Dad, Therapy, Backstory

A week ago, last Monday, my Dad called. He almost never calls — he’s hard of hearing and phone conversations are a chore for him because he can’t lip read if he can’t see your face.. He has one of these caption phones that will listen to the voice of the caller and transcribe text but he often forgets to use it because he’s old and stubborn.  If my stepmom B doesn’t remind him to use that particular phone, located in a particular room of their house, nine times out of ten he’ll use the regular one and our conversations become a one way street.

My stepmom couldn’t remind him to use the right phone last week because she had knee replacement surgery and is laid up somewhere in the house and focusing on her own troubles.  So he calls me on the wrong phone and talks at me for ten minutes.  He tells me about how B is doing (a lot of pain) and what they’re doing around the house (nothing special, they’re old and retired but he is doing the cooking and cleaning and caretaking for B and it is a lot of work) and then proceeds to talk about football for the final seven or eight minutes.  He asks if I’m watching the playoffs and I shout into the phone at the top of my lungs NO

Good Joe I’m glad you’re watching the games.

DAD I SAID I WASN’T WATCHING THE GAMES JESUS

Some of them have been good games.  Real good.  Did you want Cincinatti to win?

I DON’T CARE ABOUT FOOTBALL I HAVE TOLD YOU A MILLION TIMES

I wished Cincinatti woulda won.  Joe did you know their quarterback has the same name as you and me?  It’s JOE!

He couldn’t hear a word I said, proceeding instead to blather about the games, like he was a studio talking head providing post-game commentary, and I didn’t have the heart to hang up on him.  When he finally ran out of steam he asked for my superbowl prediction — San Francisco I said, and he responded, great then we are both rooting for the Eagles — he imagined my answer in his head holy shit — and hung up.

I told my wife about this conversation and her comment was:  Well he is bored as all hell in the house, and B is in a lot of pain and probably doesn’t want to watch football, and he’s looking for any kind of connection whatsoever, so he decided to give you a ring to kill some time, probably intentionally used the wrong phone so he wouldn’t have to accept disturbing incoming thoughts from you, and he could then pretend that you are the kind of son who is interested in what he’s interested in, which is:  sports.

You’re not wrong, I say.  Except accusing him of using the wrong phone is a bit of a stretch.

People who act exceptionally clueless are more aware of what they’re doing than you think.

Are you saying my Dad is Columbo’ing me? 

Yes.

Wow.  And all this time I thought he was just kind of dumb.

 

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Later in the week, on Thursday, I’m doing my therapy session on a zoom telehealth session with Dr. BW, staring into his face, half expecting him to drug me because he looks an awful lot like the actor who plays scarecrow in the Christopher Nolan batman movies.  Although I’ve been seeing him for seven months now, I still have the same thought every time I see him.  I half expect him to say “Would you like to see my mask?  I use it in my experiments…”  And then proceed to give me a dose of the hallucinogenic crazy-making gas somehow, even though three thousand miles separate us — maybe he’s rigged my house so it seeps through the vents, or dosed my coffee with a drone.

Anyway this week I start giving him the usual bullet point-style Plot Based Updates on my life but precious little has happened — I’ve done some insulation work in the basement, my wife Jennie is still covid positive and I have been caretaking her, I’ve been playing a video game called God of War, I’m still reading Damnation Spring, I made alfredo last night.  After that last comment we both realize I’m fishing for things to say and I flash my best sarcastic smile and say damn I have an interesting life don’t I.

Finally I’m like oh yeah my Dad called and I relate the story I documented above he asks how I felt about the interaction.

I haven’t thought about it much, I tell him.

That wasn’t the question though.  How’d it make you feel?

I search inside for a minute and say what I think Scarecrow wants me to say which is unseen — a popular Millennial way to indicate a lack of empathy and understanding and connection.  It feels fake when I say this word so I back up a little and realize that actually the emotion I felt — which I bottled up so quickly that it didn’t even register during the phone conversation itself — was anger.

Why anger?

Because he knows I don’t like football and he talked about it anyway.  So I guess that’s the unseen part. But then he steamrolls me which makes me angry.  It’s like I am not what he wants, but he’ll just go ahead and pretend I am anyway.  I forgive him because he’s old and hard of hearing — but I also do think, as my wife suspects, that he knows and remembers that I don’t care about this thing — and despite this knowledge he can’t help himself.  I mean I don’t call him up and talk about the GWAR show I went to, or how much I am enjoying The Last of Us on HBO, because I know he doesn’t care about these things and can’t relate.  So why does he do this to me?  

