Repairing a Father/Daughter Relationship as an Adult.

1. Introduction

2. A song from my past

“Now that she’s back in the atmosphere / With drops of Jupiter in her hair…”

That song. A guy singing about a beautiful woman who he’s falling for, but feels is way out of his league, right? Impressed by her frictionless, jet-setting lifestyle. Swooning, eyebrow at the way she challenges herself, marveling at what she’s capable of.

When I first heard the song as a 20-year-old, I was instantly in a love/hate relationship. With the song. I’m thinking it’s about a woman whose every quality is so epic that the metaphor of choice is: “Celestial bodies will shed luminous teardrops composed of diamond upon her, to crown her with a crown of glory as hard and enduring as adamant.”

But then something always felt off. There’s ambiguity. Does this guy’s praise border on teasing or resentment of a gal who’s “checked all the boxes” for impressive achievements, and is frustratingly distant and unattainable?

“Now, that she's back from that soul vacation / Tracin' her way through the constellation, hey-hey (Mmm) / She checks out Mozart while she does Tae-Bo…”

Then I find out that “Drops of Jupiter” wasn’t about a man hoping to date a hot woman: It was written about his deceased mother who he imagines as this captivating and challenging figure.

And you know what? That’s a powerful relationship. Not all of the poems should be about romance. There’s mothers and sons. There’s fathers and daughters. Sisters and brothers too. If we could just figure out how to give the love and respect that we feel it makes sense to… to the ones in our lives who we are undeniably obligated to.

I’m here to tell you that every one of these family relationships has the potential to be epic. (And to break your heart.)

So I’m not here to review a song. I’m here to review one of the great quests of my own life: The quest to heal and restore and reconcile my relationship with my father.

During his life, I wouldn’t be able to write something like this, because… well, it would affect my relationship with him unavoidably.

But Dad passed away two years ago, so he’s beyond my puny misjudgements and relational fumblings. Our story is fair game now.

2. Problems

A few years back, I remember an online conversation where one person commented he’d had a happy family growing up, and a happy family as a father, but, from talking to his (now-adult) children, he gathered many of their friends had a very different experience.

I thought to myself, “Well, I could represent one more possibility that’s neither of these: an unhappy childhood followed by a transformed, warm relationship with my surviving parent when I was an adult.”

My dad was, to put it mildly, a bit of a pill. In my childhood, he was often a towering figure of anger, storming about the house, shouting at one of us for some lapse or apparent failing, or at my mom for some perceived mismanagement on her part. Or his anger would be simmering, and he would poke his head into my room and catch me not-working and toss off a cold criticism laced with casual cursing. My sister, my mom and I (especially the last two of us in that list) would walk on eggshells all the time to try to keep his anger from blowing up.

When I was seven or eight, we learned that Dad would be quitting his job and would be home all day. And this was about the same time our parents had decided to fully homeschool us. I remember being worried about this development, because, well, he was so miserable to be around.

My mom did have special tactics for “managing” dad: “You have to choose the right time to ask for things,” she would explain. When it was the “right time”– when Dad was in a good mood because things were going his way, mom would make the trek to Dad’s sprawling “office,” list in hand. His “office”, situated in one of the biggest bedrooms, was where he sequestered himself all day. Its walls were lined with shelves loaded with books and large swathes of the rug were continually being overtaken by ever-growing stacks of magazines, while alongside them neat, rectangular stacks of trade publications that he might want to read “sometime” mushrooming upwards. The door was always open, because we all knew you didn’t just go bother Dad without a good reason.

The Things Mom Wanted to Ask For were usually more activities and social outlets for me and my sister. She’d make a list of the latest 4-H events that we hoped to go to, and maybe some of the homeschool club’s outings as well. By the time we were 12 and 13, she had her technique down to a science: Ask at the right time, and also ask for more than you want, so that when he inevitably turns some of your proposals down, you hopefully still get enough. So, initially, (even with the best of timing) Dad would usually rant and rage, tell her she didn’t know anything, that she had (or that “they”–my sister and I–have) shit for brains, tell her that he’s running out of time, and that we’re never going to learn anything, never going to amount to anything.  And then later he’d come back, calmer, and either grudgingly or with a mild and generous manner agree that maybe we could have 2 or 3 outings outside the house for that month on top of 2 “regular” activities.

I understood what lots of the fears that haunted him were, though: I felt like there was never enough time, too. And I knew he always feared there wouldn’t be enough money. I knew this because I listened to him. Then, there were people and institutions that had the power to screw him over. Or to deny him what he’d worked for. He was very afraid he’d fail to teach us enough, homeschooling us. Or even if he did, maybe we would still drop out of college, like he had done. He was also afraid (I learned much later) of saying “no” to someone who was family, afraid of driving at night, and (this one I learned quite early) afraid of the tears of females.

