Oh, favorite bloggers, I love you but you challenge me. You make me think on days that I don’t want to but I just can’t quit you.
You’ve got me thinking and wishing about things to do with family, specifically, Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven (when I was little I thought those were the words to that prayer). I wish I could say that having Bean brought me closer to my father. It has actually separated us more, which was no easy feat, considering how separated we’ve been thoughout my life. I wish I could say that becoming a mom made me understand the challenges he faced as a parent and that I am now able to forgive him for wounds inflicted long ago. Instead, it has torn them wide open.
Having Bean opened a world to me that is complex and difficult at times, but more often, it is supremely simple: he is my child, I love him, and he comes first. Huz is with me on this. Our marriage is essential, our individuality and personal satisfaction are as well, but nothing is more important than Bean’s wellness.
Knowing what it means to be a parent has now angered me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined while I was just someone’s daughter. I knew that things my father said and did hurt deeply, I knew that they were wrong, but I was able to ignore and forgive a great deal up until now. I was raised to make excuses for horrible behavior. I was raised to treat my father like a petulant child whose tantrums were to be avoided with careful words and tiptoeing. When we heard his car in the driveway, we would drop whatever we were playing with, run to our respective rooms and shut the door. When home alone with him, we knew it was just a matter of time before we woke the beast, and we never knew what was going to provoke it next. The simplest of things would enrage him and put us front and center in a barrage of insults and aggressive physicality. When out with him, he walked away and smoked, always at a distance from us, perhaps on a bench or pacing on a sidewalk, always looking like he wished he were anywhere but where we were.
There were random times of daddyness which made it all the more confusing. Like when he coached my pee-wee soccer team and we lost every game we had, but he still wore out the car horn on the way home from every game, shouting my team’s name out the window to everyone we passed, including the cows in the New Jersey fields. Or the time when I was seven years old and got the highest score in the history of the Black Cat Kempo on my yellow belt test (my katas rock); you have never seen a father beaming so brightly as when my score was read aloud and my new belt was issued. He looked as though he would burst. There were other “daddy” times, too, some small, some big, but they were always punctuated with a slap or an insult, so I could never really trust that the good feelings were going to last for long.
I call what he did after he drove us down to Florida and left us there when I was 11 “fair-weather phone parenting”. He couldn’t understand why we were so angry and sad when he visited, so he eventually stopped. He then only wanted to hear good news over the phone, and he only wanted to show up for the happy stuff, like driving me to grad school and attending my wedding. Everything else was met with silence, and perhaps the sounds of smoking, on the other end of the phone. Offers of money were always conditional, and if accepted, held up as proof that we only loved him when we needed something. Shamed, always shamed, if we needed him in any way. We were supposed to be strong, we were lions, we were tough. Let me hear you roar. I am not getting off the phone with you until I hear you roar.
We do not visit him because the last time we did, there was so much drunken drama between he and his wife and his stepdaughters that Huz lay down on the sidewalk outside the house and asked beseechingly, “What just happened?” My father has not visited us since my wedding three years ago. Not when Bean was born; not when he was kept in the hospital for 10 days and I was the human equivalent of a dried out corn husk, all crackly and empty and shocked to my core. Not after the time he “wanted to give us to become a family” before he planned a visit. Not the month after that, or the next, or the next. I continued to invite him despite his treatment of me, my mother, my sister. I invited him despite being asked if I felt like less of a woman because of the c-section, and despite having my pregnancy, my labor, and my child not discussed but held up to that of a stepsister’s with whom I have no contact. There was always an excuse, always a promise to visit that would placate me so I would stop asking.
I stopped sending photos at around month seven. I was making it too easy for him to feel involved from a distance. I stopped cashing gift checks for the same reason. I refused further boxes of plastic toys. None of it is you, I told him. None of it is good enough. He now doesn’t call or send anything. It hurts, but it is easier this way. Better for me to face one big rejection than continue to endure a million little ones over time. I am certain he is telling anyone who will listen that I am keeping him from his only “real” grandchild, that it is his heart’s deepest wish to be near us. He will tell people these things, he will tell himself these things, but somewhere inside he knows that he cannot emotionally handle meeting his grandson. Still, in my father’s mind, he is Bill Cosby, all laughs and tough love for his brood that he tells people he raised. Life is a beer commercial filled with good friends and good times. Why don’t we want to hear about his boat club or how he rehabbed our stepsister’s condo for her, or rebuilt her car engine? Why do we act so nice to him sometimes but then get so angry and cry over nothing? What is wrong with us?
I will never understand how he is able to justify (forget?) treating us the way he has. I thought I could once I had a child. I thought I would see how complicated it all is and understand why he couldn’t figure out how to parent us in a way that was less damaging. I don’t.
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Posted by Bianca Bean
