There is a scene in "The Godfather" in which the dim but faithful Luca Brasi congratulates Don Corleone on his daughter's wedding day. Nervous and eager to please, he finally delivers his much-practiced hope for the young couple: "And may their first child be a masculine child."
I'm not sure Luca Brasi would have ever found an occasion to offer his best wishes for a feminine child. He was a product of his times. Back then, you needed a male heir to inherit your sprawling crime syndicate. The idea of a woman whacking a drug-peddling upstart over a plate of clams never even crossed poor Luca's frontal lobes.
But those days, like Luca Brasi, swim with the fishes. Boys are falling behind in the workforce, in higher education, and at primary academics. According to the Associated Press, even the sprawling crime syndicates of Italy are now enjoying an era of unmatched chromosomal diversity at their highest levels. With the ascension of the double X and the supposed decline of the Y, you might expect the birth of a girl to be heralded with, at least, an equal sort of excitement to the announcement of the birth of a boy. And yet, as 18 million cracks appear on the highest of ceilings, perhaps we should train our gaze a little lower to the first ceiling our daughters encounter: the middling enthusiasm toward the impending arrival of a baby girl.
Or maybe it's just me.
I remember the sonogram tech revealing that our first child was a masculine child, in the same way I remember Oprah revealing she had given her audience members cars. "Look under your seats and you'll find your ... BAY-BEE'S PEEE-NIS!!”
I screamed until I lost my voice and nearly knocked out the sonogram tech jumping up and down wildly, crying while clutching my keys close to my chest.
To be fair, “baby” was a foreign enough concept for my 27-year-old brain to deal with. Telling me that I had to figure out how to raise a “girl” -- one of the other great mysteries of my life -- would have seemed about as intimidating as informing me that it was my job to figure out how to fix the Large Hadron Collider. It would have ended with me living under an assumed name outside of New Braunfels, Texas.
Regardless, I found myself doing the baby boy victory lap.
I was excited about having a boy, but I was also excited because I had endured a good deal of ball-breaking from my guy friends before the gender had been determined. My buddies ribbed me about having a yucky girl baby. One friend went so far as to assure me my wife and I would only have girl babies for future pregnancies as well. It would be a plague on my house -- a plague of girls.
When it turned out the curse had been lifted -- or, more precisely, that it never existed -- I admit: I crowed.
After that opening salvo of macho banter, I began to wonder if we speak about the sex of our impending children in vastly different ways and if the reservations about baby girls were not just limited to juvenile 20-something dudes. But it wasn't until we were expecting our second child, two years later, that the question transitioned from a passing curiosity to a legitimate concern.
From the time my wife announced her pregnancy, I knew she'd be having a girl. At 29, I had begun to experience a personal sea change, as the motivational speakers say. And maybe, on some level, I had known for a while a baby girl was coming, and I didn't want her to grow up with a lefty hypocrite father: “Baby girl, you can be anything you want to be ... as long as it doesn't interfere with your brother's success.” After all, I want my children to grow up and resent me for the right reasons, like my emotional unavailability and my middle-class white male rage.
The first eight months of my wife's pregnancy were full of bizarre and polarizing gender issues outside our home, unfolding as it did during the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. The less-than-stellar response to an estrogen-fused battle for the White House seemed to parallel, on a macro level, my one-time fear of welcoming a baby girl into my own house. And I found myself shifting from being a Howard Dean-style frat-house Democrat to a Jezebel-reading, Hillary-supporting Democrat who no longer used the word "bitch." Well, not every 15 minutes, anyway.
Armed with this new sense of feminine awareness (and, perhaps, a lingering embarrassment about my previous attitude), I became hypersensitive of how other people reacted to our little girl's imminent arrival.
