My father. Oh boy. I was hoping @ericvancewalton wouldn’t ask. But here it is, perhaps the most difficult-to-write post I will ever publish on Hive.
The task is to talk about my favorite memory about my father.
What is meant by “favorite" memory? The memory that gives me the strongest warm and fuzzy feelings? The one I like most to talk about? Is my favorite memory of the moment I revisit most often?
I imagine that what I am about to say would make my father very sad were he to ever hear it. Hopefully, the act of writing to this prompt will help me find a memory I can call my favorite, because, to be honest, I don’t like to think about my father very much.
The town Jimmy C was born and raised in was, and still is, a very small town, the kind of upstate New York village where nearly everyone knows nearly everyone else.
It's safe to say that, for a period of time, absolutely everyone in the whole county knew my father at some point in their lives.
After many decades of being involved in just about all things public - as a popular high school chemistry teacher and college professor, as board member or director of several entities, as election commissioner, and as town supervisor, for starters - my father was elected Mayor of our fine village. He was eighty years old. The villagers, who knew him well in that tiny town, elected him mayor at the age of eighty.
My father had been gone about ten years when I returned to my hometown, the same as my father’s, to live as an empty-nesting retiree. For the first few months, people regularly stopped me to tell me what a great guy my father was, how much fun they’d had with him. And how proud he was of me.
My father was fun? My father was proud of me?
I was the eldest of my parents’ five children. As the eldest, I was the child they first learned parenting chops on. My father, like most fathers back then, was strict. He was demanding. He was very easy to enrage. He had a very loud and deep voice. I never knew which of my actions would bring down his booming wrath on me. Although he very rarely raised a hand to any of us, it only took once before we worked very hard to toe his lines, which seemed capricious. I became invisible when he was in the house. I learned how not to argue, how not to have an opinion of my own, lest he lash out at me with his scary voice and exuberant anger.
My memory of my father is hazy. I am struck dumb. I have no choice but to freewrite here, and to see what comes out of my understory. Come with me while I meander down memory lane (a stuckist endeavor perhaps?) and let it all hang out:
I don’t remember being punished very often. I don't ever remember being grounded, sent to my room, or any of the other punishments other kids experienced. I simply strove to never anger my father. It was easier that way. I was once slapped across the face that time he wouldn’t let me go out in broad daylight with my neighborhood friends. As the teenager I was on that day, I had uncharacteristically dared to talk back. I think the slap shocked both of us.
If I wanted anything, anything at all, the idea would have to be approved by my father first. When I wanted my first pair of jeans, my mother said “Let me ask your father.” I dreaded his response but, surprisingly, he said yes and I got my first pair of jeans. This is a nice memory, and one that helped me see that he wasn’t such a capricious tyrant after all, that he was just having a human experience.
I got my gift of giving good speeches from my father. He could give a fantastic speech. Funny, honest, and uplifting. I credit him with my love of being on any kind of stage. As much as he appreciated a good audience, he was also well-known not only for attending every single performance involving his progeny, but also for falling almost immediately asleep, and snoring loudly through all of his offspring's shows.
Here’s a specific memory that might just be my favorite memory of my father and me, because I remember it very often. My father and I clicked on this night, we had an understanding, and we both found our places.
I wish I could erase the look that was on his face when he walked in. This was the first sleepover I had ever hosted at my home. We snuck out, like we did at all of our sleepovers. We’d go out skulking around the residential streets of our very small town in the middle of the night. Chances were pretty good that, should anyone see us, they would know exactly who we all were, so what we did out there was run and hide whenever the rare car happened along. Nothing bad ever happened, and it felt magical, like being in another world.
But that night, when we got back, The Father’s car was gone. My father’s car was gone.
We were all sitting on the living room floor when he walked back in. I was looking right at him. And he was looking right at me. That look. I’ll never forget it.
He said nothing. He quietly stepped over us to get upstairs, and that was the last I ever heard of it. I never again asked to host a sleepover. That was my punishment, to remain forever silent on the subject of sleepovers.
There is so much more to say but...
telling the story
of a lifetime?
This is my entry to the fifth installment of @ericvancewalton's Memoir Monday initiative. Every Monday Eric posts a question about our lives for us to answer, in hopes that, after a year, the participants will have produced a valuable collection of memories.
In Eric's words:
Someday all that will be left of our existence are memories of us, our deeds, and words. It's up to you to leave as rich of a heritage as possible for future generations to learn from. So, go ahead, tell your stories!
