad and ever so grateful I was.
Do I want this in public on the blog? Yes. Talking about it is hard, no one gets it, and I don’t need the advice on how to heal. I am doing that with each word I type. And I am tired of holding this and tired of silence and I am telling the world. Someone might read it. Good. Don’t need a comment.
Truth is, I love my father, I miss him every day. But, he is present in my sister’s voice and my own when showing skepticism, we both sneer, “yah, right. As if!” He is present in my brother’s and my sister’s grandchild’s banty- rooster, cock –of- the-walk strut.
Happy Father’s Day.
My Handcrafted Life 