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."