"Happy" Father's Day

I hate Father's Day. Every June seems rife with commercials and advertisements depicting smiling Dads and sunny-eyed children all aglow with epitomized familial perfection. When in reality, a scant two percent of our population can say they have those kind of PollyAnna perfect relationships with their fathers.
In 1896 Freud published a paper entitled, “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” In it, he claimed that premature sexual experience was the root cause of Hysteria, what we now call PTSD. A year after he published this paper the social implications of it's findings; that over half of the young women in the proletariat of Paris and Vienna were being exploited as children, forced Freud to recant his findings. These fathers were his benefactors, after all.
In my house, the Sunday that marks Father's Day is one spent watching summer re-runs in the comfort of an air conditioned living room with the shades drawn. It would be a waste of time for me to retort in high animation what a disappointment my Dad is. It's an all too well rehearsed spiel for too many people and I've heard it recited with such animated glee so many times by people hungry for the attention their pity party provides them that it's sugar in my stomach now: acidic and bile producing self perpetuated agony elevated to an art form that accomplishes nothing.
And the spiel isn't even the real story, because nobody's Dad is completely all good or all bad. Nobody's story is cookie cutter perfect. We all have our ragged crumbling edges with days spent with Dad in the in between. Too much TV and not enough conversation, snapped commands to clean up our rooms or go mow the lawn or apologize to your mother or else you're gonna get it, and on that day, you got nothing.
It took thirty eight years before I was diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder, a disease I inherited from my father. In that fact, there is no doubt. As a child, I grew up watching him throw the family dog out a second story window. I was beaten until I had welts on my bottom. He threw my mother down a flight of stairs when she was six months pregnant, causing her to miscarry. He did this right in front of me, yet he denies it to this day.
“All your Mother ever wanted to do was wrap her legs around me and get a kid.” My father said this to me when I was eight. That was the same year he taught me what “Mangia la figa” means in Italian. It is a vulgar reference to oral sex.
Around my eleventh birthday, in a vain attempt to keep me from turning out just like him, my mother cut off ties with him completely and refused to let him see me ever again. We didn't know, at that time about the illness, his illness, that was percolating inside me.
On Father's Day, I think about the father that I miss. The dad who was a crooner with perfect pitch, who taught me how to sing in harmony courtesy of the Everly Brother's on our reel to reel. He took me on road trips to see his cousins in New York in his fifty six Chevy convertible and we'd sing and play padiddle for hours. The father who taught me old military drinking songs was the same dad who commandeered the entire sandbox in Edgewood Park to reconstruct a perfect replica of the Grand Canyon almost every Saturday afternoon, weather permitting. If I held me breath, if I didn't say anything wrong, if Mom bit her tongue, the day might turn out to be perfect.
Then there is the Dad who is my role model. The spare, reserved British step-father who adopted me. The guy who, thanks to my father, it has taken me years to accept.
“He's my Dad, as opposed to my Father.” I would say if I wanted to take the easy way out and just resort to the over used shtick all we Adult Children of divorce recall. It's a handy bag of tricks we all resort to, full of trite cliches that do describe in some ways the emotional limbo that is the love between father and child.
After finding my father again at eighteen, I tried to retrieve those golden moments of my youth. But by 1985, I was living with a drummer twelve years my senior and I was too old to go on road trips with my dad. What fond memories I had were irretrievable. Still I held on and tried to grasp at something, like fist-fulls of water and air for twenty years.
When I was thirty-eight, after being locked up in psychiatric emergency, (quite by accident to my mind) I was finally diagnosed and put on medication. I slowly rejoined the ranks of the rational, and a funny thing happened, I began to identify more with that thin-lipped reserved British step-father of mine.
“Yes, quite. Jolly good.”
I'm not kidding.
That's really how he talks.
Conversations with my father were suddenly strained. I was becoming reserved and endless soliloquies about the past were no longer entertaining.
“Come on, old man, drop it, for God's sake. She left you thirty years ago. Let it go.” I thought. But this was the first time I thought that and I could never bring myself to say that to him. I was afraid of what the repercussions would be. I could no longer understand why he couldn't let her go.
