A few years ago an aunt told me I’m like my father. She said it in a hurtful way though, like an insult. It’s how my family operates. Hit below the belt and expect people to keep coming back for more.
For most of my life, I operated under this mistaken model. Maybe it worked in some warped way for the older generations of my family, it’s tiring though and I don’t do that anymore. Aunt is my dad’s youngest sister, she’s closer to my age than she was my now dead dad’s age.
When I say maybe that worked for the older generations, I think about the time my grandmother (my dad and Aunt’s mother), recruited her siblings to shame my dad in ways I have little idea of; all around money, a topic that often poisons family relationships, and in ways that hurt him so deeply I cannot imagine.
His mother (to be clear it was probably both of his parents who participated in this) called in her large troupe of remaining siblings, there were 11 of them originally, to shun my father for months, maybe years. I was collateral in that shunning when I traveled from Texas to Illinois blindly thinking I was visiting a real family life celebration for my grandfather’s memorial service. I was pregnant with my daughter and looking forward to some family love around that. Instead, when my parents and I saw my grandmother’s sister, Irene and a couple of the sisters standing together, I walked over to them and Irene stared through me and started to walk past me. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a clear snub because I was with my father. I stopped her and said “you can’t even give me a hug?” She hugged me. It was wild. Jesus, I learned a lot about my family in that single moment.
The fact that they used shunning as a tactic and not a single one of them took a role of mentoring my dad, but instead chose the most hurtful way possible to harm a child of theirs, showed me so much of what I did not want to keep painting into this world but sadly at that time, was well on my way to perpetuating. It also gave me a minuscule glimpse into what my dad’s upbringing must have been like and my heart breaks even now for him.
When Aunt tossed that comment at me, I was in fact insulted. I was still in the processing stage of so much pain in my life-still am to a great degree but with much more success now-and wanting to distance myself from the silence and poison of my family. Still, deep inside me, while I reconcile the hurt I experienced as his daughter, I remember him affectionately with his twinkly eyed full face smile that so often told of a mischievous bent about him that I loved to feel but rarely understood.
Aunt shot the insulting comment at me over my 50th birthday weekend where I rented a beautiful home in Dillon Colorado. My three children brought friends. We walked the famers market, rafted the river and kayaked peacefully all in a mostly beautiful celebration I chose for myself and invited those I wanted to have around me.
This was during a time I was having a great span in my working life. (Working life, not career.) All of that success stopped for me for a little over ten years, and today, I’m getting back on my feet literally and sustainably, and for that I am so proud and so damned happy.
Like I said, I was processing so much at that time, and Aunt’s comment to me was wrapped up in hers and Uncle’s response to my deciding my children, their friends and I would not go to a dinner planned by her son’s in-laws when I interpreted my cousin and his wife not visiting us as a dig.
Funny thing now that I’m older and have a more mature understanding that other people have things going on too and judging them except for outright harms I now understand, makes very little sense.
The decision I made for us not to go to the dinner was made in the knee jerk fashion so many of my decisions have been made by me throughout my life. Modeled by people in my family with no interest in talking through things that could be resolved by talking through things. I didn’t have that skill yet.
So, it’s true. I’m like my dad. I make fast decisions that sometimes aren’t great, sometimes turn out amazing. I have a really insatiable feeling of wanderlust, a weird and sometimes inappropriate sense of humor, a belief that most anything is possible, have no idea how to get to those things most of the time and maintain a solid mix of skepticism mixed with unreasonable optimism. I will keep trying all the things to see where I land and in this latest chapter of my life, am determined to find the pleasure I have missed so much during my dark decade. And, like him, I’m prone to long, deep bouts of depression.
You can read a bit about the years I lived with my dad and my mom here. Their last few years alive. During that time, a sil labeled me a mooch while her own daughter talked about planning a potential third pregnancy so it would be paid for while she was on federal assistance instead of by her soon to be husband’s insurance. My family is filled with irony. And don’t get me wrong, I have used assistance, it’s a good thing that has the potential to be amazing in this country, I’m simply saying; we’re a bundle of judgy people who don’t see other people’s struggles very well.
What I haven’t written about yet is that I saw while I lived with my parents as an adult, how dimmed my dad’s joy for life had become.
I distanced myself from most of my family over the many years prior for lots of reasons, two of which were;
-my family is significantly dysfunctional so when I settled for marrying an abuser and found no help or concern from my family, I had no reference except to shut people out (re my earlier comment that I was perpetuating the things modeled to me) and;
-I was isolated having settled for a violent domestic abuser.
Neither of these things were intended to be brought to light so the very very thin veneer of both my existences would not bleed into the imaginary public presentations of either life.
My dad always drank, and most likely was an alcoholic my whole life. His alcoholism was addressed by no one ever, even when he went into the hospital for the last days of his life, my mom and their youngest son could not bring themselves to tell the intake nurse in the ER he was an alcoholic “he drinks once in a while”…jfc. But going back and being around them when I was much older and lived with them so intimately, allowed me to see things in very different ways, with different eyes but not yet developed skills.
I saw a man whose enormous dream for retirement that never came, to travel to every place he could imagine, for basement party hosting in the space he lovingly built out with a pool table and so many pinball games that of course included a full bar for everyone to enjoy including space for dancing the polka with his wife til they sweat completely through their clothes but had to give up to bankruptcy - was entirely extinguished into bitterness and booze. I was watching him in the last stages of giving up on his life.
That’s not hyperbole, his friends noticed it. He was drinking six or more straight vodkas every night, and there were two times before he died when he got into car accidents that may very well have been on purpose. He eventually died of a stroke caused by his alcoholism. At his funeral, one wife of their friend group told me “he really didn’t want to be here”. It was true.
I’m like my dad. For too many years I drank too much. While in the abusive marriage, I competitively drank with the asshole, thinking at some point he’d see how stupid it was but like all those kinds of harmful actions, only hurt my own body and soul. I stayed too long in a situation that was very literally killing me.
I did not protect my children from that life. Having been taught the complete opposite of repair in my childhood home and doubly in the abusive marriage, I failed to reach out to them as they grew up in ways that would forge our relationships into healthy adult relationships because I was always trying to learn how to silence the absolute rage I stuffed into myself and used against myself in service to protecting the dysfunction wrought on my children’s lives by two very dysfunctional combined families. I’m working hard at changing as much of that as I can and hope there is time left for my children and I to repair and rebuild good relationships.
I’m like my dad might have been now if he knew he had the chance to get therapy, figure out that his mom and dad’s bad parenting model supported by the absolute shit show that was his extended family, was not his fault; if he’d learned it’s never too late to get better. My dad made lots of mistakes in his life. But I cannot fathom the depth of pain he might have felt at the hands of his parents choosing to enlist their siblings to hurt him, their child, instead of teach him.
I’m not sober, but I rarely drink now. I kind of hate that there’s only ‘sober’ and ‘not sober’ to talk about drinking in our culture. What I found out is that my dad’s drinking did not mean alcoholism was destined to be my future, but I did use it in many of the same ways he did. Escape. Denial. Avoidance. I now have an entirely different relationship with booze than he did, similarly with food and my mom’s model-another essay for another day. So, I drink once in a while and simply don’t want to drink to hurt myself anymore.
To my dad. You fucked up a lot. You taught me a lot. You left too soon. You didn’t get the guidance you deserved. You didn’t choose yourself in many ways. You did what you could. Sometimes your best, sometimes not. I learned from it all.