You have such an uncanny ability to make me feel as if I'm right there with you in the description of your memories. Reading this I'm reminded that my own childhood wasn't as rosy as I sometimes like to remember. There was a fair amount of tip-toeing around when my dad was in "a mood", he could have a temper but never hit us. He often slammed things, broke things, or was just silent. You carry that trauma around in adulthood though and it's taken me many years and a lot of relationships to discover and recover from. Thanks, once again, for participating! I hope it didn't dredge up too many bad memories for you. What a cute baby picture!
Thanks Eric. Tip-toeing around when Dad was in a mood - I wonder how many of us had to do this? The other fathers seemed like so much more fun, and more loving, than mine, but I wonder if they were just on good behavior around others. We can't know what happens in other peoples homes, not fully. This memoir initiative is showing us a great deal about each other, and in many cases, how alike we are.
You're welcome! I'm not sure how common it was but it usually happened in our house one or two weekends a month. My dad was never taught to communicate or process his emotions so he suppressed everything until he exploded, emotionally. As a small child I always remember asking my Mom on Friday evenings, "Is dad mad?". If he came home from work on Friday afternoon angry that set the tone for the entire weekend. He would just totally ignore us, he would be slamming things around for a few days, and any plans we had for the weekend would be cancelled. Monday would roll around and he would act as if nothing happened. This improved as he got older and became more and more rare as my brother and I became teenagers. A lot of time was wasted this way though. I've done a lot of work in adulthood not to follow in his footsteps. I think this was a big reason I began meditating in the early 1990's. I just didn't want to live that way or subject anyone to that kind of abuse, I don't blame him for it but that's what it was. When he wasn't in "a mood" he was charismatic, loving, and just a joy to be around. I'm glad you're getting so much out of this! I know I am. This is already one of the most fulfilling things I've done on the blockchain.
I feel the same way.
Now I really wonder how many of us went home to fathers like yours and mine. You're not the first to admit their father had serious flaws, compromising what kind of parent they were. I remarked on Jacey's comment that we are taught how to act on the outside, thinking we were all different inside our homes, but now I wonder if we weren't also indirectly taught how to act inside our homes.
It was probably much more common than we could imagine.
I really enjoyed reading this and now am
Wondering what my children will think of and remember of me after I’m gone.
Thinking of the pictures I’ve seen of my father and I as a baby, then thinking of my experience with him as a teenager and our relationship now, I can’t imagine what our relationship was really like in my formative years.
After becoming a parent, I think it’s so unfortunate that most of the experiences we try so hard to give young children disappear in their memory banks.
Sneaking out during sleepovers was great, want it! Such a magical experience.
Oh my goodness I made so many mistakes! You will too. My children, scarred as they are (were), all love(d) me despite. The only thing that matters in parenting is genuine love.
I do wish, however, that I had listened more closely to the alarms going off in my head whenever I chose to follow someone else's advice above my own, especially that of those who called themselves professionals.
It’s been very interesting having a third child ten years after my first and eight after my second. When you raise kids that are close in age, they tend to go through all the developmental phases and life experiences at more or less the same time, but raising a baby when you know what to expect from elementary school and team sports and so many other things, that really gives you a lot of perspective. It likes a complete do-over. All the things that I feel like I probably should have done differently, I get to try again (and maybe mess up all over agin in a different way🤣).
hm. I can see how hindsight would come in very handy for you. And maturity.
It is so sad that someone could be so loved by the world out there, but change behind closed doors. That must hurt!
Your story reminds me about my Oupa, a side I never saw, whuch Mom would tell me about as it angered her at times. He was Mom's adoptive father, married my Ouma when she was pregnant with Mom (another sad story) but his outbreaks of wrath had a profound effect on Mom and her siblings. My Ouma was a darling. Oupa changed in his latter years and tried to make up for all the hurt he caused, but the scars remained.
You have a gift of drawing your readers into the moment of the story @owasco, I can just imagine that look!
Life can be so sad, but thankfully also so wonderful!
Thank you Lizelle. I value your comments so much!
"Street angel, home devil" I have heard it called. If only we could all just be our genuine selves wherever we go. Home becomes, for many, a place to let off the steam that might have built up outside of the home due to the stress of being false. I have compassion for my father's foibles, now that I have made so many of my own. Unfortunately, unlike your Oupa, my father managed to continue to be quite mean even to several of his grandchildren. It got so bad with one of my children (you know the one), that I had to threaten to never visit my father again if he didn't shape up and be a loving grandfather, instead of a brute. He was very hurt, but he did stop being such an ass. I have since heard, from a girlfriend my father had after my mother's death, that my mother regularly threatened to leave him for the same reason. That he told this to his his girlfriend helps me to see that he regretted some of his actions and intents.
