A memoir: And so this is Father's Day

"It doesn't matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was." --Anne Sexton

Since Father's Day was Sunday, I got to thinking about fathers. Lots of people on facebook and otherwise write/talk about the wonderful fathers that they had/have. One of my former students on fb has been detailing for several days the things that she loved about her father and what he taught her--a beautiful tribute to him.

(I haven't many regrets, but I do regret giving my daughter the man who is her father. In my post about him, I said that that was her story to tell, and it is. Suffice it to say that Ellen and her father are estranged once again (and for countless times before), and probably for the last time, which is sad because he now has two beautiful granddaughters, that he could delight in.)

But I do understand the young woman in her early thirties (me) who was optimistic and wanted a child. Hoping, hoping for the best. Not yet understanding who my husband was, what was to happen to my marriage, nor the influence of a father on a daughter. Still denying then that my own father was not the best one for me.

When I was a child, my absolutely favorite TV show was the sitcom "Father Knows Best." Never missing a show, I wanted my family to be just like that TV family--loving and joking with one another. And of course, solving any problem perfectly within a half-hour's time-span!

When others' favorite TV show was "Leave It to Beaver," I adored "Father Knows Best." I identified best with the little girl named Kathy on the bottom right. The program ran on TV from 1954 until 1960.

I was mostly enamored by the incredibly kind and wise father on this TV show and the loving and fun big sister, so unlike my own big sister.

But Dear Reader, if you've read any of my memoir posts about my family, then you know my side of the story, and it isn't anything like a TV family--unless it's more like "All in the Family" or Roseanne, which were about real-life conflicts within dysfunctional families--but at least, those sitcoms made us laugh.

There was no laughter in my family. As I have written in other posts on my family, for some reasons, everything in my family was s-o-o serious. Deadly serious. Perhaps the seriousness could be attributed to the only problem my father claimed he couldn't solve with his engineer's mind--the problem of my sister, or perhaps the seriousness was about how my mother had learned to approach life from her younger, darker days, or perhaps the seriousness had to do with my father's illness. I tried to be loyal to and to love my parents, and I was/did, but my ex-husband had it right when he referred to going for a visit to my parents' house as going to the house of "doom and gloom."

Most recently, I wrote about my mother. Now the time has come to write about my father.

A rare picture of my sister and me in my father's lap. Obviously a posed picture--I just noticed that that's not a story book in his hands! (It was the 50s and raising children was thought to be the mother's job.) It looks as if daddy is reading an engineering magazine! I well remember that big Citadel College ring on his finger, which he proudly wore most of his life. 

I have alluded to my parents' beginnings in another post, which ends with the sad, foretelling lines, "They could only break and break and break. They could only break each others' hearts." In that post, I used the metaphor of trees for my parents, saying that my mother was a magnolia tree because of her beauty and that my father was a loblolly pine because he was tall and lanky when he was a young man and because he was raised in the sandy soil of Central South Carolina. Speaking of trees that kept getting uprooted as my father's career moved us about the country, I alluded to the dark days ahead in his life and to something rotten in that tree.

My father and mother on their wedding day.

After decades of trying to figure out what was wrong with my father, he was finally diagnosed in the 60s with a disorder called manic-depressant, which today is called bi-polar. It is a terrible disease for the person who has it and for the family.

As a child, I only knew that my father had a terrible, reactive temper. Now as I look back, I see it as a temper that pretty much controlled our family, that pretty much kept us imprisoned. His loss of temper could explode over the smallest of things--like a traffic jam--and would spew out on everyone in the family and leave us stunned, quiet, and spent. Many of my earliest memories of my father are about his losing his temper, even breaking down a door at one time.

As I think about it, I really do not know very much about my father. He was a somewhat shadowy figure in my early life. We did not talk very much. He went to work in the mornings and came home in the evenings. Once I asked what he did at work to which Daddy responded that he was an engineer, so for many years I thought that my father drove a train! After dinner, my father would sit in "his" chair and watch TV--mostly westerns. He particularly liked John Wayne.

