My Dad and Me
Anger
I knew I’d been angry with my dad for the past several years, but it was only after I started reading through some old journal entries that I realized that this anger had been with me for most of my adult life. These old entries felt as though they could have been written last week. I like to think that I’m ever changing, ever evolving, but these writings paint the picture of someone stuck in an endless loop.
In one passage after another, I express rage that he’s always trying to change me, that he refuses to accept me for who I am. I write that I hate him and that I’m lying when I say at the end of our phone conversations that I love him. In an entry from almost twenty years ago I recount how he told me I was wasting potential at my job. I proceed to explain in detail why he’s wrong, giving reason after reason why I’m working exactly the right job for that time in my life. I admit to myself how much his “stupid words” irritate me and not because I think they’re true but because they’re coming from “my dad.” And as much as I don’t want to admit it, I care what he thinks about me. I then confess that “I have no idea why I’m like this.” I think he’s wrong, I know he’s wrong about so much in life, but “I cannot help but care what he thinks about me.”
Pain
This anger was rooted in pain. In my first memory, I’m probably two years old, sitting on my mom and dad’s brown leather couch and watching in amazement as the cocker spaniel sitting next to me gets up and then leaps off the couch. My second memory involves the same brown leather couch, only this time I’m standing on it, leaning against a windowsill. Tears are running down my cheeks and snot down my nose, as I watch my dad carry a suitcase to his car. He looks back at me, and I can see that he’s crying too. I can still picture him so clearly, his wavy brown hair, his eyes, his tears.
My parents never again lived together, but my dad’s love remained a sustaining, ubiquitous force throughout my childhood. He came to my baseball games and took me on vacations. He called me on the phone nearly every night to see how my day had been. He would sometimes lose his temper, but not once do I remember doubting that he loved me. I knew I meant more to him than anyone or anything on the planet. We loved spending time together, going to movies, sitting side by side for hours every weekend playing Earl Weaver Baseball on his computer. He knew I would grow up to do great things and change the world.
And then I did grow up, and I came to be a lot like him. Restless, stubborn, determined to be my own person. And he reacted with hostility. At first he just nitpicked: I needed to go back to school, to call my grandmother more, to smile more when meeting new people. I tried to bite my tongue and found myself pushing him away.
His criticisms became increasingly severe, and over time it seemed that he no longer really cared about me. All those years he had wanted me to have a better job, but by the time I finally landed a better job, my dream job in fact, he didn’t even ask about it. I waited and waited for him to show interest. He would talk on and on about himself, about his political beliefs, about his daily aggravations, about all the fun things he was doing with his new family, but literally years passed before he finally asked what it was I did at work.
Things got even worse. He made some especially hurtful comments two years ago, and I finally told him that I was tired of being attacked and would not have a relationship with him if he did not apologize. I didn’t want him to grovel. I just wanted him to stop hurting me, and I thought that an apology might offer some assurance that he would stop hurting me. He responded by saying he didn’t have anything to apologize for.
All these old journal entries document the torment of my mental life over the past three decades. I can be found endlessly replaying his hurtful comments, sometimes imagining saying something hurtful back, always wondering if he still loved me. I try to convince myself that of course he doesn’t love me and hope that coming to terms with this will somehow make all the pain go away. But that never works, and I keep wondering what he’s thinking. Does he think about me? Does he worry about me? Does he really not love me?
Death
Last Monday morning, I received a voice message from my stepsister, Rose, telling me that she was at the hospital and that I needed to call her. I froze and then thought that no, my dad being in the hospital didn’t change anything. I wasn’t going to bend. If he wanted a relationship with me, then he still needed to man up and apologize.
But I learned that my dad wasn’t sick. He was dead.
Love
I cried when I heard that he was dead. And then for the rest of the day I felt somewhat dead myself. I knew I was sad. I knew I was still angry. But I couldn’t feel all that much.
I woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly felt something strong, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I missed him. I wanted him. I needed him. Just one more time I needed to see him sitting across the dinner table from me. I needed to look into his brown eyes. I needed to hear him say my name.