A kind of pitying, you-lose sentiment was common among dads without daughters. They always delivered some polite variation of, “Dude, that sucks." Or, "What are you gonna do with a girl?” I remember talking to a friend whose second son was born with a heart defect that required two open-heart surgeries before the kid's first birthday. When I mentioned how impressed I was with the way he and his wife shouldered such difficulty he said, with a sigh,"It's been rough." He then slapped me on the back before continuing, "I'm just glad we didn't have a girl. Good luck with all that!"
As for women, well, they never went that far, but even their enthusiasm seemed dialed down. During our son's birth, the blue-haired waitresses at our favorite diner had been kind enough to act as my wife's unofficial pregnancy support group. They doled out advice on anything from sleep deprivation to breast-feeding. And when it came to gender, the decision was unanimous from every waitress in the joint: Boys are easier than girls, and girls are difficult and demanding, and then they turn into teenage girls and then they're at their worst.
This line of thinking was not confined to the old-school atmosphere of Bob's Diner either. I remember one of our hipper neighbors responding to our news by griping about how easy her three boys were versus her 11-year-old daughter, a constant source of aggravation. The girl rolled her eyes but bore this proclamation with a surprising dignity, considering that her mother was standing next to her at the time.
Even my perpetually sensible Indian pediatrician ended my daughter's first checkup by saying, “Little girls are very special. But then they turn into teenage girls, and you want them to just go away.”
This wasn't exactly the stuff of Maurice Chevalier.
It's true that an occasional mom without a daughter experienced an obvious moment of longing. Dads who already had girls were congratulatory enough. But dads who only had girls seemed, at times, to be overcompensating, trying too hard to prove just how cool they were with it. One gentleman earnestly regaled me with the hidden charms of "High School Musical" and the Jonas Brothers. It was petrifying. It just didn't seem like anyone was that pumped about the whole thing. I refuse to include grandparents here; they would have been happy if my wife had delivered a Labrador.
Maybe the reactions were muted for practical reasons. This was, after all, our second child. As a second child myself, I am acutely aware of the dip in excitement between the first kid and the second. (Although my sister might argue that she is acutely aware of the way boys are received as opposed to the way girls are.)
When my wife and I told people we were having a boy, their faces would light up, their eye-smiles would have made Tyra Banks proud. People radiated a sincere and palpable joy at the idea that another Y chromosome would be added to the global gene pool. But when it came to my daughter the only unbridled enthusiasm I remember came in relation to the fact that we already had a boy -- thus creating the “Rich Man's Family” (a very important concept in my Philadelphia neighborhood). I'd never heard of it before. I have heard about it almost weekly since my daughter was born.
For my part, I can honestly say I was just as excited about my daughter as I was about my son. And she's even better out of the belly. Turns out, while we have years before we have to negotiate her first bare-midriff prom dress, none of the dire prophecies about her demands or attitude have come to pass. In fact, she is a calming counterbalance to my son, who takes after his hyperactive mother. My daughter is laid-back. At 10 months old, she's grunty and built like a linebacker and beautiful and perfect, and she makes me want to be a better father, one who takes risks and stakes out my own success. Her first real word was "Orca," as in the whale, and that is awesome. I love her with every rapidly aging fiber of my being.
But I sometimes wonder if I would feel the same way if I did not already have my masculine child. If she had come first. Would I have been as excited about her arrival? Would I love her just as much? Or would I feel like something was missing?
Of the many things we love about Google, certainly the gentle, non-judgmental way it gives us an out on our fuzzy thinking and bad spelling is right up there. So we’re going to do this in Google-ese. Earlier today we did a search for “bad fathering” and got a “Did you mean: bad mothering?” You also get a similar suggestion if you Google “poor fathering.” In fact, the very first thing at the top of the page when you search for "poor fathering" is "Mommie Dearest (poor mothering ability)". The first two true results for "bad fathering," meanwhile, are for a band called Bad Fathers and "First time father deserves a bash."
Really, Google, did you mean that?