Now that I think of it--like me, he probably got a great deal of his identity from his career--an electrical engineer for the DuPont company. Like me, he "got retired" from his career in his early 60s; I think that he got a buy out. Like me, he probably felt lost for a while after retirement. He loved sports, golf, gardening, and writing, especially writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper and long, often critical, letters to his daughters. He loved to eat fresh home-cooked meals, as his own mother (who lived on a farm) could put on the table.

Here's what little I know about my father's history: He was born on a hot, humid summer's day, July 14, 1923, in a farmhouse in Bowman, South Carolina, the house where he lived all of his growing up days. He was the second son in a family that eventually had nine children--with the last child (his sister Sandra) being born the same year that my own sister Lynda was born. Story has it that when he called to tell his mother that his wife was pregnant, she answered that she was pregnant, too. A bit anti-climatic, wouldn't you say?

There were five sons altogether and eventually four daughters. Even for the times, they were poor in the 1920s and 30s. His mother apparently had a temper, too, because Daddy would tell a story about her getting angry and chasing the boys around the house with a butcher knife. My father's father was quiet; his mother definitely seemed to be the head of the family. Living on a working farm, she favored her sons.

Because there were so many mouths to feed and more all the time, the first born son C.F. eventually got to live with my father's mother's only sibling, a sister, who had no children of her own. As I was growing up, I knew my Great Aunt Pansy to be the "rich" one in the family. She lived in the city in a fine house with really nice things. I remember how soft the towels in her bathroom were. She eventually paid for C.F. to go to college.

On the other hand, my father joined the Navy to become a pilot. Luckily, World War II ended before he left the states. Then he went to college at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, on the G. I. Bill. He played football, in part to make some money to help support his growing family. My impression is that he was understandably envious and resentful of his older brother C.F., who seemed to be the favored son and nephew.

My father was not particularly close to any of his brothers nor sisters; therefore, I hardly knew my aunts and uncles as I was growing up. They did not come visit us in the various states where we lived. In the summers we would go visit his mother and father for a few days on the farm, where we might see a few of his grown brothers and sisters and their children. He did love and admire his mother and seemed to be forever seeking her approval. Even as a child, I intuited that C.F.'s son Butch was the favored grandchild. One message that I got from my father's family (and from society at the time) was that boys were more important than, were superior to girls. My father probably wanted a son, but instead he had two daughters.

This family portrait was taken when I was about ten year old in the late 50s. We lived in Madison, Tennessee, at the time, the years I refer to as my best childhood years.

My parents' fighting with one another and my father's rage are my strongest memories from my childhood and teen years. A real bone of contention between my mother and father--something they fought about for years and years--was when he decided to financially help his mother by sending her money every month--supposedly to buy the farm. I'm not sure if his primary motive was to help his mother or to buy his childhood home or to have an investment. I think that it was the former, but maybe a combination of all three. Nevertheless, my mother did not think that we could afford to send his mother money every month, and she resented it.. After all, we didn't own a house yet ourselves; we were still renting houses as we moved about the country with my father's job. And if it were the case, I'm sure that my mother did not want to retire to Bowman, SC.

My parents would fight about the same issues for years--sometimes it was something that had happened in the distant past. Unfortunately, it appeared that my mother could really hold a grudge and never give up the fight. Most often, I did not know exactly what my parents were fighting about. Often, they seemed to  have their most violent fights after having bridge parties, where drinking alcohol was involved.

Once diagnosed with manic-depression, my father's illness was something else to be kept hidden in our family. Don't tell. Keep the family secrets. Dad may lose his job if people know. When he was diagnosed, unlike today, it was thought to be something to be ashamed of--a mental illness to hide from others, and unlike today, there was not as much to treat it with. The drugs back then had really bad side effects. At one point, my father even tried shock treatments.

