Father, you were wrong

[Boss]

This is my final post on this thread. Below is something I posted about five years ago.

by Boss » July 27th, 2005, 6:35 pm

I spent years competing with my siblings for Dad's love. He walked out on the family a few times, the longest before he finally left for good, was for 8 or 9 months - I was 6. He moved in with an Israeli woman. My foundations were shaken. I missed him writing poetry in bed on the weekends. I missed him coming home to our bourgeois house every week night. I MISUNDERSTOOD THE LACK OF TEAM LEADERSHIP FROM MUM AND DAD. Everything was unreal, shaky, insecure. I looked to my older brothers and sister for guidance. They started smoking and drinking. It was chaos. My father had brought these 6 kids into the world and now left it for Mum to sort out. My mother took me to the snow for a weekend with my aunt and uncle and their kids. It hurt to see this family in union. Driving home I started to sob in Mum's arms. I wanted my Daddy. He had been looking after my siblings. When we got home I cried in his lap. He said he would come home.

In 1976 a brother had a breakdown. He was 12. It required a year off school and a long holiday. On Pesach night 1977 my sister was killed with her boyfriend in a car accident. He was drunk. In early 1979 my youngest brother had 2 cysts removed from his right leg. While not malignant, they caused a scare. He had neurofibromatosis (and would die of it in 2001). After all of this drama, my mother and father still divorced in 1980. He left in late '79. I remember the day in my mind but I still don't feel the PAIN of him leaving. I didn't cry - I had built up sufficient defences to tackle pain. Just block it off. Ward it off. It seems easier just to walk away and not FEEL it. I want to be angry, I want to scream but I still haven't found the right forum in which to do it. When my father left I was 11. I had an entire adolescence to battle through without him 'close by'. It was hard being one of the youngest - you're open to bullying. I oftentimes needed his support. Still I didn't blame him for not being there - that would not be 'right'.

The next 19 years I spent trying to capture his attention. "Do you think this is a good poem? Story? Idea?" He didn't (largely because of his parenting) instigate the loving - he was more concerned with his new wife and publishing his books. Intelligence is what mattered to Dad, courage and pain were secondary. And I wasted so much energy, so much hope on something that would never materialise. And now he is dead. I don't think he loved and accepted me for me - I had to change, had to be someone else. Lie. Earn my stripes.

I truly thank G-d for my mother. It was her unconditional love and fight for the well-being of her kids which sustained me; in many ways, even to today. If I needed proof that parents can love, I need look no further than her. And be sure for such a one to fall in love with my father, he couldn't have been all bad. Nothing is total. I remember our close loving moments too, but it's this distance that he placed between us I shall endeavour to MOURN fully.

Regards Boss

I have fought so long, so hard.
Finally, in the last week or so, it all opened up.

I so love you, Dad

[carm]

River Gravel by Russell Thornton

The mountains somehow shifting around each other
had been fooling me for hours. To try to think,
I sat down on a steep stretch of icy rock.
I saw a wind come off a sharp peak above me
and agitate a darkening mist. I stood up
and began to run. I slipped, slipped again, crashed
face-first with my legs wrenched into natural trap-holes
where the months' snow lay over treetops
until, after two hours, I reached the snow line.

Then I was in forest, on quick-changing ground
difficult to see. I kept running, kept crossing
and recrossing deafening creeks, trying to find
the right river origin, the right way back,
and kept marching down creeksides through bush
that cut me, belittling me, goading me -
until finally I understood, until I began to feel gratified
as how more and more of what I had thought
to be myself was being stripped of me.

The way ahead was the same surging black space
I carried within, and was all I was, and I could go
nowhere but to the centre of that space
and to the presence of the man who had fathered me.
I spoke to him. I told him how I had been a darkness
to myself for years as I had run, the way echoing
my every question with no sound - only a blank wall
of matter and will. Time had happened. It had filled me
over and over with my boyhood without him.

I saw ahead a turn in a creek where it joined
another creek. Red markings on a high boulder
signalled the beginning of a river that would lead me
out of the backcountry and into a familiar valley.
Slowly I waded waist-deep into the swerving melted ice
to get to a bank I saw I could make my way along -
but out in the middle of the flow lost my balance,
grabbed at water, sensed it take hold of me, propel me
for an instant, then blindly I found the riverbed.

When I righted myself I had a fistful of gravel
in my hand. I released it, watched it pour out of my palm.
The river, always gathering itself up as it rushed
through the touch of pure distance to the inlet,
had let me stand and gather up my father.
Wet and shining with the last light, the gravel was a mirror
in which I saw how my face was my father's
with gravel falling out of his eyes, how the crushed stone
was the river in its bliss grinding mountains down to tears.

Adam writes:

I have fought so long, so hard.
Finally, in the last week or so, it all opened up.

I so love you, Dad