Much of my earliest “experimenting with prayer” (as I like to quip that I got into as a teenager) was me praying for Dad. I would be lying awake in my top bunk bed, and the door would be open, with an arc of light from the hall pouring through the doorway into the otherwise dark bedroom. Along with the light, my dad’s words would pour through it, his endless tormented ranting to my mom as he’d probably assumed my sister and I were both asleep, with Dad always worrying and agonizing about money. I felt sorry for him, and prayed for him, thinking about how I had it so good as a kid, and feeling glad that, unlike him, I knew that those things didn’t need to be worried about.

And there was also the sense of God seeing all things. (If you’re growing up in Arkansas in the 1990s, you’re bound to pick up a few things about God and Christianity even if your family is the most atheist of all closeted-atheist families–and I’d certainly heard somewhere that God was an omniscient being.) So, even though my Dad had an abundant willingness to generously condemn me all through the day for many things I had not done wrong, I felt sure that if there was a God, the one thing that was certainly true about God was that He was omniscient, and so God saw in what things I was innocent. And at night, when I was alone, I took comfort in this.

When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get relief from the dark cloud of anger and worry that inhabited the house–though I’d never say it out loud, because it felt disloyal. I loved my dad, but I dreaded the interactions with him that felt emotionally out of my control. And that was most of them.

But well into my late 20s, maybe even into my 30s, I would lie in bed staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep for my rage: Thought after thought of mine silently blaming Dad for lots of patterns of dysfunctionality that were deeply ingrained within me. I knew I was furious, but inside, I was also torn, because I also knew that this was no way to go on: I needed to be able to connect with Dad (I would get immensely guilty when I would go for spans of weeks and months without calling or emailing my Dad - but I also did not want to deal with him). When I did face him, I’d need to be consistently kind to him, and not just shallowly, as a façade, but from the heart. (In a family, you can often see each others’ souls.  I could see inside him… and he could see inside me as well, at least some of the time–and, worse, if he was going to err, he was likely to err on the side of cynicism.) I needed to be a “good witness” and to patiently tell him about God, somehow, some time.

But I–really both Dad and I–did indeed find a way to bridge this silent gap. And, to my surprise, I was able to see Dad mellow with age.

3. Resources

To bridge this gap, we needed to leverage resources that we did not yet have.

But think about it: In the face of his parents’ choices, a seven-year-old child is comparatively powerless: He doesn’t have an imagination for the influence that he could have on his parents at twenty-seven. To really win at filial love, he needs to grow and mature–but he should take care how he shall grow: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”

2. The Heroes and Poets

Where would I be without heroes? A poor example of a human being, and a woman trying to live without hope.

My dad’s driving narratives were cynical: “Kid, someday you’ll learn that people are assholes.” “Religious people are all hypocrites.” (But he always bestowed these dad-proverbs as someone with “an axe to grind.”) Or he’d say “Nobody really wants you to bother them.” (Decades later, I could stand on my own two feet, and say to myself, “Maybe nobody wants him to bother them, but that is not how things are for me.”)

I needed my heroes to keep my hope. But, hey, I was literate, my parents had encouraged me to read longer books–so my youth was luminous with them: Isaiah. Moses. Paul the Apostle. Joseph, son of Jacob, reconciling his broken family. Daniel. Calm counselors and teachers in the modern days: C.S. Lewis, an ever patient voice. (I always forget how pleasant he is when I haven’t read him in awhile.) George MacDonald or someone reminding someone that though they grew up, they perhaps rather ought to have grown down. Amy Carmichael and Elizabeth Eliot. Some guy whose name I have not retained, who had been a thief before becoming a Christian, and when he learned about restitution embraced a new holy task: living on a small salary from an honest job, when he received his paycheck each week, he went to the Post Office and mailed envelopes of money to those he had stolen from to give back what he had taken. (How did he know the names of everyone he had stolen from and the amounts, I always wonder?) Corrie Ten Boom. Brother Yun. Step back in time, and you have Hudson Taylor and Jonathan Edwards. Augustine.

3. The Love of My Life.

When you come out of this, and then you get married, the person who most bears the brunt of the cost and the need to sacrifice… is your spouse. Or so it was with me.  My husband sacrificed so much as my many dysfunctionalities ran up against the realities of life.

