“Shrivelled up”. That’s what I thought when I last saw my father.
He’s now 82 and his old age is starting to show. His posture is stooped, He’s shrunk a good few inches over recent years and, because of chronic back pain he’s taken to coasting round the house using the furniture to keep his balance and to support his weight. Like an oversized wrinkly toddler! He’s had trouble with his left eye ever since a botched cataract operation 2 years ago which resulted in persistent infections. The eyeball is now deflated, discoloured and completely dysfunctional. Over the years his gums have receded and his teeth have fallen out leaving just two behind in his upper palate. He tells me that his dentist is doing some work repairing his other set of dentures. The poorly fitting dentures he’s wearing now cause him to talk with a nasal quality. They move around in his mouth as he talks lending a weirdly tragic-comic air to his speech. I’m looking at him and registering his weakness and vulnerability. I’m contrasting the image before me with my memories of him as an angry, powerful and impossible man.
I would like to take you on some of the journey I have travelled in my relationship with him. The story begins with a small boy craving care, emotional sustenance and nurturing from a monstrous ogre of a man and it ends with affection from a wounded son towards a man riddled with vulnerability and pathos.
I can remember my father first coming into my consciousness as a stranger entering my world. He had returned from work and it was as if I’d never known him before.
“So who is this?” my innocent soul enquired. My bemused parents responded to my nascent awareness with smiles and reassurance and all seemed well and safe.
Now fast forward years, over a background of emotional foreboding. Pause.
A simmering, stifled, anger tinged atmosphere around the dining table. Older siblings have transgressed in some way to be warranting this frightening silent treatment. We all know at any time, for any reason, it can now erupt into a spasm of threatened physical violence and there’s nothing we can do about it. Then, Bang! His mean face crumples into what seems like a snarl of hatred, his arm is flung backwards in a full arc with his hand hovering above his head, poised for an unrestrained, abusive slap. Hard skin and bone powered by muscles and sinews against soft child skin.
He didn’t need to hit us that often. Just the threat that he might snap, just the sight of that hand hovering, just the tension of knowing that he might not be able to restrain himself was enough to tyrannize us all.
It wasn’t all bad. There would be fun times when all of this would be forgotten or at least brushed under the carpet of our shared awareness. Catch him on a good day and my sister and I can have great fun messing around rough and tumbling on the carpet.
He’s now just a pretend monster and we’re trying to wrestle him to the floor and pin him down but he’s too strong and he roars loudly then squishes us under his full weight so we can hardly breathe and we’re both squealing with delighted pretend fear…..
Every morning he’s there in the kitchen making rounds of bacon sandwiches for us to silently consume before we set off for school. He’s even baked the bread himself!
But each and every happy memory is troubled by this deeply frightening undercurrent. There is the potential for real violence coupled with a prevailing emotional unavailability. Most of the time he’s either sitting in the corner of the room behind a pile of the science fiction books that he’s borrowed- six per week from the public library, or he’s angry and on the lookout to be criticizing or chastising us.
In spite of this atmosphere, my innocent soul drives me to love and seek affection from him. Another memory comes into focus.
I’m just 5 or 6 years old and I’m tucked up in bed. I can’t sleep and wonder what’s going on downstairs. I’m going to toddle downstairs and see what they’re all up to. Tell them I can’t sleep. Maybe I’ll be allowed to stay up and watch TV. Down the stairs I go one by one. I can hear taking in the living room. I push the door open. I’m assaulted by the angry bark of a man with no love or affection for me “GET BACK UP THOSE STAIRS RIGHT NOW!” I quickly pull the door shut and cry my way back up the stairs and into my bed. Something inside begins to die. This isn’t right. Why have I got this emotionless, sergeant major for a father? Surely other kids’ dads aren’t like this. There’s something seriously wrong here!
No wonder then that we all flee the nest as soon as is respectable for bright middle class British kids and escape to universities as far away from home possible. By the time of my young adulthood, my dissatisfaction with dad has grown into a full-blown hatred. As far as I am concerned he is so not what he should have been for me that I can’t bear to be in the same room as him. So whilst friends at Uni can’t seem to wait until the end of term to spend the holidays with their families, I stay behind finding excuses not to go home. Of course I have my closeted sexuality to be busily unpacking and he gets the blame for me having had to repress my sexuality too.
Interestingly, however, as I meet more and more gay men, I find that poor-difficult-absent father relationships are the rule rather than the exception. Is there something about being a gay boy that is likely to doom a relationship with a father?
