Today is our father’s birthday. I didn’t always get along with daddy, especially growing up.  None of us did.   The typical teenage syndrome when you think you hate your father. He was always very strict and controlling and, we thought, unreasonable. He had a 6th grade education, worked construction and I know now that he did a long hard job and came home to kids who smart mouthed him and that couldn’t have been easy.  

My mom got home from work about 9:30pm so he had us from 5:00pm on.  Being a parent at all is such a gigantic job, and I never wanted to do it.  I’ve always been far too selfish.  I couldn’t even keep the same job/boyfriend/husband for more than 3 years at a time, I never wanted to subject myself to an 18 year commitment of any type.  So I understand now how difficult it must have been for my father raising us ungrateful wretches, but of course then I didn’t see that.  That was back when I knew everything 🙂

My dad was what they’d now call bi-polar and used to drink.  He could be psychologically abusive and he believed in corporal punishment.  He was a deeply troubled man and I only realized that years later.  Long story short, when I was 14, Daddy – we called him Bob – and my brother Jerry had a falling out and Jerry got “banished”.  I did not know this and was told that Jerry had gone to Vietnam, and then later that he had died in Vietnam.  Yep, I told you our dad was unbalanced.  I did not know until 37 years later, in 2003, that Jerry was alive until he emailed to ask, “Hi, do you remember me?” Needless to say, I was floored.

So today is Daddy’s birthday.  As I was growing up, his birthday generally evoked negative feelings since I’d be obligated to buy him a card.  None of them ever said what I wanted them to.  They were all too personal and intimate.  In a workshop once with a group, I had everyone create a card for their mother and father and say in the card exactly what it was they wanted to say and be really understood.  I remember my first one was a Father’s Day card.  It was after much healing and forgiveness had taken place within me, and it said:

“You were unfair when I was a child, yet through my childlike eyes I judged you for it and saw not that you, too, were merely a victim and in your ignorance knew no other way to treat me.  Now that we’re both older and wiser, we don’t have those problems, or at least the confrontations no longer take place.  Perhaps you are cowed at my own empowerment, or maybe I’m just a more formidable foe now.  A man who mistreats his children is not to be hated, rather we should extend compassion for his lack of control.

So now we silently sit together five times a year, the Hallmark card placed like a holy icon between us, hoping to heal the past without mentioning it.  I accept your unspoken apology as I see how frail you’ve become.  Not so much in body, but in spirit.  Beaten down from your own abuses coming back to haunt you, I needn’t add to the burden, nor can I voice my forgiveness.  You understand.  We understand each other now and that’s enough.  And today, finally, I love you very much.”

My father mellowed after my youngest brother, Bobby, committed suicide in 1976 at the age of 22.  At that time I also thought my brother Jerry had died.  Two years later, Daddy scared off my mom with his drinking; she divorced him and moved to Tampa.  I felt that left no one to love him, so I began keeping in touch and visiting more.  He had stopped drinking, but now took massive amounts of Tylenol with codeine due to a back injury that left him partially disabled.  Pain controlled his life.  The drinking and drugs had taken its toll on his judgment and he could see no way out.  In 1987, he shot himself.  He died on Father’s Day.

Happy birthday, Daddy.
Free and happy at last.

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