Family Issue (Winter Issue 5)
On Father Issues
By Débora Raimundo
We have all heard about it. Many times movies, series, and song lyrics make it sound as if this is a ‘girls only’ problem, but boys are as impacted by ‘father issues’ as we are. The reasons may vary: abandonment, death, emotional distance. I learned a long time ago that my condition is not special because, unfortunately, there are so many of us. And we hurt pretty much the same. The issues are real, so let me tell you a story.
My father left when I was three months old because he couldn’t bear the frustration of having a girl instead of a boy. (If I have ever came across as a feminist, now be assured that I am one.) Emotionally overwhelmed, my mother lost the ability to take care of me for a while, so my grandmother had to take me. As my father had also wiped out the bank account, I was given the only thing available: goat’s milk. (You can do what I do and imagine Amalthea nursing Zeus to make it sound cool.)
My mom came around to be a Super-mom, but she could never replace a missing parent, of course. My father lived less than a mile away with his new family, but didn’t want anything to do with us. Maybe I talked with him once or twice, but I cannot remember and the only thing he ever gave me was a Kinder Surprise that came with a crappy plastic green airplane that I cherished like gold for years. He was killed in a car accident when I was seven and the worse part is that this meant very little at the time, because there was no one to miss.
I grew up hearing my mom telling me that “God is my father,” but I would subtract from the meaning of that blissful reality by transforming it into a mathematical equation and replying, “That only means that everyone else has two fathers and I only have one, so that does not solve anything.”
In my teenage years, I tried to find some healing through therapy and by reading every book I could find about parenting, marriage and divorce management, children’s development and emotional intelligence—anything that could point out what was wrong with me by telling me how things should have been. I would also pay close attention to other families to see how they functioned, so I would learn (I still do that). All this was very important, I believe, but I wasn’t quite ready to address the problem.
You see, when the last thing that you wonder about before closing your eyes every night is why the person that was supposed to love you and take care of you didn’t…you need a lot of courage to look inside and see what this did to you. For me, the difficulty was trusting other people. As Mother Basilea Schlink explains, mistrust is the “ever-present concern for our ego. Will we get what we deserve?” Thus, the lack of trust makes it impossible to cultivate any profound relationship. To love is to be open to rejection, and you can only do it in trust. But how can you trust if rejection is imprinted in your heart? Only through Love itself. This fear of rejection is not only felt in romantic love, but in your friendships, with your peers. However, the antidote is to seek to love more than being loved and to find pure contentment in this. And by this prayerful practice you will eventually find out that you are loved. And finally, Love has cast out all fear.
When I was ready to look beyond my own hurt, I could not unsee the rest of the story. My father had also been abandoned by his mother, while she fled an abusive marriage. In a twisted way, the replication of behaviour made me realize that my father and I had, after all, something in common, and I was ready to forgive. But I was also ready to make sure that the wrongdoing stopped here. When, one day, I see my father again somewhere between Heaven and Purgatory (assuming C.S. Lewis et al. could be right) he will know a lot more about God’s forgiveness than I do now, so I like to think that we will be able to rejoice in the closure of this story.
I will never really be over these issues. As Donald Miller says, having a father feels like owning a dragon: we simply have no idea of what it is like. (And I have heard that having a dragon also brings its challenges.) That will never change. But I rejoice in families so much. I rejoice when seeing my friends raising their sons and daughters to be good men and women; I rejoice in seeing them becoming great fathers and mothers, and when I see sons and daughters loving their parents; I rejoice in my friends and in other friendships I witness—are friends really God’s way of apologizing to us for our families? Maybe; I rejoice when I see people looking out for one another and being kind by expanding the concept of family and making tables longer; I rejoice in the certainty that my husband will be a great father, and I rejoice in my son. Yes, I can rejoice in all this, even without a dragon.
The Land of Nod
By Robert Louis Stevenson
A poem for tucking in your children.
From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do–
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are these for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.
Guess The Parents
In the PDF version of this week’s issue (link above), you’ll find a fun little game to play on page 3. Try to guess whose parents are whose, and we’ll publish the answers in next week’s issue.
Editor’s Desk
This Be The Family
By Alice Hodgkins
As the Et Cetera team was putting together this issue, I joked that we could include Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse,” which Iwan Russell-Jones has been known to quote vigorously to his arts students. It’s a dark little poem about the negative legacies parents pass on to their children, even when trying their honest-to-God best.
We know this to be true, of course. When we look within ourselves we find wounds and fears and hardnesses with direct thru-lines back to the people who raised us. Our families, however narrowly or broadly you’d like to define the term, are usually the sources from which we gain our first sense of self when we are young, and so later in life—even much later—they are the context in which much of who we are makes sense, even if that sense is painful.
I’ll let you look up the whole Larkin poem for yourself, but it ends with this:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
But perhaps Larkin’s wry conclusion is so purposefully, broadly bleak that it begs to be proved wrong. So here, friends, is what I think.
I think that just as family is capable of bequeathing inescapable pain, they are capable of bequeathing inescapable blessing. In one or two more heated moments I have informed my parents in no uncertain terms which of my faults are their fault, and yet I remember sitting in a restaurant with my dad a few years ago and telling him that I had no idea until I was in my twenties that adults ever said unkind things behind one another’s backs, because I’d never heard my parents do so. Kindness is not a virtue natural to me, yet I regard it as essential and powerful because they always have. The same goes for self-discipline, an ability to communicate directly, and a sense of self-worth. I claim them only because of my parents, yet I couldn’t get rid of them if I tried.
I also think that families, not despite the often inextricable ties that bind us together, but because of those ties, have more capacity to heal each others’ souls than any other human beings. Closeness means we know how to hurt each other, but it also often means we know how to help. Such healing may not come to us when we wish it, but how humbling to think that we hold a balm perhaps able to ease the particular secret aches of our own close kin.
Once, in a conversation about my anxiety over meeting new people, my mom told me frankly that people worth my time will like me not despite my tendency to be quiet in a group, but because of it. This was a revelation to me, and one I wouldn’t have believed from anyone but her. So honestly, I’m super-glad she didn’t listen to Philip Larkin and had kids anyway. She’s not half-bad at this.
If you feel like responding to any of this week’s articles, feel free to write a letter to the editor by clicking the link below.