Daddy would always stop taking his meds because he liked his highs, and the meds would make his life too gray. My mother and I would mope around, wringing our hands and hopelessly discussing what to do about my father's mood swings, which were increasing and getting more severe as he aged. Much to my dismay and disgust, once my mother became ill with COPD, my father began to have encounters with other women. We did not know much about manic-depression then; we had no internet to explain to us that it's main symptoms are

Mania Symptoms:

• An extremely elated, happy mood or an extremely irritable, angry, unpleasant mood
• Increased physical and mental activity and energy
• Racing thoughts
• Increased talking, more rapid speech than normal
• Ambitious, often grandiose plans
• Risk taking
• Impulsive activity such as spending sprees, sexual indiscretion, and alcohol abuse
• Decreased sleep without experiencing fatigue

Depression Symptoms:

• Loss of energy
• Prolonged sadness
• Decreased activity and energy
• Restlessness and irritability
• Inability to concentrate or make decisions
• Increased feelings of worry and anxiety
• Less interest or participation in, and less enjoyment of activities normally enjoyed
• Feelings of guilt and hopelessness
• Thoughts of suicide
• Change in appetite (either eating more or eating less)
• Change in sleep patterns (either sleeping more or sleeping less)

But I now know that his illness majorly affected the whole family. Before and after the diagnosis, I would get between him and my mother when they fought--to try to protect my mother--to try to get them to stop. One time I got so angry at his losing his temper once again and at his spewing out profanity that I actually spit in his face! Then I ran and hid! To my surprise and relief, he ignored my action. Oddly (or typical in my family), it was never mentioned.

Often my father's quick, unrelenting temper would cause me embarrassment in public places. He and my mother would sometimes fight on our rare outings to restaurants, and I would want to crawl under the table. Once when I was in college and wanted to go out for a pancake breakfast at the beach with him and my mother and some friends of theirs, he got so mad when he couldn't find the restaurant that he cussed at me, causing me to dissolve into tears, in the back seat with the other couple. In my family, so many simple, ordinary events were turned into family dramas.

My parents were not demonstrative; they seldom gave hugs or pats on the back. They did not say "I love you" out loud or very often to each other nor to us children. Once I grew up, the way my father showed his love was through the gifting of money. Very financially generous with his children and with his family of origin, he bought me several cars and helped with down payments on two condos and on my house.

My absolute favorite picture of me and my father, taken at my first wedding when I was about twenty and he in his mid-forties. 

Even though I was fairly petite in statue, the opposite of his statue, I looked like my father and like his family. My mother and sister did not think that his sisters were pretty, and even though they didn't say it, I knew that I looked like them. So naturally, I assumed that I was not pretty. Unfortunately, thinking that I was unattractive became a huge part of my life, which was such a sad waste of my time and energy.

My parents came full circle, so to speak. When they retired, they had moved back to the town where Daddy had started working for the DuPont company. In the post about my mother, I wrote about the last time that I saw my father, but actually my sweetest memory of him was when he came for a visit after he had retired. I guess he was on a high, but perhaps the highs showed his true self more than the lows. He drove from Camden, South Carolina, to Kingston Springs, Tennessee, in one, quick trip and arrived earlier than expected in my driveway. When I went out to his car to greet him, he literally swept me off my feet in a warm embrace! This memory has come to symbolize for me my father's unverbalized love for me, for his children, for his wife, and for his family.

A note--Years after I wrote this blog about my father, I came across these paragraphs in a letter he wrote to me. He recognized that he could have been a better father, and that means a lot to me..

"I write about things that I should have spend more time talking to my wife, my daughters, my relatives and friends about through the years. Some for my own good, some for edification, some to provide the companionship, and better relationships.

"I should have been more outgoing, more of an extrovert than an introvert, should have been more emotional about the right things, shown more of my actual interest in our lives, been more encouraging, more talkative, more of the things that go with being or at least more closely approaching the ideal husband and father and to a lesser extent having a better relationship with relatives and friends."

