my wife and i were talking this past week about our recollections of our childhood christmases and contrasting the two. this brought about a conversation about her complex relationship with her father and how she had come to forgive him for the physical and emotional harm he had done to her and her sisters. later in the week, i thought about my own father and the difficulties in our relationship. my father never physically harmed me. i never feared him or dreaded to see him come home. yet, we were never close. i always felt as if i were a disappointment to him. i didn't like sports. i didn't want to hunt or learn to use a gun. i was fiercely independent and liked to keep to myself.
in many ways my father and i were very alike. when i look a pictures of myself now that i am what many would consider to be "elderly," i am often shocked that i am almost my dad's twin, except for our hair color. like me, he was a very private person. he didn't like to be in a crowd. he was a quiet person who spoke little and enjoyed solitary pursuits--working in the yard, wandering through the woods alone. when he hunted, he hunted squirrels which couldn't be done in large groups. unlike many of the men in our area, he didn't like to go to the deer camp and spend days in the company of other men. he loved to fish, which, like squirrel hunting, required quiet and solitude. i think he chose to fish and hunt squirrels because they were by definition individual pursuits rather than endeavors that lent themselves to large groups. i chose other hobbies, but ones that were solitary--reading, stamp collecting, playing the piano. i think i avoided sports because they required working with a group. the one sport i did take to was tennis, which is not a team sport.
i suppose because of our natures we were never close. like him, i was determined not to be dependent on my own father. in contrast to his brother who was less than two years older than him, my dad refused his father's help even when he could have used it. his brother had gone into business with his father and lived the early part of his adult life a block from his father's home with only a small field separating their two houses. as a teenager, he had often accompanied his father on business trips and been his confidant, a role my father rejected. when his father, who was well off, wanted to buy a house for my dad and my mother after dad returned from europe at the end of the second world war, my father refused, insisting on making his own way, though in the end he went to work for his father, not as a partner but as an employee. i think he wanted to be able to separate himself and his young family from his father when he pleased and not to be tied to him in a business partnership.
in our insistence on our own independence and the freedom to engage in our solitary pursuits, i think my father and i missed out on a lot. i know that he loved me, but it was always from a distance. i don't ever remember a hug from my dad and few kind words. when he was on his death bed, he told me that i had been a good son, the biggest compliment he ever paid me. i remember others--my mother, friends of my family, other relatives--telling me how proud my father was of me. i suppose this was because they sensed that my need to know my father cared for me when it was impossible for him to express his feelings to me.
in his last few years, my father shared some stories of his life with us, telling us how his own father was absent much of the time when he was growing up. my grandfather had a large manufacturing business to run in a town some distance from their home, forcing him to spend most of every week at his plant while my dad and his two siblings were left at home with their mother. my grandmother had a large extended family in and near the town where they lived and wanted her children to grow up surrounded by these many relatives. my grandfather didn't seem to want them to move to be in the town where his plant was either, so they spent six days a week living in separate places. his own distant father may account for my father's inability to express his love to his own children. even as a child, i remember my paternal grandfather being a loner, spending his days in his private suite of bedroom, bath, and sunroom, and only coming into my grandmother's part of the house for meals. they each had their own bedroom, separated by a jack-and-jill bathroom, and i always thought it odd that they didn't share much, not even a bed.
i regret that my dad and i were never able to speak openly with one another about our feelings. even when my mother died, dad pushed me, my brother, and my sister away, refusing to speak about how to deal with her passing. we were left in an emotional limbo to deal with our grief separately from him. in the years following, he distanced himself from us, only telling us of his remarriage after the fact. we were not opposed to their marriage and would have loved to have shared the ceremony with them and to have had a family celebration, but we were left out, as were her own children. i have tried to behave differently with my own children, demonstrating my affection for them verbally and in physical ways. i've let them see how much i care for their mother and have tried to include them in every decision we've made. i hope they know how much i care for them, how much they mean to me, how important their happiness is to me. when they've had big life decisions to make, they've shared them with us. i am so grateful that we have been able to be more open in our relationships than was the case in my relationship with my dad, and i hope we've broken a pattern that seemed to have started in my father's family many years ago.
may we be able to speak openly with one another of our love. may we be honest about our feelings and willing to let others know how much we care for and about them. may we not end our lives regretting that we never shared ourselves with those who matter most to us. shalom.
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