We know it’s nothing personal; it’s just an algorithm based on the most common queries. And while we appreciate your patience when we suck at spelling “sacerdotal” and don't quite know whether that song goes “whoo hoo” or “woo hoo,” trust us that when we’re looking for faulty fathering, it’s not dear old mom we seek. Who knew you were so Freudian?
Parents just don’t understand. Like, say you’re a once promising young actress whose career is stalled and whose high-profile relationship recently ended. And then suddenly you have to consider obtaining a restraining order against your dad after he mouths off about wanting to take you "to an undisclosed location” to get you straight.
Or you’re a British singer known for your powerful pipes, big hair and predilection for drugs and alcohol. You’ve been laying low a few months, trying to get your life together, and then your dad tells the British press all about your “fantastic” new boob job.
Or you’re a blond pop star in the midst of a comeback after some impressive screw-ups, and then Fox gets wind that you’re so “out of it” you just do whatever your manager father tells you to.
Or you’re the most famous 16-year-old in the world who just feels like taking a Twitter break, and then your dad starts tweeting about how he wants you to stay.
All of this, by the way, is within days of Jon Gosselin's getting sued by TLC for his rampant media appearances, and Richard Heene facing criminal charges for the balloon boy fiasco.
Stop it, dad, you’re embarrassing me!
The creepy showbiz dad has been with us since Hildegard of Bingen’s parents pimped her out to the convent. But no longer content to stand on the sidelines, a new breed of doting father has emerged -- tireless, opinionated, and possibly more desperate for attention than his famous offspring. And the fact that so many of these TMI-dispensing dads are talking about their young, famous and notoriously troubled daughters just adds an extra coating of ick to the whole business.
In a week of shameless spotlight hogging, it’s Mr. Michael Lohan who has distinguished himself most. First, he appeared on Friday’s "Maury Povich Show" to share how he cries that his daughter has become a “hollow, hollow person.” Then told X17online.com, “If I can't get a conservatorship, then I'm going to take her to an undisclosed location and get her straight. But I know I'm gonna get charged with kidnapping.” Today, he has an open letter to Lindsay in the new InTouch that reads in part, “Let me help you get your life back so that you can build it to where you once were."
Lindsay, meanwhile, has displayed a charming lack of self-awareness by telling Us magazine, “I'm so hurt that someone who calls himself my father needs to use the press to communicate with me."
For troubled stars on the other side of the pond, however, things are looking up. During an interview Wednesday on a British morning talk show, Mitch Winehouse spoke of the need for more funding for drug rehab in the U.K. and daughter Amy’s own recovery. He then digressed about the singer’s “fantastic” new boobs, adding his relief that he didn’t have to pay for them. Joe Simpson, your previous comments about daughter Jessica’s “double D’s” have just been massively owned.
No one would suggest that Lindsay Lohan, still smarting from her disastrous debut as Ungaro’s artistic director, is experiencing the best of times. When the 23-year-old showed up at a gala in New York this week, her haggard, apparently cosmetically enhanced appearance was front-page news. (Let’s put it this way: She made Donatella Versace look good.) And Winehouse, who is at work on a new album, has her own history of questionable judgment. It's just that after a few reckless sound bites from Dad, one begins to wonder where they get it.
Of course not every show business daughter has a disturbing tell-all memoir in her future, and far be it from us to suggest a cause and effect between dubious parenting and a penchant for driving into sidewalks or heckling Bono. But if I had the kind of father who went around talking about how fabulous my breasts are, I’d be shitfaced 24/7.
Why do these guys do it? Good dads, we believe, love their daughters -- they let them dance on their feet when they’re little and fret over their suitors when they’re big. When the relationship is healthy and appropriate, there’s an almost romantic element of mutual adoration.
But the weird dad is in a class all his own. He too easily reminds us of the shudder-inducing older man/much younger woman cliché, then he makes it all that much more vivid by gassing on about his beautiful, troubled daughter’s physical attributes or wanting to “detox her myself.” I'd say it’s a fine line, but honest to God, it’s not that hard. And it smacks of bonus jealousy and competitiveness and, if she’s over 18, some intense control issues.