I went to work that morning. I knew that my job, the dream job that he never took an interest in, would help me to cope, my sessions throughout the day serving to titrate my grief. I would meet with a client for sixty minutes, immerse myself in their life and struggles. The session would end, and I would then open up my computer and look at the same picture.
In the picture my dad is wearing a Hawaiian shirt, his tanned arms crossed, a Nikkon camera in his hands. There’s that face I’ve known my entire life, now framed with white hair and a white beard, but it’s the exact same face, the aquiline nose, the brown eyes looking back at me. I would look at that picture and break down, tears beginning to run down my cheeks and snot down my nose. Just as I’d done when he’d left me forty-four years earlier.
I had come to believe that I no longer loved my dad, but now I understood that I had never stopped loving him. As a psychotherapist, I believe that we humans are uniquely gifted at becoming estranged from our own feelings. When our feelings cause too much pain, our minds try to protect us by burying them, trying to make us forget.
I knew I’d been angry with my dad for the past several years, but it was only after I started reading through some old journal entries that I realized that this anger had been with me for most of my adult life. These old entries felt as though they could have been written last week. I like to think that I’m ever changing, ever evolving, but these writings paint the picture of someone stuck in an endless loop.
In one passage after another, I express rage that he’s always trying to change me, that he refuses to accept me for who I am. I write that I hate him and that I’m lying when I say at the end of our phone conversations that I love him. In an entry from almost twenty years ago I recount how he told me I was wasting potential at my job. I proceed to explain in detail why he’s wrong, giving reason after reason why I’m working exactly the right job for that time in my life. I admit to myself how much his “stupid words” irritate me and not because I think they’re true but because they’re coming from “my dad.” And as much as I don’t want to admit it, I care what he thinks about me. I then confess that “I have no idea why I’m like this.” I think he’s wrong, I know he’s wrong about so much in life, but “I cannot help but care what he thinks about me.”
Pain
This anger was rooted in pain. In my first memory, I’m probably two years old, sitting on my mom and dad’s brown leather couch and watching in amazement as the cocker spaniel sitting next to me gets up and then leaps off the couch. My second memory involves the same brown leather couch, only this time I’m standing on it, leaning against a windowsill. Tears are running down my cheeks and snot down my nose, as I watch my dad carry a suitcase to his car. He looks back at me, and I can see that he’s crying too. I can still picture him so clearly, his wavy brown hair, his eyes, his tears.
My parents never again lived together, but my dad’s love remained a sustaining, ubiquitous force throughout my childhood. He came to my baseball games and took me on vacations. He called me on the phone nearly every night to see how my day had been. He would sometimes lose his temper, but not once do I remember doubting that he loved me. I knew I meant more to him than anyone or anything on the planet. We loved spending time together, going to movies, sitting side by side for hours every weekend playing Earl Weaver Baseball on his computer. He knew I would grow up to do great things and change the world.
And then I did grow up, and I came to be a lot like him. Restless, stubborn, determined to be my own person. And he reacted with hostility. At first he just nitpicked: I needed to go back to school, to call my grandmother more, to smile more when meeting new people. I tried to bite my tongue and found myself pushing him away.
His criticisms became increasingly severe, and over time it seemed that he no longer really cared about me. All those years he had wanted me to have a better job, but by the time I finally landed a better job, my dream job in fact, he didn’t even ask about it. I waited and waited for him to show interest. He would talk on and on about himself, about his political beliefs, about his daily aggravations, about all the fun things he was doing with his new family, but literally years passed before he finally asked what it was I did at work.
Things got even worse. He made some especially hurtful comments two years ago, and I finally told him that I was tired of being attacked and would not have a relationship with him if he did not apologize. I didn’t want him to grovel. I just wanted him to stop hurting me, and I thought that an apology might offer some assurance that he would stop hurting me. He responded by saying he didn’t have anything to apologize for.
All these old journal entries document the torment of my mental life over the past three decades. I can be found endlessly replaying his hurtful comments, sometimes imagining saying something hurtful back, always wondering if he still loved me. I try to convince myself that of course he doesn’t love me and hope that coming to terms with this will somehow make all the pain go away. But that never works, and I keep wondering what he’s thinking. Does he think about me? Does he worry about me? Does he really not love me?