Part II of seven characteristics of Doing versus Being

Sometimes when I have mentioned mindfulness to someone I've just met, they will ask me, "What's Mindfulness?" Well, it's not Buddhism or any religion, nor meditation or yoga, which are tools that we can use on the way to Mindfulness.

Kabat-Zinn's working definition of Mindfulness is "paying attention on purpose non-judgementally in the present moment as if your life depended on it." Now that's a mouth full! For me, being mindful means being fully awake, aware, alive in the present moment.

The last three characteristics of Doing versus Being (or of Mindfulness) mode are as follows:

5. Avoidance versus approaching--

Instead of trying not to think of something, such as some fear, which only enhances your anxiety, the Being mode encourages you to approach and to acknowledge the very thing that you feel like avoiding. This compassionate approach gradually dissipates the power of your negative feelings.

6. Mental time travel versus remaining in the present moment--

Living in the past often puts you in a regretting mood ,while living in the future may put you in worry mode. "We re-live past events and re-feel their pain, and we pre-live future disaster and pre-feel their impact," write Williams and Penman.

Don't allow yourself to get lost in a mental time warp. See memory as memory and worrying as worrying. Consciously know that you are remembering or that you are worrying about or planning for the future. This acknowledging helps free you from being a slave to mental time travel. You will be able to avoid the extra pain that comes from re-living the past or pre-living the future.

7. Depleting activities versus nourishing activities--

Sometimes life gets so demanding with projects in our professional lives and in our personal lives with on-going projects such as homemaking, childcare, or elder care that it's tempting to focus on these projects to the exclusion of our own health and well-being. You tell yourself that such busyness is temporary, and so you forego interests, hobbies, and pastimes that nourish your soul. Such thinking and Doing can drain away your energy and innate happiness.

For me, teaching would drain away my energy, but when I found kayaking, I discovered something that could replenish my energy and spirit. Nature and river and trails! And kayaking a white water river could always keep me very mindful and present; actually, that's true of any river really. Somehow being out on the river with the sky above me and the water (and sometimes those mountains) all around me connects me to and nourishes my soul.

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In the past and most of my life, I have lived too much in my mind, constantly analyzing, and striving for perfection and  approval. I had thought that my thoughts were reality, that they were me, that they were true, and I probably avoided those who didn't think the way I did. My mind was often in the past (if only a few hours back regretting something I had said or done) or in the future (if only a few hours ahead planning for the next day's lesson!), and I found myself often fatigued, even exhausted at the day's end.

According to Williams and Penman, characteristics of the Doing mode include judging everything, comparing the way things are with the way you want them to be and striving to make them different from how they actually are. Being on automatic pilot much of the time and getting lost in thoughts that you take too literally and personally. Living in the past or future and avoiding what you don't like. Finally, the Doing mode sees the world indirectly, through a veil of concepts [delusions] that short-circuit your senses so that you no longer directly experience yourself and the world.

Is this the way that you want to live your life? I have been extremely guilty of taking things too literally and too personally. And of trying to "improve" things that I really had little power over. What a waste of precious time and energy!

Characteristics of the Being or the Mindfulness mode include nourishing activities, being in the present moment, approaching and acknowledging, viewing thoughts as mental events, accepting, sensing, and conscious choices.

Would you like to live your life this way? I know that that is how I want to live!

To make a conscious shift to the Being or Mindful mode takes practice. After all, it took many decades for us to "perfect" this Doing mode of rapidly getting things done or jumping from one task to another or multi-tasking.

Toward the end of my teaching career, as my students would call out my name for attention time and again, I would tell them that I could only mono-task! That's one way I slowly began to shift gears to the Being mode or to becoming more mindful.

So how do we begin to shift gears? How do we engage ourselves with the Being mode? How do we become more mindful?

In the present moment, of course.

To be continued . . .