There’s nothing worse for a parent than to stand by helplessly and see your child in pain. But anybody who thinks that going on Maury is going to make it better is perhaps not being entirely honest. The bottomless public appetite for scandalous celebrities makes it unnervingly easy to get airtime or magazine space on a famous daughter's gin-soaked coattails. Easy to be a hanger-on first and a parent second. The world is chock-full of girls going wild because they didn’t feel they got enough attention from their fathers. Congratulations, Lindsay and Amy, your antics have commanded the attention of yours. And in the process they just happen to be soaking up plenty for themselves.
In the new movie "The Boys Are Back" (which, for the record, I haven't seen), Clive Owen plays a young widower, Joe, figuring out how to raise a 6-year-old son, Artie, on his own. His "chosen style of child rearing," writes Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly, "is distracted permissiveness. Bedtimes are indistinguishable from playtimes, meals are indistinguishable from delivery pizza, and if his younger son wants a joyride on the hood of a car, Dad is happy to get behind the wheel." When Joe's son from a previous marriage, Harry, arrives to visit for the summer, the apparent strictness of his upbringing is contrasted unfavorably with what Artie's getting from freewheeling Dad. But, says Roger Ebert, Joe's parenting style, presented here as liberating, actually reads as selfish, and "[s]ome of the film's more successful passages involve the ways Harry becomes the father his poor little brother doesn't have."
Although the film is drawn from a memoir by Simon Carr and is thus, as they say, "based on a true story," Schwarzbaum notes that the movie version "dulls whatever edge the story has in conveying the bewilderment of an overwhelmed single father." In other words, what we're seeing is the typical Hollywood version of fatherhood -- wacky, childish and occasionally dangerous -- minus the standard killjoy Mom for balance.
Judah Schiller, writing in the London Times this weekend, offers a much more realistic portrayal of unexpected and tragic single fatherhood. After his wife died from complications of giving birth to their third child, Schiller struggled not only with profound grief, but the realization that he had, until that point, been nothing like an equal partner in parenting. "A friend took [baby] Satya every day for a solid year while I was at work. But I had to learn how to be a parent and not merely a working father who lets the mother do all the parenting ... I had failed to appreciate how hard [my wife] had worked to raise the children and take care of the house. Many men grossly undervalue their wives' contributions. So I tried to pay attention to that: How do I reinvent my life to be a better person?"
Schiller was charged with raising three children and becoming a better person while mourning his beloved wife, an element of the story that's often elided from the Hollywood version of loss, or at least glossed over. In "The Boys Are Back," Joe has conversations with his dead wife, as both real and fictional people will, but thanks to movie magic, the wife is right there with him, diminishing the sense of loss. (Ebert: "please, please, give us a break from the scenes where the ghost of the departed turns up and starts talking as if she's not dead.") Schiller, on the other hand, writes that "for the first six months, it was difficult for me to cradle Satya without tears streaming down my face, silently screaming that his mother could not hold her baby." Like many grieving people, he was overwhelmed by an outpouring of support -- but only at first." After three months, however, the support died down, and the number of people who remembered grew fewer and fewer. I felt isolated as a father among mothers, and seeing families together was so poignant. I didn't go to the mums' groups. I think mothers found me difficult to approach, so they just got on with their lives." As it turns out, widowhood isn't just a 24/7 party with no stinky girls allowed.
