Father Knows Best

I am standing in the kitchen, talking to my father…about the past, about the future, about whatever is going on with us…my father is sweet person, who means well, that is until you do or say something that crosses one of his many emotional boundaries and then it’s everybody for themselves…living with my dad the way I do, in the wake of having returned home from Florida a complete and utter failure, has finally settled into a peaceful routine that feels equitable…I am not reliant on him beyond the roof over my head, and he doesn’t ask much from me beyond us getting along and me doing the dishes regularly…the place is such a dump that the concept of ‘clean’ is a kind of surreal subjective notion that involves the appearance of frugal, stark order, but everywhere you look are signs of creeping oblivion…being musicians as we are, it is common that you would have a Marshall half-stack in the kitchen, serving as a temporary spot for cups, dishes, keys, bills, or dog treats…my father has a Doberman Pinscher that he loves more than life itself, a dog named ‘Conan’…he regularly comments how perfect the dog is for him, because the dog loves him unconditionally and doesn’t know how to speak…this in my father’s eyes is the perfect relationship, something he not so secretly asks and wishes of us…I absolutely adore my father, and have a hard time telling him anything that might upset him…he has reinforced idea throughout my whole life that if it isn’t that important, he really doesn’t want to know…so it is odd to me, standing here talking to him in that same ruined kitchen, that he appears to be open when talking about the past beyond the anecdotal…

Having left us to live and essentially fend for ourselves with our step-mother around 8-11 years ago (it depends on who’s counting), I am finally feeling secure enough in my relationship with my dad to open up about some of the things that happened at home when he wasn’t around…I have come to rely more on my real mother to be the filter of all that has happened, for she is more consistent and doesn’t end up laying the blame at my feet…her position is one of good friend or confidant…she listens, points out who she believes was at fault (usually my father, but she hates my step-mother too), and reminds me that those things are over with now, etc…if there is any fault in my mother’s position about the past, it is that she has never fully come to grips with the fact that she abandoned us as well…in her eyes, she has never fully ‘left’, but consistently been in our lives the whole time…which is true to a fault…my father, on the other hand, cannot deal with the damage of his own decisions, generally taking a “well if it hurt you, it hurt me even worse” position, which renders any talk or argument about the past dead on arrival…so this is something new, to try to reach out to him in this way, to find some empathy in his heart and heal some of the still raw wounds…

We are talking about whatever when it suddenly takes a sharp left and we go into talking about the very real abuses of my past…as is his custom, my father talks about how he was abused as well…I counter by offering up some abuses that he was not aware of, and he gets quiet as my emotions rise…I am not blaming him, rather I am just letting him into a space that I have never asked him to come into before…feeling overly confident, I don’t hold back, because there is no longer anything to hold back for…I am off and running now, going into detail and over the cliff as I am prone to do…he is calmly leaning in the doorway to the middle room…the front door is open, and the sun is coming through…it is a beautiful day, and this is a moment that I have waited for for a very long time, because I finally have a pathway from my heart to my father’s ear…

He stops me, and repeats something that I have heard from my grandmother many times (his mother---in other contexts), a basic soliloquy about how life is tough and the only way you can survive is to forget about these things and move on…it is a fairly sophisticated nullifying argument, a means to an end that once served a whole generation though world war and nuclear terror, and he robots it back to me almost verbatim…I tell him he doesn’t realize what he is saying, which is if you essentially bury it, IT will go away…which is not true, because one only needs to look at the drug abuse in his life, the chaos surrounding him, and the trail of tears in his wake to realize that this has not been an effective strategy…I don’t want to bury it, I want to dig the bodies up and properly and honorably bury them with dignity…this is not a call for sympathy, this is a call to action, because I do not want to die, or live in the shadow of symbolic death, which for me is to live but not really be alive…

I lose my cool with my father for the first time in my life, and drop the mask that I have learned to wear, which is the one of the dutiful son, who endures and protects him from reality even if the walls are falling down around my ears…my voice rises, and I chastise him for looking the other way…I tell him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t there, that he doesn’t know what happened, he has no clue what was asked of me…and he is only now making it worse by telling me his version of events, which gives major credence to what he went though at the time, and no credit to the sacrifices of his children…it is a moment that all children must inevitably go though, the moment when the parental edifice comes toppling down…they can no longer save you, for you are on your own, and maybe you always have been…my father is stunned, for he has never seen this kind of emotion from me…he is used to me being emotional, but I have always refused to break down in front of him…the emotions wash over me, and I cannot control my mixture of rage, anguish, betrayal, and sadness…I break down in tears and leave him standing there, cursing that I bothered to tell him anything at all…