He's Part of Me

There is no getting past it.  He is an indelible part of who I am.  He is undeniably in my core, and I can feel his influence just about every day - both the bad parts I resent him for and the good parts I'm starting to appreciate.  He'll never go away, though he is gone forever.

What I don't get, after more than fifty years of life, and coming up on the tenth anniversary of his death, is why I am still working out what it all means; what lessons I am supposed to have learned from my turbulent, icy relationship with him; what I could possibly hope to gain from the years - DECADES - of all the talks we never had, you know: those fabled father-son talks.  Shouldn't I have processed all of it?  Shouldn't I know by now?  He was my father, for God's sake.  What is there to figure out?

What I am starting to get, however, is that an awful lot of this processing is going on all around me.  In fact, I'm starting to think it might be a universal thing.  Not that every man has a difficult relationship with his father (at least, I hope not).  Universal in the same way that knowing glances are exchanged about mother-daughter relationships.

I recently returned from my second Taos Summer Writers' Conference, and the story that I workshopped was not the only one with a missing father element.  In fact, the absent father's influence was the main point of another writer's story, even taking place the day of the funeral.  Two out of the three readings assigned by Wally Lamb, the workshop's facilitator, had at their central core the relationship (tender and loving in one, difficult and tension-filled in the other) between the narrator and his father.  And the Wally Lamb novel I was reading at the time portrayed a very stormy stepfather relationship.

Part of this Great Working Out has simply to do with the fact that the most influential people in our lives are those who raised us, for better or worse.  When a man's mother dies, there is naturally (I imagine) a similar review of their shared history and what it means; however, women who were mothers of baby boomers had clearly-defined roles, both domestically and emotionally, so the mother-son relationship was pretty stable (Oedipal complexes aside).

Men, on the other hand, were struggling to figure out their place in the family as women's expectations began changing.  And older fathers were hands-off when it came to child-rearing.  With their traditional roles limited to breadwinner and disciplinarian, they didn't have to concern themselves with relating to their children if they weren't punishing them for something.  Either way, it's no wonder they didn't know how to be fathers, or even know there was a way to be.  Many believed that being a father meant providing for one's family, simple as that.

This left a whole lot of men to glean fatherly lessons by osmosis, I guess.

But it's also why I view my own paternal relationship through a softer lens now.  My dad just didn't know any other way to be.  He sure didn't struggle with it.  There were no books about it back then, and men of his generation didn't seek help, anyway.  When I consider how little about life I myself really know or understand, even after half a century, I can't really fault him for the job he did as a father to me.

I'm not done yet.  There could be more re-hashing ahead (though, thankfully, it seems to be dwindling).  More revising of previous conclusions.  More letting go.  The Great Working Out continues, and it's all good.  There is no deadline.