I haven't read Carr's memoir, but reviews suggest it, too, is far more truthful about the grief, frustration and fear that went along with his "manly" neglect of tidiness and refusal to be overprotective. In an age and culture where we routinely shame both "helicopter parents" and those trying to raise "free-range kids" -- and where mothers usually bear the brunt of that shaming, feeling pressure to do not only what they believe is right for their children but what will be perceived as right -- such a perspective from a single father can add much to the conversation. Is it really such a sin to leave the living room a mess? To let the kid play on the monkey bars even if he might fall off? And why are we so likely to give men a pass on those things, yet mothers who evince a similar laissez-faire attitude are demonized? These are important, interesting questions about parenting, gender roles, how we see ourselves and what we teach our children. But when an honest memoir about single fatherhood gets shellacked, as Schwarzbaum puts it, "with a gloss of sunshiny affirmation," what we're left with only reinforces the same old stereotype of the contemporary dad: Bighearted yet intractably doofy, and so congenitally ill-suited to adult responsibility, a stabilizing (read: buzzkilling) female influence is necessary to save his children from malnutrition and suspicious hygiene, if not death by misadventure.
Moms and dads alike, single and partnered -- not to mention their children -- deserve more than this myth that women instinctively know what they're doing with kids while men, left to their own devices, will neglect their young at all times except at playtime. In reality, the world contains terrible mothers, amazing fathers and a whole lot of people in between, just trying to do their best. As long as we keep promoting the fiction that women are naturally nurturing and capable, and men are naturally reckless and self-centered, moms won't get all the help they deserve -- and dads won't get all the credit they do. Even casting single fathers as heroes for stepping up and becoming primary caregivers when the only alternatives would be unthinkable to most, is disturbingly patronizing. Under the circumstances, says Schiller, "How could I do anything but step up and try to be an amazing parent?"
Steven Greene, the North Carolina State professor whose research on how parenthood changes politics I blogged about yesterday, writes in to note that the liberalizing effect on mothers is much stronger than the conservative impact on fathers.
That is women with children are often more liberal, but dads are, more often than not, no different than men without children. When we do see these conservative differences for dads, we hypothesize that the Republican rhetoric has largely been effective, e.g., men want to keep the government out of their way in providing for their family. For example, men actually start working more when they have kids thus lower taxes means more take-home pay to provide for the family rather than appreciating the government services that benefit children/families.
The fact that a majority of dads do not change their political allegiance after parenthood suggests that the press release from N.C. State pushed by EurekAlert slightly misrepresented Greene's conclusions. However, Larry Letich, a psychotherapist in Bethesda, Md., offers a thoughtful response explaining why the minority might become more conservative that feels intuitively on-the-mark to me.
To begin with, social science research going back about 15 years, but which is most likely still true, shows that when most couples have their first child, the wife (now a new mother) becomes strongly identified with her role as caregiver while the husband and new father becomes more identified with his role as provider, often working longer hours and devoting himself more diligently to his career. (This usually results in tension within the couple, but that's a whole different topic.)
Since most American men work in business, becoming more invested in being a provider may mean identifying more with the attitudes of one's employer. Men may take on the attitude that "everyone must pull their weight; the boss deserves the money he gets; anybody can succeed and if you don't, it's your own fault." Being a renegade, even secretly, is not a good way to get the bosses in your company to like you and consider you promotable.
What's more, American liberalism has been totally fixated for at least 30 years on what you called "nanny-statism" (the providing of more and better social services to people) and not on any meaningful kind of critique of the bosses who run America. There really isn't much in the liberal message or the liberal legislative agenda that speaks directly to the problems of men who are trying to be good fathers and providers. A politician who could figure out a way to address the stress of the average middle-class American male in a meaningful way -- protecting their jobs or their incomes when practically any kind of work can be shipped overseas to enrich the ultra-wealthy, for example -- that politician would start seeing more support from middle-class men. He or she'd have a hard row to hoe, though, since any powerful person who questioned the "You-can-be-a-millionaire-if-you-want-to-be-so-stop-complaining" attitude that has ruled America since 1981 would be attacked a million times a day by the right wing noise machine, now made noisier and even nastier by all the twittering idiots they've empowered to do their dirty work.
Speaking purely personally, the first paragraph of Letich's e-mail resonates very strongly with my own experience (from the father side of the equation, not the mother's).