We haven’t talked much about your Dad in these sessions.  Tell me about him.  What do you think he wants you to be?  

Well what do you remember I told you about him?  

That your parents got divorced when you were 11.  That he drank and there was some physical abuse and that led to the divorce.

What else?

Not much else.

It occurs to me that I haven’t said much about my Dad to my therapist and now’s as good a time as any so I dump the following:

He was wild and hopeful when he was young.  A lot of energy, anger management issues.  In his early 20s he wanted to write and teach English!  But his hearing problems prevented him ultimately from going into teaching — he couldn’t manage a classroom.  He went to vocational school in his late 20s to become a mechanical draftsman — he met my mom while doing that, at a mixer,  while she was studying to be a nurse at a local women’s college.  He turned his 2-year degree into a job doing highly detailed technical work for a defense contractor.  When he proposed to my mom, HIS OWN FAMILY told my mom to be careful, that my Dad was a livewire, a lot of anger, unpredictability.  My mom didn’t care, she wanted to save somebody, and picked my Dad, who appeared to be to her, lonely and lost.  And hot, too — my Dad worked out a lot and was pretty buff.  

Anyway.  They got married and my mom found that my Dad was a control freak, abusive, angry all the time, angry about his hearing loss, angry about having to work a job he didn’t like, angry about not being able to follow his old dreams, angry about her too — she didn’t keep the home the way he liked, he hit her, she commented that he drank too much, he hit her for that too, and when us kids got a little older he would smack us around as well — they would fight about how to raise us, my mom didn’t like the abuse, my Dad thought it was necessary to make us disciplined.  He hit me when I cried and hit me when I showed an interest in things that he thought were girly.  My mom told me that he almost killed me when I was eight — he bent me over his knee on the couch to spank me, I made an L shape with my body, my groin over one leg and my throat over the other, and he spanked with one hand and pressed down on my neck with the other, not realizing my neck was over his second leg and choking me, and apparently I lost consciousness and it was lucky she was home and walked into the living room where this was happening and stopped him — she almost left him over that.  

Do you remember any of this?  What was he spanking you for?

My mom said I didn’t clean up my Nintendo around the television, which, well, he hated that I had a Nintendo, I saved up for it with my own money and had a couple of games, and he didn’t understand video games and was enraged when he saw me playing because he wanted me to be a different kind of kid. No, I don’t remember it.  I don’t remember much of my life until after the divorce.  Then it’s like I can remember almost everything.  

What kind of kid did he want you to be?

Outdoorsy.  Rough-and-tumble.  Football loving, baseball playing, chasing girls around the neighborhood, confident, ballsy.

This surprises me.  You said he liked English when he was younger, I thought he would show more sensitivity and acceptance himself, especially toward his own children.  But now you’re saying he wanted an athletic child.

His favorite author was Hemmingway and his second favorite was Joseph Conrad.  He liked the manly writers.  His all time favorite book is The Old Man and the Sea.  Nowadays when he reads it’s still the same — all war shit, all written by men about manly things.  He sent me The Heart of the Fist in the mail a couple of years ago for example — it’s a book about Navy Seals.  I was tempted to send him something he’d hate, like The Joy Luck Club or Outline, to retaliate, a book by a women, about mostly women, just to see what he’d do.  So even his interest in literature seemed to revolve around his ideas around what it was to be a man.

And what was his idea about that?

High pain tolerance, sporty, drinker, fun loving in a jock-y kind of way, outgoing, popular enough, confident, fearless — basically a knuckle-dragging meathead, a Rambo or Conan the Barbarian type.  He enrolled me in Boy Scouts, he took the family on miserable camping trips, he insisted I play little league baseball one season and, desperate for his affection and approval, I agreed and suffered through countless hours of boredom, of teasing from my teammates because I was terrible at the game, of always dreading the next game or event.  And I saw how embarrassed of me he was — I couldn’t hit the ball, couldn’t do much of anything.  I remember he lashed me with his belt once because he came back from working overtime on a Saturday and found out I’d been playing Nintendo instead of practicing baseball like I told him I would.  But he left for work and I couldn’t help myself — I wanted to do something for myself instead of something for him.  I think the main reason he didn’t make me do a second season of baseball is because I was so bad that I embarrassed him and he wanted to avoid more of that.

What did you like doing?