Maybe there was something in the awfulness of my relationship with my dad which drove me towards eroticizing a forbidden hitherto denied male-male bond. Maybe it was my sensitive gay temperament that recoiled from his harsh and abusive macho parenting style. Did my father have some repressed sexuality issues which my existence reminded him about and caused him to cut me out as he had attempted to cut it out from his consciousness? Did my mother unwittingly play a role? Were our gentler natures naturally drawn towards each other and united against the aggressive foe? Maybe I was just a lisping, feminine-acting embarrassment of a sissy son. More images come flooding back
I’m standing outside the locked bathroom door whist dad takes a bath. I must only be about 4 or 5. Mum always leaves the bathroom door open when she bathes and we all wander in and out talking to her, uninhibited by her nakedness. Why can’t we do this with dad I wonder? So I’m knocking and asking dad to open the bathroom door. There’s no reply….
I’m not like my older brothers. I have a pair of roller skates and my sister and I skate around outside. I play skipping with the girls….
I like to watch my mum applying face powder from her mirrored compact. I rescue old compacts and scrape the powder from the corners then apply it liberally to my face. My dad notices and is angry. Tells me to wash it off. I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong. A few years later I rub talcum powder over my face and get the same angry response.
So whatever the explanation for the tensions between us, I’m a young man and I’m vehemently hating my father and it doesn’t feel right! I learn that if you are a successful male you are highly likely to have had a good relationship with your father so I figure that I’m doomed to be unsuccessful. And then I discover that those with unresolved issues towards a deceased family member are far more likely to suffer an abnormal grief reaction in the form of anxiety, panic or depression than if there is a good relationship. This information comes as a big shock to me and I realize that at a deep level for many years I’ve been wishing him dead and I’m actually disappointed that his death won’t solve the problem. This is the turning point. I’m determined that since this old bugger has done enough to mess up my life during his lifetime-I wasn’t going to let him carry on messing it up when he ultimately pops his clogs. So at the age of 28 I decide there is only one way to deal with this hatred and resentment. If I am to avoid it consuming and destroying the rest of my life I have to somehow find a way of making things better.
Years fly by and, in spite of tentative attempts to make friends with him; his critical, aggressive, bossy manner and my dislike of it continue to erode any chance of a connection. Then my career takes me into the field of childcare. Much of my work starts to involve sitting down with parents and interviewing them in depth to get an understanding of their own childhoods in order to build a picture of why they might parent in the way they do. I become quite an expert at developing explanatory formulations for why a child’s behaviour might be disturbed based on these detailed parental biographies. One day, after completing a particularly distressing parental interview, I suddenly realize that getting an understanding of a parent’s struggles inevitably causes a shift away from judgment and a move towards compassion. I realize at the same time that I have never given my parents the chance to tell me their stories in the kind of detail I expected from my clients.
I resolve to take a detailed history from my parents to see how far that might move me towards a more compassionate understanding of my father. Next trip home I announce my plan and- almost surprisingly- they are happy to oblige. Mum is the eldest daughter of four. Her father gambled and drank away most of the family’s money. Her mother had to be strong and was able to run a small but successful retail fish business in spite of him. Mum was bright and the nuns at her convent school had high hopes for her academic success but she was removed from school before she could take exams because of family poverty and the need to earn money to feed the younger children. When she met dad they fell in love and resolved to bring up children who would be able to fulfil their full academic potential.
Dad’s story was that he was the elder of two boys. His own father had lost his mother at an early age and was brought up away from his father by an aunt so never got much of an experience of being fathered. When dad was around 8 years old this man developed severe Parkinson’s disease. The illness left in its wake a tremulous, drooling, expressionless emotionally absent invalid father at home. Dad was educated at a church school run by a Roman Catholic order of priests with a reputation for strict, sadistic discipline. Because of his father’s illness he too was forced to leave school early to earn money for the family.
On leaving school he joined the army and was exposed to those strong, hierarchical, unemotional, power relationships necessary to keep competitive male egos in check. So his whole experience of being fathered was of growing up in a household with a severely physically and emotionally disabled man who in turn had had no experience himself of having been fathered. His template for being nurtured by male authority figures came from his experience of the sadistic Salesian brothers and the army sergeant majors with their harsh and cruel discipline.
Piecing together this story from dad allowed me to no longer see him as a despicably aggressive and controlling man but instead, for the first time, as a poor, forlorn, forsaken, abandoned child desperately seeking to carry out a role for which his experience had left him woefully inadequately prepared.
Strangely, magically, and almost instantly, once I could see him for the struggling soul he was, he was able to relax with me. He didn’t feel the need to defend himself against the silent accusations of his deficiencies. We could finally relate. I had found a way to forgive him. I’d shifted from the judgement that he was a useless father and instead I had found some compassion for the hardships that had shaped him. I could conclude that in his fathering of me, he had tried the very best he could under difficult circumstances. And that really is the very best I could possibly have hoped for!
So, if you’re struggling with your relationship with your father- and there are many reasons why a gay guy might struggle- don’t just accept it as an unchangeable inevitability. Get him to talk about his childhood and his father’s childhood. What was his experience of being fathered? What experiences did he draw on for his parenting skills? If you can forgive him for not getting it right then the relationship will inevitably improve and a better relationship with your dad will most certainly change your life.