I remember how since I, like my mom, had learned how to “manage” the frail ego of my upset dad (try to find reasons why I myself am to blame for anything that has gone wrong, true or untrue, and bring them forth). Then when I projected this on to my husband who very-much was not looking for verbose self-castigation out of me as a way to “make things better” when one of us screwed up. It… was kind of an insult, if unintended. Once, when he told me that assigning blame was not what he was looking for, I was drawn up short and wondered: “Okay, what else could I even be trying to do now?” (Wonder of wonders, a possible answer presented itself to my mind. It was something to the effect of: attempt to fix the presenting problem. Or, if it’s too late for that–amelioration or do an after-action review.) In my childhood, maintaining the social reality of “Dad is not wrong” had seemed to be what was most necessary if you wanted to avoid disaster. It overrode everything. But as an adult, I could still change.

And the sacrifice–just knowing my husband was sacrificing for me, and without giving in to bitterness or apathy at his circumstances–was such a gift. And when you get a gift like that, you don’t want to squander it.

4. A New View of What’s Past

My husband, too, could tell me things that nobody else could. He would listen to the hardest things I experienced, and so, over the years, he could also speak to them–notice something new.

One painfully-frustrating memory was from when I was a little child. My sister had a Barbie and I broke a piece of it – a necklace unique to that doll. So, being the kind of six-or-seven-year-old girl who I was, with a type of understanding of the world that was inculcated into me at that time, I wrote a letter to send to Mattel Toys to inquire about whether I could buy a necklace from that specific doll individually.

The bad part was.. my dad discovered the letter before I sent it. And when he saw the sub-par quality of its workmanship, he completely excoriated me. The handwriting was, admittedly, sloppy, and I wrote it on a sheet of white paper that was unlined. But I was completely unprepared for his response to this. After firing an unrestrained verbal volley at me, he took over. For the next several hours, he assigned me to draw carefully-measured lines on that piece of unlined paper with a ruler, and to write and rewrite the letter, and erase the guidelines, when each line was done–with many tears as well.

I blamed my dad–and that incident–a lot for perfectionism in the years that followed, as you might imagine. And for Writer’s Block. (Of course.) But it’s a funny thing having people in my life who will listen to me carefully and thoughtfully… and then challenge my assessment of the situation.

This happened one time with my husband when we discussed that story. I asserted that, even as a child, I knew that adults would praise that type of action. So I knew better than him, even at the age of six, right? But my husband had a thought: What if my dad was afraid that none of the other adults will push back? What if Dad was afraid that he won’t be able to find anyone else to hold my work to a high standard? And I thought back… those were the years where the rumblings of a huge war in education began–the controversy where the norm of always inflating the praise of children to try to “build their self-esteem” was justified as good, and needed, and best. (Maybe if it weren’t for that, I would have come up with a better parallel list there than “good, and needed, and best.”)

And it’s a fear I can understand.

5. Circumstances Beyond your Control

This is going to sound like I’m saying “You can just throw your problems at your… other problems!” But sometimes you really can. My relationship with my dad has greatly benefitted from the disappointments common to life and even frightening circumstances beyond my control.

I remember when my husband lost a job, how surprised I was with my dad’s instant sympathy for him. (This is my dad who would always talk about how when he lost a job, he’d go around to apply at different places and find a new job in about a week! But it’s different when instead of “kids these days who complain so much,” it’s a particular person who’s lost something.)

I got a surprise cancer diagnosis when I was an adult, but unusually young to be expecting that. Finding a time to get him on the phone was something I fretted and worried and prayed about. (For awhile, much to my frustration, he had asked me to just email him everything, no phone; but I wasn’t willing to do an email for this.)

The conversation was incredibly powerful: he had instant sympathy for me (of course), but didn’t freak out. (Freaking out over cancer–especially cancer in someone youngish–is shockingly common, I regret to inform you.) Dad was, instead, able to open up and express regrets about the past–about things he said to my mom when she was dying of cancer and he was feeling sorry for himself. And this was–I couldn’t imagine a more precious conversation to be having with him.

Soon after that conversation, in late December of 2014, Dad and I both had surgeries. I didn’t know about his until afterwards… and after an additional delay.

Then he sent me an email with subject line “Operation Christmas.” (“like a military action film. Maybe starring Bruce Willis.”) I’ve dug it up:

Anyway, like you, I had to stay in the hospital overnight, in fact 2 overnights. Instead of removing a stone from my bladder, they put some of their instruments into my bladder. The trouble was that they couldn't get out the stone, or one of the broken instruments, so they had to cut into me to find the missing pieces. They say that they have everything removed. I wonder?”

After another sentence or two, he added “It sounds like the same types of things that they are doing to you.”

I still smile, having forgotten the extent of his wit, when I read the line, “Now I'm dragging around the house like a 70 year old, which I am, but which I didn't feel like before going into the hospital.”