So what is it, exactly, that makes fathers turn conservative?
From research presented by NC State professor Steven Greene and Dr. Laurel Elder of Hartwick College at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting, we learn that "Parenthood makes moms more liberal, dads more conservative."
Unfortunately, the summary from EurekAlert doesn't offer any theories as to why this might be so, but I think that with reader help, I can fill in the blanks.
The mom part is obvious. Since even in these supposedly progressive times, moms end up doing must of the child-rearing, they have an instant, intuitive grasp of the necessity of a strong welfare state. They naturally appreciate the advantages provided by state-funded day care and education, because without government, they'd be doing all of it. Moms generally take care of most of the kid's doctor and dentist appointments, so they also understand why comprehensive health care insurance is essential. They also knowthat leaving kids alone to organize their own anarcho-syndicalist communes where they can do whatever they want is a recipe for smashed crockery and peanut butter stains on the Persian carpets. Moms think libertarians are just silly. Moms provide most of the nannying -- of course they are pro nanny-state.
But dads? Why do dads get more conservative?
This is something of a puzzler. But I have a couple of theories.
What else?
Dear Cary,
This is an epically long letter -- sorry. To some extent, I just needed to put it all down on paper so I could get a grip on it: see the patterns and find some coherence in the whole thing. What I'm writing about is such a large part of me that I can't find a way to edit it down. I suspect you understand.
I need some advice about dealing with an alcoholic, specifically my father. I'm 21 and my dad has been drinking since I was about 4 years old. I guess he's what you might call "high functioning" -- he has a stable job as a department manager, doesn't get violent or abusive in any way, doesn't drink hard alcohol as far as I know, just beer. Because of this, I didn't know he had a problem until I was a teenager. Looking back, I realize that almost every memory I have of him until I was about 12 includes a beer can: doing work around the house, working at his desk, watching TV, on camping trips. I think he's not really meant to have a family and a high-pressure job. My impression today is that he began to feel trapped and depressed, and started dealing with it by drinking. But of course, I thought it was normal and everything was great.
I adored my father, like many little girls do. I was born 10 weeks premature, which resulted in my mother and I being not at all close, so my dad was often the one who was there for me. He was the more patient parent, introverted like me, and the polar opposite of my mom, personality-wise. She came from a highly dysfunctional family full of alcoholics, failed marriages and absent parents. In spite of it all, she came out shockingly sane, but chronically depressed and not at all familiar with "normal" child development or child-parent relationships. My brother and I were expected to be emotionally competent far beyond our years -- many confrontations between us revolved around my inability to be adequately "grateful for all that she sacrificed" to raise us as a stay-at-home mom. So, naturally, my father's alcoholism really messed with her and the more he drank, the more she leaned on her kids for support.
Finally, when I was maybe 12 or 13, she sat us down for a talk with my father present, and informed us that he was an alcoholic. I really didn't understand the ramifications of it, but I took on her anger and betrayal and joined her in a messy confrontation with him. Looking back, it must have been absolutely shaming and a really ineffective way to handle the problem. He agreed to go to counseling, but quit after a couple of sessions. Over the next few years, things were tense, to put it mildly. My parents were miserable -- my mother furious and my father beginning to withdraw -- but neither was willing to divorce, which was my greatest wish. I wanted the whole thing to be over with, for everyone's sake.
For a little while after the "intervention," I continued to be closer to my dad, but it was obvious that I was expected to choose a parent's side, and as he began to withdraw emotionally, I switched to my mom. A year or two later, he and I had an enormous fight (I think he must have been drunk) which culminated in him bitterly observing "I used to be your hero," to which I shot back, "Well, I found out you're not so perfect." After that, we were done. I felt angry and betrayed and he refused to reach out to me again, so we just quit having a relationship.