Some of his children still idolize him, as the townspeople mostly did. I wonder how that has affected their lives.
A big sigh here from me! How can a grandfather be so mean, especially to someone vulnerable? At least it stopped, and as you say, it must have made him realize what he had done!
A dear friend of mine was one of four children, and when in her teens, her father told her Mom to choose between him or the children. It is unbelievable that a father could do that!
He moved to a city some 10-hour drive away, married someone else, and apparently, her children and grandchildren adored him!
Why he was like that to his own blood is beyond comprehension, her mother had to support them on her own!
He started writing letters to her oldest son, and when he got cancer, she and her siblings drove all that way to see him.
She never forgave him, and I don't blame her!
Very apt!
Interestingly, several of the commenters on my post, and others about fathers, say their father was affable outside the home, and cruel inside the home. My husband was one of them too (I married my father). It's very common apparently! I'd say "like father like son" but my husband's father was a sweetheart through and through. I lived with them for a few months, knew him for several decades, and never saw an unkind thing from him.
This felt bittersweet. As Eric said, I felt there. Though I wouldn't say that was entirely pleasant. :) It's certainly interesting and I think far more valuable to get this sort of nuanced good and bad memory of one's father. I think it was very easy with this particular question to maybe seek to emphasize only the good. this is far more relatable.
All I can say, much as I despise the triteness of the phrase, is thank you for sharing. With such a gifted writer, it's a pleasure to read :)
Aw.... Thanks so much.
I see you reblogged this week's memoir monday post. I hope that means you'll be joining us. I know I would love reading your memoirs, as I love reading all of your posts. You're very insightful for such a young woman!
I am loving these prompts, even though some of them bring back unpleasant memories. But are the memories really unpleasant? Not for me. I feel as though I've purged the unpleasantness, and can get to the human-ness more clearly.
I enjoyed reading your story.
I'm sorry it wasn't easier to think of some very fond memories of you Dad.
My father did not have a quick temper, but in serious situations, he was no nonsense and expected respect, not only for himself, but my Mom. My Mom was not as strict as my Dad, so we always asked her first ! LOL She was able to make most answers on the spot, but if it were different or she wasn't sure, she and Dad discussed it in private and came out with a united front on the answer. I sometimes thought Dad was too strict and did not keep up with what should be acceptable for the times and I think Mom thought so too, but still, his word was pretty much law. I do have fond memories though.
It's like someone else said, you never know what goes on inside a home by how people present outside of it. It could be pretty much the same or WAY different. As a young child, I didn't know all the other families were not like ours. Then I grew up, heard stories and was surprised as could be. Part of the live and learn kind of things that happen as we become adults I suppose.
You bring up a good point, and I just saw something more clearly. On the outside, we conform to accepted norms, we all behave similarly, we all look alike to the others. Inside our homes, we can let that go. The stress of the outside is released on the inside. It's a nifty trick we've been trained how to do, a slave system, one of a great many. Oh dear there I go again. @ronthroop, feel free to warble here.
This bird chirps, “You trilled it!” :)
Fathers leave such a difficult legacy. Mine was like yours but a lot more violent and it's also hard to find some positives although eventually I did and I think that's helpful
Writing this helped me find some too. I had so much compassion for him, now that I've made my own terrible parenting mistakes and had the time to look back on them. I'm sorry your father was a lot more violent than mine was. He must have been very scary!
He was!
My goodness, you could be describing my father there. A street angel and a house devil, my mother used to say. Though he never raised a hand to us, we lived in mortal fear of incurring his wrath.
Yes! So that's an Irish saying? I said it to someone in the comments.
Oh, you did too! I usually browse the comments but haven't had a minute. We've had 2 semi-dry days in a row now and I have to get some stuff in the ground.
I put peas into my mini garden yesterday, and radishes. Today hope to plant carrots, beets, lettuce etc, the spring things. It's so exciting! Enjoy!
Wow, you're such a pleasure to read @owasco.
I think most parents, especially fathers, from the older generation never really knew how to be sweet enough to their children.
It's a very common thing the further back one goes. Fathers were usually tyrants/tyrant-wannabes. It's nice there were a few good memories, though ✌.
PS: I asked Katharsisdrill about the medallions you wanted to buy and he said they are not done yet. He also said he's going to begin writing on Hive soon and that he's just been busy with things around his locality 😊👌.
Thanks for asking him. I miss his work very much, I loved having him here. There are not that many accounts I read almost religiously, but his was one.
