Those of you who have been following this blog (and earlier ones) have a pretty good history of the relationship that my father and I had.

 

To recap for those who haven’t been along for the entire blog journey, my father was a verbally abusive alcoholic with a fourth grade education who could barely read and write.

 

He was minimally educated because he was a Depression era child who had to quit school early to help support a physically and verbally abusive father and a harried, mistreated mother. (He once saw his father, in a fit of rage, cut off another man’s arm!)

 

He became a verbal bully and a hero at age ten because he felt an obligation to his beleaguered mother, whom he loved. His father had beaten his mother again.  Dad knocked him on his ass and then told him if he ever touched her again, he would kill him. The threat worked.

 

When Dad and I were riding together on an ATV on Peoh Point in Cle Elum one year, I heard a rare birdsong that threw me back into my childhood. I said to Dad, “That bird just put me back in Grandma’s yard (his mother’s yard) as a child. How weird and wonderful!”  Dad said something like, “That’s nice.”

 

I asked him, “Have you ever heard a bird or a song or something else that threw you back into your childhood?”

 

Dad said, “Yes, but I don’t have any happy memories of childhood.”

 

That floored me. It saddened me.  And it also made me realize that I didn’t know, or understand, my father at all.

 

For all his faults — and there were several that really crippled and unsettled our family — I began to understand that had I grown up under the same circumstances and family dynamics, I could and probably would have turned out very much like he did.

 

There were no counselors for people of his generation. Going to counseling could get a person lobotomized or institutionalized back then for so much as confessing some dark failing or other. My dad had to deal with his childhood woundings in the way most people back then did: drinking to dull the pain and minimize the flashbacks. He was a walking PTSD victim!

 

He was an unwanted child. (This was a full generation before the birth control pill, remember.)  He never felt much love. He experienced a great deal of trauma.

 

My Childhood Was Different

 

Because of his wounding, my childhood could have been soooo much worse than it was.  But the lessons he learned,  he learned very well. He learned to control his temper so as not to mirror his father’s rages. The worst I ever saw him do was throw a plate through a window when he was arguing with Mom one time (That was scary enough!)  In fact,  he had a heart attack arguing with one of his sisters later in life, rather than hitting her.

 

He only hit me once — and I richly deserved it! I said something disrespectful about Mom.  He could diss her to her face, but no one else was allowed to besmirch her in any way.

 

My earliest childhood — until we moved to Cle Elum when I was ten — carries no memories of his battle with alcohol.  What I remember about my earliest childhood are trips to Disneyland (“are we there yet?” asked 10,000 times on the 1600 mile road trip on two-lane I-5), Christmases where we kids got everything we wanted (for me, that was Roy Rogers outfits, cowboy hats and  boots, train sets, erector sets, plastic horses) and his work crew got movie cameras that cost Dad a pretty penny ($35 each for about six workers — which was like $435 now) because they all had children and he knew capturing them on film would be precious to them in later years.  I remember wrestling with him and laughter and the fact that he bought us horses, which were my passion.

 

I always had a hard time getting to the gifts he gave me, because he was so enthralled with setting up the railroad and the marble tower and the erector set that he barely let me play.  It was frustrating!! But now I understand that he was giving me/us the childhood he had been deprived of. He was as thrilled as we were with our toys. He didn’t have any growing up, or the relationship we had with our parents.

 

By the end of his life, I was old and mature enough to “get” him.  I was well educated, self-taught as far as psychology and psychiatry, and extremely empathetic, realizing that had I been exposed and raised as he was, I would have turned out pretty much the same. But he and Mom made sure I wasn’t raised the same.

 

I loved my dad as a small child and I learned to love him again wholeheartedly later in life, thankfully.  What I learned from the experience is that we can’t know why people are treating us the way they are until we understand what their backgrounds have bequeathed to them. They’re doing the best they know how to do. 

 

And because of this, I understand Jackie, although I can’t quite get to how we turned out so differently from each other, other than the fact that I was an eager, high GPA student and the reader of just about everything I could get my hands on (which helped me develop empathy and a visceral understanding of different lived experiences), and she wasn’t.

 

Even so, if I’d had her more limited experiences and interests, I would very likely feel the same way she does about people and politics. (God forbid!).  I simply can’t fault her (any more than I should have faulted Dad for his less-than-ideal treatment of his family) for what she doesn’t know about empathy or putting herself in someone else’s shoes long enough to catch at least a glimmer of their lived experiences: black people, brown people, misused/abused/ marginalized people,  T-Wrecks’s victims: E Jean Carroll, the naked contestants of his Miss America pageants, and the children he has been officially accused within the Epstein files and elsewhere of murdering and raping; the egregious and illegal redactions in those files, etc.).   Chances are she doesn’t even know about the allegations, given the news sources she trusts and the “fake news” denials that her present political idol spouts nonstop whenever his behavior or wretched policies have been called into question.

 

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink if they aren’t thirsty. She isn’t thirsty for truth because she is full up with all the lies of the “Gym” Jordans (another alleged abuser of children) and James Comers of the world.

 

My dad was far from perfect.  But so am I.  We are saddled with what we know, what we have learned, and what we want to do with all of it.

 

I want to live a life that forgives the people I know and love for being unintentionally hurtful and harmful. That’s my goal. Jackie is one of those folks.

 

But I fervently want those individuals who are intentionally malevolent to be held to account by the rule of law.  Jackie and I have entirely different opinions about who those individuals are.

 

That’s the dilemma.

 

I love my dad.

 

I love my sister(s).

 

I love myself, their brother, warts and all.  (That’s why I can love my dad and my little sister.)

 

I don’t think my dad or my sister loved/love themselves.  It’s hard to love well when you don’t love yourself enough to embrace everything about yourself.

 

Insecurity is the real killer.

 

It creates killers, too.

 

My dad and me, La Push WA about 1955

Happy times!