Seven characteristics of the Being versus the Doing modes of mind or modes of living

Presently, I am reading Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams and Danny Penman from which I get these seven characteristics of Doing versus Being. Besides Our Town, Thoreau, and Buddhism as mentioned in my former blog post, other early influences on me concerning mindfulness include Thich Nhat Hanh, especially his Living Buddha, Living Christ, and anything by Jon Kabat-Zinn (son-in-law of Howard Zinn, who wrote the amazing A People's History of the United States).

Kabat-Zinn tells us "the cultivation of mindfulness may just be the hardest work in the world," yet paradoxically, he further says that "a lightness of being and playfulness [are] key elements to the practice of mindfulness, because they are key elements of well-being."

Here are four of the seven characteristics of Doing versus Being (or Mindfulness). (I'll cover the other characteristic in my next post.) See if any of these characteristics "speak" to you as they did to me.

1. Automatic pilot versus conscious choice--

Autopilot means thinking, working, eating, walking, or driving without clear awareness of what you are doing. The danger is that you miss much of your life in this way.

Mindfulness brings you back, again and again, to full conscious awareness: a place of choice and intention. It provides you with the ability to "check in" with yourself from time to time so that you can make intentional choices.

2. Analyzing versus sensing--

Doing mode needs to think, analyze, recall, plan, and compare. In this mode, we spend a great deal of time "inside our heads," without noticing what's going on around us.

Mindfulness is a truly different way of knowing the world. It puts you back in touch with your senses so that you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste things, as if for the first time (beginner's mind). You become deeply curious about the world again. Gradually, you cultivate a direct, intuitive sense of what is going on in your inner and outer worlds, without taking anything for granted.

3. Striving versus accepting--

The Doing mode involves judging and comparing the "real" world with the world as we would like it to be. It narrows our attention down to the gap between the two, so that you can end up with toxic tunnel vision in which only perfection will do.

Most of my life, I have been a perfectionist, wondering what made me this way and knowing that it made me crazy. Recognizing this toxic habit, I have been able to move beyond it, but it still haunts me at times and make me feel "less than." Finally, I've learned to say/think, that's "good enough."

Being mode invites you to suspend judgement. It means temporarily standing aside and watching the world as it unfolds, without preconceptions. It means allowing the world to be just as it is for the moment. It allow you to observe the world, rather than judge it, attack it, argue with it, or try to disprove its validity.

Or in my case, try to improve it.

Mindfulness liberates you from unhappiness, fear, anxiety, and exhaustion.

4. Seeing thoughts as solid and real versus treating them as mental events--

This characteristic of the Doing mind really resonates with me. For some reason, I mistook my thoughts for reality! I've always been too good at thinking, planning, and doing. My thoughts ceased to be my servants and became my master and a very harsh and unforgiving master at that. In the Doing mode, you tend to get on this treadmill of judging yourself: I should be able to cope better than this. I am weak. I am no good.

So you strive harder and harder (See number 3 above).

Mindfulness teaches us that our thoughts are just thoughts; they are events in the mind, mental events if you will. Furthermore, our feelings, too, are just feelings; they are not us.  Neither your thoughts nor your feelings are "you" or "reality." They are just your internal running commentary/emotions on/about yourself and the world. They come and go, come and go continually, but they are not you.

This simple recognition/realization frees us from the distorted reality that we have all conjured up for ourselves. With Mindfulness, we can see a clear path through life once again.

Now, more than ever, we (the world) needs mindfulness. "Our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations that we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them. [These expectations are] generated in a large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life," according to Kabat-Zinn. With which, I agree wholeheartedly. We must learn how to use technology mindfully, and in our homes and in our schools, we must teach our children/youth how to do so also.

Mindfulness is a way of saving our world from destroying itself.

Did any of these Doing characteristics resonant with you, as they did with me? In my next post, I will share the three other characteristics of Doing versus Being mode with you, as well as give you a definition of Mindfulness and perhaps some ways to begin the practice of Mindfulness, if you are ready.