And, of course, there’s the little nudge where he reminds me of the difference between us… he razzes me about religion, by now knowing roughly where my religious convictions lie, but… it’s fine:

“Thank God, or Bill Gates, for the internet. Whichever religious persuasion that you hold. Just don't make it that Apple crew. And of course Netflix helps & DVDs.”

IV. Dad’s Stories

1. How we got to the point of Dad sharing the stories I wanted to hear

So I’ve come at you, dear reader, with an insistence on idealism: “Don’t give up,” etc., etc. And that is true, for it is good and right. But it’s not a very detailed picture. “Mash one button, with the word ‘idealism’ printed on it?”

And not only that, but–you can’t just do whatever seems like a good idea, because if you’re from a dysfunctional family, some of the things your mind has been trained are “obvious good ideas”/”the only way to do things”–just. aren’t. …either of those things! You need to find out what’s true, how people work… otherwise, your efforts will just be “barking up a dead end.” Sometimes, as a daughter, I might say to myself, “I’m trying to love Dad in spite of his faults,” when I’m really just using that as an excuse for enabling. Because it’s easier than confronting. Other times, I might want to tell myself, “I concluded I need to practice ‘tough love,’ so Dad just needs to deal with it,” when, really, there’s not that much love in it at all: It could be an act of turning her back on someone I love, letting my heart get cold and brittle, but all the while repeating a line from a cliche she heard, so I feel justified. Keep repeating it enough and you’ll believe.  (What I’m saying is, don’t repeat it. Maybe even, “you repeat this mantra at your peril.”)

There is a line that says, “You teach other people how to treat you.” (Full disclosure: When I hear someone say that, I don’t usually like the experience of the conversation I am in, and I frequently suspect there’s motivated reasoning going on. But let’s roll with it, because we live in a world full of bad advice; let’s try to make something good of these usually-unhelpful words. They are at least memorable.)

When my Dad was on a subject I liked, I’d ask him more questions… slowly learning what kinds of specific questions open up the channels, (floodgates, on really a good day), what kinds of questions lead to more interesting  and what kinds of questions bring down the portcullis. I exploited the one great skill I gained in my past of being such a timid person in social situations, and that was LISTENING.

I wanted to hear ordinary stories, not the “faux-edifying” canned narrations that we say to try to encourage children to “work hard, play nicely, and be patient.” The ones that struck him as funny. The ones that marked and shaped him forever.

And here is some of what I got.

Wonder over new technology - picturephones

Dad was captivated by the changes in technology. It should me a piece of who he was when he recounted waiting in line all morning to get to use one of the first videoconferencing devices to talk to someone on the East Coast.  Was it the Bell Picturephone?  It looks like they installed 3 calling booths for those–one in NYC, one Chicago and one in DC–in June 1964.  Dad would have been 22 years old.  Both from listening to his account of it (it doesn’t sound like he’d planned to talk to any particular person; just whoever was next in their own line on the other end) and from knowing him, though, I think it was probably for a free promotional sort of thing - so possibly a bit earlier than that.

Marvelling at technology.  “And here we are talking to each other like this [videoconferencing] now.”  Marvelling that here he was–he’d made it to 80–talking to me, his daughter–”You’re 40 already?”  Marvelling at how time flies.

Dad and his childhood best friend.

He’d spent a lot of time at his best friend’s house, growing up.  He told me about so many evenings hanging out with his best friend and his best friend’s mom.  They would play board games.  My favorite anecdote was how the two of them would “gang up” together against the mom–my dad playing to make his buddy win, even if that would guarantee coming in last place himself.  “You’re not supposed to play the game to intentionally lose!” she would insist.  Oh, but you can!  I can imagine the child version of myself doing that, too.

The saddest anecdote from that house, but unforgettable, and which Dad had recalled dozens of times around my sister and me when we were growing up, was about his best friend’s dad.  His best friend’s mom would send him to the store because they’d run out of milk.  And he’d go out to get milk, and then she wouldn’t see him for hours, and he’d come back–frequently bringing the wrong thing, maybe bread or some other staple rather than the milk–because he had gotten completely soused at the local bar.

I remember dad saying that one time his best buddy’s mom ate cold pizza for breakfast.  “How can you eat cold pizza for breakfast?” my dad would say, shaking his head and making a bit of a face.  After making that comment with a humorous grimace at least a half-dozen times, dad explained why she was doing that: “No, she was mad at her husband, and doing it to make him feel sick.  He couldn’t imagine eating such a thing right then, as he was nursing a hangover from the night before.”