Actually, he quit having a relationship with anyone. He lived in the house, but worked and slept in a basement room, spent a lot of nights out (presumably at work, though we never asked and he never said), and quit eating meals with us. I refused to have anything more than a curt conversation with him. He continued to drink, though he kept it as hidden as possible. Over time he became more and more irrational and moody. My mom continued to bend over backward to keep him happy, but I decided I didn't want to play the game and just went through daily life in the house like he didn't exist unless I absolutely needed something from him.
Finally, two years ago I moved out to go to college on the other side of the country. My little brother left last year. I've been home for some vacations, but I'm staying away this summer for my own sanity. On top of all this, I took my mother to see a family therapist this winter, at the suggestion of my own therapist who had been helping me work through the mess of all this. My mom felt instantly betrayed by the mere suggestion that she had been a less-than-perfect mother and the idea that I might want to be my own person instead of her support system. I managed to set up a rule that I was no longer going to be dragged into her passive-aggressive conflicts with my father, which has been helpful for me. However, she has now withdrawn from me, rarely initiates contact, and doesn't really have much to say to me anymore. I have no contact with my father outside of short discussions about financial aid or the family health insurance, which require his input. Once every few months he tries to start a conversation with me over e-mail, but they never go anywhere. When I'm at home, we ignore each other's existence.
So, I'm sitting here, on the verge of being a grown-up, feeling kind of disjointed and parentless. Now that I've broken out of the messed-up dynamics of my childhood and set some boundaries for myself, I've started to revisit this history with my father, and it turns out that, angry as I've been with him, I really miss having him in my life. He was the parent my mother couldn't be for me when I was little. And I have a hard time letting him go because I see so much of myself in him. But at the same time, he's chosen alcohol over functional relationships in his life. He controls my mother's life because he controls the household finances and she's co-dependent with no real income of her own. My brother still talks to him; I guess that's the side he chose when it reached that point. My dad spends a lot of money on him instead of time and genuine effort. I expect any day to get a call saying Dad has been injured or killed driving drunk.
I know I can't make him change. I know he's pretty dysfunctional and to blame for a lot of things. But I also know he must be as miserable as the rest of us, and I'm starting to wonder (here's the point to all this): Am I being unfair to him? Does he deserve, simply as a human being, to have a daughter who will talk to him? What can I expect from him, if it's even possible to have some sort of relationship with an alcoholic? I'm worried that I'm being immature and immoral by shutting him down so completely. But I never, ever want to stoop to his level like my mother has, and I don't ever want to be used emotionally by him. Is it time to just give up or is it time to reach out?
Thanks so much,
J
Dear J,
It's true that your letter is long, but I agree that each part of it is important, and the task is to find the pattern in it. I am glad you wrote it all down. Each time someone tells their story, people who also have grown up with alcoholic dads are helped.
I have two main responses. One concerns how you as an individual will navigate between two poles of being. The other concerns your father's alcoholism, and how he might get some help.
On the first point, let's just say that one pole of being is the you as a completely unique individual. The other pole is the you who exists in knowledge of and opposition to your parents -- the you who has made a pact with herself never to repeat the mistakes of your parents.
Neither of these poles represents an absolute state; rather, you are a unique individual trying not to repeat your parents' mistakes. You are trying to have a relationship with them as you are, not as the circumstances of your upbringing might dictate that you be. We are a synthesis of utter uniqueness and the shaping forces of experience. We live in the tension between uniqueness and repetition.
As we question and challenge our parents' negative examples, we also must question our own iron-clad determination not to repeat those negative examples.
Determined not to repeat "my father's mistakes," I am in the process of repeating them even as we speak. I am so afraid of abandoning plans, and thus repeating my father's pattern, that at times I have been rigid, and so have not become conscious of what is the next thing, and so have missed opportunities, and in that way have replicated my father's pattern! In being so determined to make a marriage that works I have at times failed to live authentically in the life of the marriage, have administered the marriage instead of living in it, like some remote bureaucrat in a desert highrise, grading the marriage's adherence to program. In resolving not to let my inherent wildness destroy me, I have destroyed some of my inherent wildness and with it some of my life force and love and beauty and desire and music. I have been so fearful of repeating my father's impulsive changes that I have in my own life become a little rigid and conventional, although at heart I am naturally intuitive and thus blessed with the ability to act with wise impulse.
