When I think of my dad these days, what comes to mind is, oddly enough, my leg.
Specifically it’s the back of my right calf. It’s balding. Again I’m reminded of God’s sense of humour when it comes to aging: every leg hair that I’ve lost has magically reappeared up my nose or in my ear. And I’m reminded that my father’s calves are now completely bald.
Otherwise, physically, I resemble my mother rather more than I do my father, but whereas Mom’s temperament and generosity of spirit have been an example to which I inspire, I know that my personality owes more to the good and the bad that I’ve inherited and learned from Dad.
We’re both intelligent but hardly tactful, quick to anger and forgive (mostly), careful learners of social lessons rather than instinctively urbane, and neither of us seems able to live up to our full potential, though I’m still working on that. We have little in common at face value but a weird tendency to independently develop the same interests: languages, history, travel to remote islands, sitting around discussing proper word usage and correcting errors in local papers, etc.
Unfortunately, we also share the same tendency to expect too much from each other.
We’re once again at what I call the “passive-aggressive greeting card” phase. Instead of talking on the phone or writing e-mail, we send each other cards on special occasions. Typically, his cards make reference to my neglect, and I send cards to everyone around him, but not to him.
The problem is, our relationship has always been a lie. Just as both my father and I play-act personae for the rest of the world, so we imagine that we have had a good relationship based on mutual respect and intellectual camaraderie. Unfortunately, that’s simply not true. We can barely stand each other and clearly neither of us has a clue how to change that.
I don’t think my dad’s a bad man; I do think he never really wanted a child. For years, he treated me like someone with Stockholm syndrome, under the control of my mother and her family who poisoned me against him. After my mother died, Dad said that I should look upon it as an opportunity to start making the right choices…by which he meant that I should then become the image of the son he really wanted – affable, successful, quietly capable, and distant.
The best (most peaceful) era of our relationship was the half-decade between my mother’s death and my return to Ottawa last year. We shared Sunday dinners, chatted on the phone regularly, and were even seen in public together identifying as father and son.
Those five years, however, were some of the worst in my life. I’d assumed that my lot in life was (again) to take care of Mom and after she was gone, I seemed to lose myself. I was lonely, unsocial, prone to self-defeat and self-destruction, and paralyzed. Not for the first time in my life, I opted to act instead of to live, and those happy moments Dad associates with that period were part of a fallacy, that I would be okay if I seemed okay.
Everything changed after I met my partner and gave up on the ridiculous idea that I could prosper where I was, in a community that didn’t reflect who I was, my values, or my aspirations. Dad’s suggestion was to retreat further into a narrow, lonely world made up of my house, his house, my stepmother’s family, Friday nights spent watching Jeopardy and reading the weekly papers, whereas I wanted at least an opportunity to exist in a less limited world.
It dawns on me now that my father’s recently berating me about my choices is rooted in genuine confusion. I must have seemed happy to him, since he never looked below the surface and I made every effort to fake it, feeling that showing my true self would threaten our uneasy peace. Nothing makes my father more uncomfortable than my expressing emotion.
In my heart of hearts, I know that I have to seek reconciliation. My father turns 68 this year, and his mother will be 92. My mother is dead and her family isn’t part of my life. I may not be able to force a family unit, but if I continue to be stubborn, someday I’ll have to deal with heaps of regret. Also, I know from past experience that my father can wait, apparently indefinitely, for me to make the first move.
I understand now that I can’t trick, seduce, or force my dad, or Mom’s family, or anyone into loving me. I will never really have the approval I’ve always craved. I lack a sense of belonging and recognition of the role I play in the families of those I love. These are sad facts, yes, but liberating. It’s so much easier to focus without tilting at so many windmills.
That bald patch on my leg reminds me that Dad and I, so similar, also share the loss of the love and affection we had when I was a boy, and now it’s a big empty spot that looks odd: the father and son who never say “I love you,” never hug, never even shake hands.
I may never live up to my father’s expectations, but I continue to aspire to be the man I want to be, to seek contentment, and to let love grow in my heart, and I truly believe that – however distant and irreconcilable our relationship may seem today – Dad and I will make peace again, and perhaps we shall even understand each other not as father and son but as two men who can be honest about our shortcomings, and happier when we take off the masks we’ve always worn,