Reading.  Playing Nintendo.  Hanging around with my friend Justin who accepted me exactly the way I was.  I liked even then just laying about and thinking, I would read a book and then close my eyes and visualize characters in my mind, imagine them doing things.  I rode a bike around the neighborhood some, too.  And liked baking with my mom.  I remember my Dad would watch football every Sunday, getting steadily trashed drinking fine beers like Keystone Light, his favorite, which he called The Key To Life semi-jokingly.  Sometimes he’d ask me to get him cans when he ran out.  I told him even then I didn’t like football but he would try to get me to watch games with him anyway and sometimes I would humor him because I wanted him to like me.  But in my teenage years, after the divorce, I started to make it very clear that I didn’t like football, wouldn’t watch it with him, and would not discuss it.

So that’s why you are angry he talks about it on the phone with you sometimes.  You feel you’ve told him already you don’t want to talk about it.

Yes, that’s why.  It’s probably a childhood response.  Amazing that I’m in my mid-40s and shit from my childhood still bothers and affects me.

It’s normal, we’re programmed when we’re younger — we model behavior from our parents and the time in which we learn is youth.  All mammals do it.  It’s difficult to break the modeling.

Right.  The modeling and the triggers back to crappy things that happened.  

Do you want to tell me more about things from your childhood?

There’s a lot I could talk about, I guess.  I could go into more detail about the event that led to us leaving my Dad.  He got drunk and held a knife to her throat  — didn’t cut her but she felt like it was a close thing — and the very next day we moved out, all three of us kids, while he was at work.  Moved to an adjacent town, right next door to my mom’s sister — this is my Aunt E who is now dying in hospice.  Could talk about the terror my older brother caused — I guess you already know some of those details.  Could talk about how I continued to see my Dad even though my sister and brother refused.  

Well we could also go into more detail about things your Dad did when you were younger — things you don’t remember.  There are ways to put you into a more relaxed state of mind to help with those memories.

I think I remember enough already.  And I think I’m done talking about this for today.

Why are you reluctant to explore it?

Because it hurts.  And because I don’t know what the point of talking about it now is.  I’m a middle aged man and my problems at this point in my life are of my own making.  I don’t blame my parents for anything.  So why would we do this?  My old therapist, a guy I had about five years ago during my last depressive episode, he wanted to do the same thing, uncover buried memories.  He thought it would lead to an improved understanding of myself.  You know what I told him? I said I do understand.  My Dad did terrible things to the family when we were younger.  I lived with a man who was quick to violence and created an atmosphere of anxiety and terror in his house.  I understand enough.  Remembering more of the details — why would I do this to myself?  So we can talk about it more?  Talking about this shit just makes it worse.  I know why I get upset sometimes talking to him — I know there are triggers and I know he pushes the buttons sometimes and there’s nothing to be done about it — he’s an old man, far past the ability to change who he is and how he interacts with people.

Why do you talk to him then?

It’s not healthy to not have some kind of relationship with your father.  My older brother M stopped talking to him — they haven’t spoken directly in twenty years — and it hasn’t done M a bit of fucking good.  M still obsesses about his father, blames him for his problems.   I’ve learned that having a flawed relationship with my father is better and healthier than having no relationship.

Look, I’m done talking about this today, do you have anything else you want to ask me that isn’t about my father?

We have five minutes left, we can talk about anything you want.

I don’t have anything else to talk about.  My god, therapists, all you guys want to talk about is our relationships with our parents.

I think you know that’s unfair.  We’re just exploring your past together to make sense of how you behave in the present.  We discuss a lot of different things with our time together.

OK, OK.  Sorry.  But I do want to go.

I want you to think about ways that your father affects how you interact with other people, the world, and yourself for next session.

 

Oh boy.  Homework.  Great.  

Here he smiles and reminds me that when we first started seeing one another in mid 2022 I said I would be happy to do work outside of therapy sessions if he thought it might help me and I stopped arguing with him.

 

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On Saturday I took out a notebook, placed it on my desk in my office, and I write words on it when they come to me.

So far it reads:

• lowered expectations
• excuse making for others when they do terrible things or disappoint me (because I so often excused my Dad’s behavior — partially because my mother also so often excused it.)
• hard on myself, overly critical
• willing to accept mistreatment in life — from partner / job etc.
• lack of confidence 
• difficulty pursuing my own genuine interests because I feel my father doesn’t approve and part of me still subconsciously seeks approval from him

I also had a memory of my father shouting at me and hitting me for being proud of some work I did for school — getting a “big head” — “People hate a bragger” — and I wonder if this is why I don’t post to facebook and I am always anonymous online, because I don’t want to put myself out there in any public way — and I wonder if there’s any way to fix or change any of this, or it’s too late at this point in my life.

Scarecrow would probably say I can change things through awareness and hard work and he’s probably right.