It's as if our fathers thought they were not allowed to have loving feelings for their children. My father was much more patient with his dogs than he was with me. Of course, dogs do not cast quite the reflection on a man that his children do.
I think no matter how strict our fathers were, we love them and today we can see why they were the way they were, but being a teenage girl and wanting to spread our wings was not an easy thing to do. I think they were so strict because they were once a teenage boy.
I also learned to be quiet around my father, and never talk back. I had one time when a friend crocheted a bikini for me and she wanted me to try it on before putting the lining in it, as I walked down the stairs to show her, my Dad walked in the house, that was the maddest I ever saw him and it broke his friendship with this lady and her husband. He made me take it off and he burned it in front of her. There was no telling him that it was not finished.
Sounds like a lot of our fathers threw irrational fits now and then.
Yes mine did for sure
In spite of the jumpy form, the disclaimer, the historical bit, the sudden freewrite, I love how you paint a portrait in so few words. A complex figure that stays complex throughout the text. Family is hard to describe, hard to understand, because you are part in what it is yourself - but your knack for short form really takes me to a place where I have the feeling I sense the truth somewhere just behind the words.
I'll have to go back and see the other instalments... first the math lesson with my daughter though.
Thank you for reading so closely and commenting so lavishly! I worried about the jumpy form, but eventually decided that, if my memories are 'hazy,' perhaps because I don't like to stay with them for very long, it was accurate for the post to be hazy/jumpy too.
My father was complex, yes. I don't see how any human could not be complex back then, or now, given all the false messages we are regularly inundated with.
Speaking of math, you've reminded me that he loved the quadratic formula, and was proud he could recite it flawlessly right to nearly his death. So you have fun with that math. I loved the stuff, the only thing I could be 100% sure of the answers to.
Yes, memory is filtered through the notions of the Now, contaminated in most cases. I seek simplicity now, and love. Why bother with anything short of those?
In my experience people use most of the braincells they have reserved for historical analysis on family. Maybe it is the reason the family saga is so popular a literary genre. Both being moulded and mould, form and being formed makes it a shit show, but somehow we have to return to it.
I have a large family and have poured out so much knowledge, sorrow, responsibility and joy that I feel soaked every time I think about it. In the end, it's all just love, but in the wild and destructive sense as much as in a calm and useful way (with the odd psychopath or two thrown in, mind!).
I wonder if this isn't something we've been taught to do, so that we are less likely to put two and two together about what's going on in the supposed real world. Psychotherapy sure has us dwelling on family matters, as if not much is more important. I credit psychotherapy, in large part, with the sad state of the world today. It's made many of us into the psychos it purported to prevent.
We could go back to indigenous ways (are we the indigenous now?) and tell stories about our ancestors to the children every night, so they can better see outside of themselves.
Maybe it is, but who taught us. Family is the people who were around us for most of your early life, the ones in whose company we learned all the basic necessary things. Putting two and two together - realise things - cognition in a word, is always mixed up in our memories our stories, and there they are: the family.
I see it as something that is just as unescapable as the period of history you live in.
Psychotherapy is a strange monster, I agree on that. It masquerade as science, but it suffers from the same blind spots as religion. It creates powerful and dogmatic stories instead of uncovering the unknown. And then there's art story telling etc. It is only a fraction better, but at least it sometimes touch on truth and there's freedom in it. Psychotherapy always gave me the chills with its overly certain explanations.
Excellent post about your father @owasco.
I can imagine that it was indeed difficult to write parts of this as you mentioned early in the post, as you took a lot of traumatic pressure being the oldest.
Walking on eggshells because of explosive unpredictable rage is a feeling I can relate to, being also the oldest of 5 growing up (later to be six but the majority of growing up was five of us.) It's interesting we share a similar dynamic in our early life that way. The implications are different for a female with that same type of pressure though.
Your father was a prominent man in the town and undoubtedly felt the pressure of this, creating a need to maintain control, and any feeling of loss of control or a potential for loss of control induced a type of loss of control in a controlled environment. He must have carried around a lot of anxiety that he kept hidden from the general public. It's probably not very uncommon with men who've garnered levels of success like he did.
I think you wrote this gracefully and in line with how our stories never really end in a way, it's more like chapters that continue on through our children, and we just have to make sense of how things played out in the most digestible fashion possible.
Thank you @futuremind! I love your thoughtful comments. The last paragraph here, especially.
I don't remember your telling me you were the eldest of five!
That's the truth. I wonder if we rewrite the past when we do so.