The focus on not repeating negative examples seems to bring them to life!
The "not" part does not seem to be as strong as the "what" part.
In playing tennis, we avoid saying to ourselves, "I must not hit the ball out." Our brain does not seem to get the "not" part. We must instead visualize the ball going in. Likewise, in life, we visualize what we are trying to bring into being, instead of focusing on what to avoid.
So to the extent that you can survive it, I think you must have a relationship with your father. This relationship with your father can be your laboratory for growth. There are probably areas of life in which you did not grow because of your truncated relationship with your father. Coming back into his life can be a way for you to build, piece by piece, your way of relating.
So I suggest you forge a framework for relating to your dad. Identify safe, relatively neutral areas in your home town where you can go with your dad, where he feels comfortable and where you feel comfortable.
If he drinks steadily throughout the day, you may want to identify a time when he is not too hung over but not too drunk -- perhaps mid-afternoon. Or perhaps lunchtime at work is a time you can visit him, if his workplace is governed by corporate norms.
If being with him is too difficult, too upsetting, too dangerous, then you will need to back off. But I think that measured, regular contact with your dad is better than cutting off contact altogether. There is something there, even if it is buried and distorted by the alcoholism. There can be at least a continuum of contact. If nothing else, by staying in touch, you will have up-to-date contact info.
As you occupy this difficult space, notice yourself in opposition to your parents. Then notice yourself in the absence of your parents. Each is an abstraction, a false pure essence: the you that is only you, and the you formed by your parents. Neither is real. Find the middle. Live in the tension between these two. Notice how it feels to move from one to the other. Notice how narrow is the space where you only oppose your father or your mother. Notice how narrow is the space of your own uniqueness. Notice the power in these poles of attraction and repulsion.
To be more concrete: You love your father. Your father has a disease. The disease distorts his personality and his thinking and causes him to act in ways that are harmful to himself and harmful to others. But there is a man in there who is your father and he has been the most important man in the world to you. You love him. Because you love him it is painful beyond words to see him distorted and destroyed. Your task is to handle it with boundaries.
I know how difficult this father thing is.
I know how difficult it is to accept that in spite of the many, many ways he can be helped, you cannot help him until he is ready. In spite of what I know, I find myself thinking, Couldn't you cook up some sort of real intervention? -- not the shaming and self-serving drama that your mom concocted (wow, what a scene that must have been!) but a professional intervention, with a treatment option. Why not try that? I mean, it sounds like he hasn't really tried ... and I have just fallen again into the same old trap everyone falls into, haven't I? I know that we are powerless over the alcoholism of others and yet, and yet ... I cannot let this go! (Why not? Because I'm no different from anybody else!)
Has he ever said he wants to quit? Has he ever admitted he has a problem? What was this family conference about? If he went to a counselor for a couple of sessions, perhaps he at least had an inkling of his problem. And then maybe the shame and trauma of the family conference just shut him down completely, and now he is all alone and full of self-pity and whatnot.
But maybe he is ready. You could at least try to find out. (See how tenaciously I cling to the belief that he can be helped, that he can be changed?!)
You might at least have someone who is a recovering alcoholic come and visit him and see if maybe he can relate, and maybe give recovery a try. There are people who would make the visit, I'll bet, if it's even remotely possible that he might be interested in some kind of help.
So that's the alcoholism side of it: He might be ready. Who knows. It's possible.
You and I know you cannot change him. Yet let's hope you can forge some kind of relationship in which you take strong precautions not to be burned, but are still close enough to feel his warmth.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
My escape from East Berlin
The Color Blue – Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 10 
A Last Look at Father's Day 2009 - Not Satire