For how shall we live?

When I retired from teaching high school English, I asked myself, "What was the most important thing that I had taught my students?" Though most of my students probably wouldn't know how to identify it (or it would vary for each of them), for me, the answer came back immediately--Mindfulness!

What do Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, Buddhism, and Thoreau have in common? In the first year of my teaching 1972, I began to teach Our Town, and though it wasn't popular to teach into the 21st century, I continued teaching it through 2010 until I retired and never tired of it.

You may remember that in that play Emily has died in child birth. When she comes back from the dead to relive her 12th birthday, she realizes that we human beings do not appreciate life while we live it. She spoke these words, and I immediately knew them to be true (the italics are mine):

"Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!

I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. 

Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some."

Now fast forward in my teaching life to about 20 years later in the mid 90s when I began to teach about the major world religions through literature. Besides Christianity, my favorite of those faith traditions was Buddhism--primarily because one of its main tenets is mindfulness or being fully awake:

The Buddha advocated that one should establish mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna) in one's day-to-day life, maintaining as much as possible a calm awareness of one's body, feelings, and mind. Mindfulness, which, among other things, is an attentive awareness of the reality of things (especially of the present moment) is an antidote to delusion.

As I thought back to the religion that I am most familiar with--Christianity--I realized that Jesus lived an incredibly mindful life. Didn't Christ live in the moment and encourage us to do the same? Wasn't he fully awake and alive? Spiritually in tune.

Excuse the words on the picture, which I cannot erase and which have nothing to do with my blog post! I actually have this picture on my wall. It is one of my favorites of Jesus.

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life . . . do not worry about tomorrow." (Matthew 6) Isn't Jesus telling us to "stay in today" in this passage? "Let the little children come to me . . .for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19) Jesus tells us to become like little children if we seek the kingdom of God. Before society (we) corrupts them, don't children live fully in the present moment?

And then there is always Henry David Thoreau's Walden, telling us to simplify, slow down, and live in the present, "Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature." Thoreau didn't just write about mindfulness, he lived it, especially at Walden Pond. He was teaching us that if we don't live mindfully, we will miss our lives. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "We must learn to reawake and keep ourselves awake." "Only one in a hundred million [is awake enough for] a poetic or divine life." Isn't that the Stage Manger's answer to Emily's question in Our Town, "the saints and poets maybe"?

Thoreau cautions us about not living: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach me, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Still and all, though intellectually, I knew that mindfully was the way to live and that most of those whom I admired (living and dead) lived in the present, I was too much in the "doing" mode. Always doing, doing, doing, or if not doing, thinking about doing or going, going, going. Making long lists of what I "had" to do, where I had to go.

Why/how had I come to believe that living was all about doing and going? Running errands, working, cleaning, organizing, shopping, cooking, washing, planning lessons and grading papers, taking care of my child and pets and yes, husband, gardening, weeding, raking, paying bills, etc.

Wasn't I on that proverbial hamster's wheel? But how to get off?

Years and years ago, someone had said to me, we are human beings, not human doings. And I wanted to learn how to be more of a human being. But I didn't know how.

Oh I've had my moments: floating down the Hiwassee River in the late afternoon when the sun sparkled off its crystal clear waves, walking to school underneath the white pines with the early morning dew drops sparking off their evergreen needles, looking at my students' sparkling eyes and young faces as they comprehended the lesson for that moment. Apparently, one thing that I have discovered for sure is that living in the moment is a "sparkling" experience!

Thoreau said, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn. To be awake is to be alive."

With that in mind, I have been doing--there's that word again--some research on mindfulness. In my next blog post, I would like to begin teaching us how to be more mindful, more awake, more alive in our lives. Because it's never too late to learn how to really live! And we shall start with the "being" mode versus the "doing" mode of living and how to tell the difference. So stay tuned, Dear Reader!