It doesn't stop being complicated. If my father were alive, well, I feel now that I should say thank you.
It's only in the past few years that I've understood that words like abuse and victim are accurate, in describing my childhood. I wasn't raised to think in those terms. He anticipated it, and got ahead of it, dad did. Excused it with the self-aware trope, do as I say not as I do. A trap. He'd say, even the children of criminals can be successful. He wasn't calling himself a criminal -- he was saying nothing he did was harmful enough to cause harm.
In a context I've forgotten, today I imagined the kind of love someone might have for their rapist. Then I thought, for their violator. Then I thought, yes, if it happens early enough, young enough, and over time, some sort of love is even likely. Being touched matters.
He only showed how damaged his soul was through his anger. He wasn't aware that it was abusive, but, not being a monster, he felt guilt about it.
I remember he traded his Martin 12-string guitar (something like this)
for me, for my 16th birthday. I hadn't ever expressed a desire for a motorcycle, but that was nice. Today I was thinking that he must have thought about it a lot. He would have thought it would be good for me, out in the air and sunshine, faggy indoor readerboy that he believed me to be.
Today I thought, again, that he did indeed value that guitar, and he sacrifice it, for me. I thought maybe he didn't have the money, so he had to make the trade. I've never forgotten this, and none of these thoughts are new -- trapped in stereotypical thinking as I am. But I've never felt the need to, as it were, bring it up to him, and thank him.
And for 3 years, from 13 to early 16, we lifted weights every evening in the garage gym, from 9 to 10. We listened to the CBS Mystery Theatre on the radio. Then I was 16, and I just stopped. One evening he called down and asked if I was going to work out, and I said no. He never asked again. I think he saw it as rejection and betrayal. I was just a moody teenager.
It was probably that year, or the next, when he came into my room and ripped the shirt off my body. Buttons flying everywhere. I've written this before. He was trying to make me ashamed, expose my scrawniness. But I was muscular. This is how he thought a father should act, motivate a son. He will have been brooding about it, how I didn't work out with him. But I was in gymnastics, in school -- too tall for it, but it was a thing to do.
If he were alive, I would thank him for working out with me. It was valuable, and good. It's the best thing he ever did for me, generally speaking.
My son calls about once a week. We talk for a few hours. We have wide-ranging conversations, share info from our specific knowledge bases, and cordially disagreeing, when we disagree. I tell him stories that he would not remember, from when he was little. Because I was watching -- the way a small, weak but benevolent god watches, to give blessings.
When he was two he ran around naked in the house and he got outside, and it was just a very few minutes until I noticed but he was running around in the snow, laughing hysterically and gasping with cold, and blue. I picked him up and put him inside my shirt and carried him in, and we laughed like idiots. A good story.
But sometimes I'm very depressed indeed. I try not to repeat myself, my same old stories. I never never never used him when he was a child, for my own needs. It was a pleasure to love him. But now he's the only person I talk to about some of these various unresolved traumas -- my various untreated PTSDs. I tell him now, because he's nearly 40. Part of it is that, by showing more of myself, he will have greater insight into himself. Dads are important, you know. But I hear myself pouring things out, and of course it's from a need that I have.
I've stopped doing that though. He's heard all my sad stories, no doubt more than a few times. It's what my father did, when I was in elementary school. Not right.
Understanding is a skill -- or rather, communicating that you understand the core emotion. My son is not really good at that skill. Only a few times I've told him what I'm looking for, in my repetitions. I want to feel understood. It's Rogerian therapy. Being heard, having the feeling validated. Very powerful. It's a skill I'd like him to have, but after these couple of years he doesn't need any more info about my past. Any more, and I'd be using him in a way that is destructive to communication. Eventually, to the relationship.
I'd like to find comfort in the memory that the last thing I did, when last I saw my father, was hug him. I'm not a hugger, anymore. And never with him. My son was visiting and we went to see him. He did his usual thing, repeating his stories. He sort of hobbled us to the door and we said goodbye and he stood on the porch and about 10 steps down I looked back and he had such a sad look on his face that I just groaned and came back up the stairs and hugged him. He let out a sound like a little sob. A moment, and then I said goodbye again, "Well, be seeing you," and off we went.
But it's not meaningful. Gestures are not meaningful. You might say they are, and we'd disagree, cordially. No one is more sentimental than a psychopath. Or as superficial. It isn't understanding that matters. It's communicating your understanding. The forms matter, hello and goodbye and thank you and sorry. And hugs. These matter, the way a shirt makes a difference in a light wind.
What matters is what we do for a long time. Or sacrifices. Or shared joy. What matters is icy skin on hot skin, with laughter.
J
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