And dad told me the story of how he’d met his best friend.  To hear how Dad remembered things, to be a boy growing up in Chicago suburbs in the 1940s and ‘50s, well, you had better love baseball. Summer revolved around pick-up games of baseball in the neighborhood. Dad remembered that when he had a brand new catchers’ mitt, he met a couple of other boys had a bat and ball but no mitt. One of the boys, their appointed leader, walked up to him and asked if he’d join. It’s such a little thing. And yet–to think of how long ago, my dad was just a little kid wanting to be included.

Someone I could thank for the relative absence of alcohol in my house.

Another brief conversation that had changed Dad’s life, which he told me in recent years.

He recalled one Saturday or Sunday morning–the morning after some bar-hopping or partying with his best friend and a group of their friends.  I think my dad was waking up on his best buddy’s couch after crashing at his apartment or something.

His best buddy’s wife was the only other person up that early, and I think my dad complained of a hangover, or sought an antidote.  In response, she expressed something along the lines of: “I don’t even know why you drink.  When you drink, you act very silly.”

His image of himself was instantly shattered!  “Before that, I thought that when I drank, I was like Dean Martin! Suave and smooth, like Dean Martin with a martini in his hand,” he told me.  But here he was talking to a trusted friend who wasn’t trying to convince him of any point, but just voicing aloud a thought which was obvious to her (and, she had assumed, to him). In the eyes of an actual woman, he was merely a guy “who acted silly when drunk.”  He was suddenly dramatically less-motivated to drink to excess with a group!

My dad’s best friend’s wife–I remember her.  When we went up to Wisconsin for a trip one summer, we met Dad’s best friend and his wife. A gentle middle-aged woman with a puff of crimped blonde hair, probably getting a bit dotty by then. She’s gone now, but I’m so glad I got to hear what I owe to her.

Dad defending his co-worker Winston

His co-worker Winston was brilliant, and also had an addiction. He showed up late for work one day. This was the late 1950s or early ‘60s. Everyone was thinking, to use some words of my dad’s, “pothead.” What people said out loud, in their murmurings, was more along the lines of: “Unfair! Why does he get to show up at 10:00 with nobody complaining? You or I would never be able to get away with that!”

My dad felt the ire building inside him. He was maybe the youngest, newest guy in the office, but he couldn’t let that go by without speaking up: “He gets more done in four hours than most of the rest of us do in eight!” The whole room went silent.

As people put their heads down and got back to their own work, my dad thought he heard the boss, over at his own desk, quietly chuckling to himself after that.

Dad’s loyalty for Winston was characteristic. Dad once told me that, whenever he was in a new workplace, he “tried to find out who’s the smartest guy, and follow him around.”

A Conversation in a Hospital Room

“Do you like to dance?” my Dad asked me. It took me by surprise. The TV in the hospital room was playing some sitcom and there were a couple people going dancing in the storyline of that episode, so it shouldn’t have. I answered, yeah, my mind off in a different direction.

I could’ve done with the reminder “Remember: he is not you.”

“I didn’t like to dance.” he said.

I turned towards him and wondered where this was going.

“I had pimples and didn’t like being up close near a woman, where she could see that. And you know I had glasses.”

Oh, wow. My poor dear dad.

Then months later, on SKYPE, he casually mentions “I didn’t go to my prom.” I quickly rush in conversationally, with all the thoughts about how that is okay, and how the question relates to my own life, and my husband having no interest in attending prom. Instead of asking: Wait, why would he be saying this?

“Your mom, she wanted me to take her to prom.”

Oh.

My mom married someone else before Dad.

I have a half-brother and a half-sister, so I don’t think about going back in time to change. So many consequences. Time-travel paradoxes, etc. Skip those hypotheticals.

But, for my dad… my mom also died at around the age of sixty. They didn’t get together until about their late 30s, although they grew up in the same town and went to the same high school.

He was thinking about a lot of lost years there. There was nothing for me to do but to listen–but I’m so glad I was able to show up so I could be there for that conversation.

V. Conclusion: A Privileged View: beholding Dad’s vulnerable self.

When you’re a child, your parents make sure that the side of themselves that you see is carefully-controlled. Mom and Dad are smart and capable. They are strong. They don’t need help. It’s kind of propaganda.

It was crazy-wonderful to me that I got to the point where I could hear stories about my Dad’s youthful hijinks all the time, and he understood–correctly–that those were really the stories I wanted. Not him justifying how he did this and that right and I should learn from him, just–”I did this thing and this is what happened.”

And, even beyond that, Dad and I got as far as me hearing the stories from his younger and more-vulnerable self–even the losses and the sorrows. Because he wanted to talk about them.

Five out of five. Highly recommend.