Death
Last Monday morning, I received a voice message from my stepsister, Rose, telling me that she was at the hospital and that I needed to call her. I froze and then thought that no, my dad being in the hospital didn’t change anything. I wasn’t going to bend. If he wanted a relationship with me, then he still needed to man up and apologize.
But I learned that my dad wasn’t sick. He was dead.
Love
I cried when I heard that he was dead. And then for the rest of the day I felt somewhat dead myself. I knew I was sad. I knew I was still angry. But I couldn’t feel all that much.
I woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly felt something strong, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I missed him. I wanted him. I needed him. Just one more time I needed to see him sitting across the dinner table from me. I needed to look into his brown eyes. I needed to hear him say my name.
I went to work that morning. I knew that my job, the dream job that he never took an interest in, would help me to cope, my sessions throughout the day serving to titrate my grief. I would meet with a client for sixty minutes, immerse myself in their life and struggles. The session would end, and I would then open up my computer and look at the same picture.
In the picture my dad is wearing a Hawaiian shirt, his tanned arms crossed, a Nikkon camera in his hands. There’s that face I’ve known my entire life, now framed with white hair and a white beard, but it’s the exact same face, the aquiline nose, the brown eyes looking back at me. I would look at that picture and break down, tears beginning to run down my cheeks and snot down my nose. Just as I’d done when he’d left me forty-four years earlier.
I had come to believe that I no longer loved my dad, but now I understood that I had never stopped loving him. As a psychotherapist, I believe that we humans are uniquely gifted at becoming estranged from our own feelings. When our feelings cause too much pain, our minds try to protect us by burying them, trying to make us forget.
I could now see through all his harsh comments. I could see through what I believed had been the withdrawal of his love. I could again picture those soft brown eyes, and in them I could see a wounded human being. He had his own pain, pain inflicted by his own father. I will never know what exactly happened, but I know that he too had been wounded and that this had indelibly changed him.
We had both been living with similar pain, and it had blinded us both in similar ways. His pain had predisposed him to see my yearning for independence as a rejection of him. He’d been so deeply hurt that he saw threats where none existed, and he’d learned to defend himself by attacking and then pushing away.
I had not truly understood his pain for all those years. What I saw was that the man who had once been my protector, who had loved me more than life itself, was now turning against me. And to this day nothing in my life has ever hurt me more, not even the loss of other loved ones. Nothing has hurt me more than believing I had lost his love. Losing his daily presence when I was three years old pierced me, but believing I lost his love devastated me. I felt disoriented, as though I no longer knew myself, as though life itself no longer made any sense.
We had both been living with similar pain, and it had blinded us both in similar ways. His pain had predisposed him to see my yearning for independence as a rejection of him. He’d been so deeply hurt that he saw threats where none existed, and he’d learned to defend himself by attacking and then pushing away.
I had not truly understood his pain for all those years. What I saw was that the man who had once been my protector, who had loved me more than life itself, was now turning against me. And to this day nothing in my life has ever hurt me more, not even the loss of other loved ones. Nothing has hurt me more than believing I had lost his love. Losing his daily presence when I was three years old pierced me, but believing I lost his love devastated me. I felt disoriented, as though I no longer knew myself, as though life itself no longer made any sense.
I grew to hate him.
But I now realize that hate is not the opposite of love; the opposite of love is indifference. I hated my dad because deep down I loved him, and I needed him to continue loving me. Anger and hate had protected me from feeling this pain, but now that he was dead, I no longer needed their protection. My dad was dead, and he could no longer hurt me. And I in turn could now see that buried inside me was the same love for him that I’d had as a boy.
I also realized that he had never stopped loving me. I doubt that he went to his death consciously feeling anything resembling love for me. But we’re so alike, and I can’t help but think that his love for me had never gone away but, like mine, had been buried.
Life
I again return to my old journals. My dad and I were always doing these stupid passive-aggressive things to try to get at one another. Little barbs here and there, each of us straining to misunderstand the other. Over several entries in 2008 I documented how he had insisted that I watch a DVD of one of his pastor’s sermons. I wrote how I felt exhausted by his efforts to control me and spent the next several days drafting different emails to him. In some of these drafts I excoriated his pastor and “idiotic believers” like him. I finally sent a cold reply, thanking him for the DVD but saying nothing positive about the sermon, something I knew would get at him.
Looking back now, none of this seems complicated. The wounds we kept inflicting on one another were not intended to harm but to communicate. Deep down we were both trying to say the same thing. When he sent me that stupid DVD, he was trying to say, “Donny, I need to know that I still matter to you. I need to know that you still love me.” Had I raved about the DVD, he would have felt that maybe he still did matter to me. By refusing to give him that satisfaction, by writing that cold thank you note, I was trying to communicate my own message, trying to say, “Dad, I feel like you’re always trying to change me, and that makes me feel that you don’t love me anymore. Why don’t you love me? I so badly need you to love me.”
Life, Soren Kierkegaard wrote, can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.
I’m forced to move forward. I’m forced to live in a world without my dad. I will never be able to make things right with him. Each time I say those words — I will never be able to make things right with him — my eyes fill with tears.
Although I wish my dad were not dead — and each time I speak of him being “dead,” my eyes again fill with tears — I can also recognize that his death gave me the gift of knowing that we never stopped loving each other. It’s tragic that fear and pain prevented us from knowing this when he was still living.
I’m forced to go forward without my dad in the world, and that’s not right. I shouldn’t have to live in a world without him. Even if we still weren’t talking, even if he were still living hundreds of miles away, he should be here.
But I now realize that hate is not the opposite of love; the opposite of love is indifference. I hated my dad because deep down I loved him, and I needed him to continue loving me. Anger and hate had protected me from feeling this pain, but now that he was dead, I no longer needed their protection. My dad was dead, and he could no longer hurt me. And I in turn could now see that buried inside me was the same love for him that I’d had as a boy.
I also realized that he had never stopped loving me. I doubt that he went to his death consciously feeling anything resembling love for me. But we’re so alike, and I can’t help but think that his love for me had never gone away but, like mine, had been buried.
Life
I again return to my old journals. My dad and I were always doing these stupid passive-aggressive things to try to get at one another. Little barbs here and there, each of us straining to misunderstand the other. Over several entries in 2008 I documented how he had insisted that I watch a DVD of one of his pastor’s sermons. I wrote how I felt exhausted by his efforts to control me and spent the next several days drafting different emails to him. In some of these drafts I excoriated his pastor and “idiotic believers” like him. I finally sent a cold reply, thanking him for the DVD but saying nothing positive about the sermon, something I knew would get at him.
Looking back now, none of this seems complicated. The wounds we kept inflicting on one another were not intended to harm but to communicate. Deep down we were both trying to say the same thing. When he sent me that stupid DVD, he was trying to say, “Donny, I need to know that I still matter to you. I need to know that you still love me.” Had I raved about the DVD, he would have felt that maybe he still did matter to me. By refusing to give him that satisfaction, by writing that cold thank you note, I was trying to communicate my own message, trying to say, “Dad, I feel like you’re always trying to change me, and that makes me feel that you don’t love me anymore. Why don’t you love me? I so badly need you to love me.”
Life, Soren Kierkegaard wrote, can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.
I’m forced to move forward. I’m forced to live in a world without my dad. I will never be able to make things right with him. Each time I say those words — I will never be able to make things right with him — my eyes fill with tears.
Although I wish my dad were not dead — and each time I speak of him being “dead,” my eyes again fill with tears — I can also recognize that his death gave me the gift of knowing that we never stopped loving each other. It’s tragic that fear and pain prevented us from knowing this when he was still living.
I’m forced to go forward without my dad in the world, and that’s not right. I shouldn’t have to live in a world without him. Even if we still weren’t talking, even if he were still living hundreds of miles away, he should be here.
But he’s not here. He’s dead. I keep saying that as though needing to remind myself. He is dead. My dad is dead. More tears. Every time I say that there are tears.
My dad is dead. And yet in my heart, my dad is somehow present.
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