I tried suggesting therapy, but he was stuck in the stigma of it. I told myself it was a generational thing. Those New Yorkers from the fifties ain't got no need for no psychological crap. Instead, he went to eight thirty Mass, every morning. Jesus would save him. Finally after having yet another sermon repeated to me, I took the risk of pissing him off.
“Jesus hasn't healed a leper in over two thousand years. What are you waiting for, a burning bush? You need therapy!”
Mostly, I stopped picking up the phone when he called because I was sick of hearing my mother referred to as the “C” word. I am her daughter, old man. If she's a cunt, then what does that make me?
Still, there is an in between to this story. There is a reason that, in spite of not being able to maintain a relationship with him for the sake of my own mental well being, there is a dad in there somewhere whom I do cherish and miss dearly.
In the spring of 1990, my father's step-father died. He was the only man I had ever known in the capacity of a paternal grandfather. I was a dancer in the Boston Combat Zone at the time. I was emotionless about his passing. That bothered me because I was emotional about everything else. Nonna had him cremated, and in the summer, they brought him up from Florida to be buried where he grew up: Exeter, New Hampshire.
I had a customer then, who was sure he was more than a customer. He was a local bookie from Chinatown. Every night he'd feed me champagne and tell me stories about Hong Kong and how pretty it was there. He was sure I would love it there. He took me to get my passport renewed. We were going to Hong Kong and I was going to be a Geisha Mama, whatever that meant. I thought it sounded exotic. I had no idea what white slavery was. I'd never even heard of it.
I couldn't tell anybody about my exotic future in Hong Kong because my mother refused to continue speaking to me once I started dancing. My reserved British step-father would hear nothing of my day to day going-ons and how I managed to afford such lavish presents for my little siblings.
I had no one to share my excitement with because no one would accept me for what I had become. Except for the man who created me.
After the funeral, the man who put whiskey in my sippy cup because he thought it was funny, asked me to take him to my strip club.
I was so excited that he wanted to go. I felt so accepted for who I was.
He bought drinks for every Chinaman in the bar. He laughed with the managers. He tipped the dancers. He swore he was in love with Karen, the dark exotic matron of the club with long brown hair that went past her ass.
“I'm her father.” he told them all, shaking each and everyone of their hands, looking every single one of them in the eye. I didn't understand it at the time, but he was making sure he could identify these guys if he had to.
About a month after the funeral, I got slipped something in the club and was tripping balls, walking around with my arms outstretched before me like I was reaching for something. I called my Dad around 5 am because I could. Because he was the only parent who would ever answer the phone. He had me out of Boston and hidden away in Florida within three days.
My Chinese customer who thought he was more than a customer, had some of his boys follow my dad home from his job at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft everyday for over six months. But dad had me at Nonna's house. They never found me. The black LTD stopped following dad home from work after Tabitha, one of the girls from the club, mailed me an article from the Boston Globe. My Chinese customer had been shot by a cop in a B & E.
This is the same man who beat my mother to the point of aborting my brother, who beat me and almost killed our dog. This is the man who not only had nothing supportive to say during my bought with infertility but couldn't understand why I wanted to have any children of my own in the first place. This man risked his life to save mine. He was the right parent for the job because of, not in spite of his illness. He alone had the capacity to venture in that darkness with me, because he too felt comfortable there.
This is the man I miss each Father's day. This is the man I wish I could still talk to.
But the reality is a mental mess who can't let go of a past that has no meaning anymore and who does more damage in one off the cuff remark than I can repair in time for next Sunday's phone call. Instead I cherish this newfound meeting of the minds I have with the step-father, so stiff, my uncle in Italy has nick named him, “The Field Marshall.” ( He used to schedule our family vacations in fifteen minute intervals in military time.)
How do we bring these frayed, frazzled edges into the fold of emotional acceptance? What Yogi or Shamanic trance can we embark on that will soothe us on the third Sunday of each June? Whose sermon can sum up in one or two sentences what we Adult Children need to hear in order to feel okay?
This father's day was spent attending the funeral of my neighbor's sister. She was killed by her son's father. He had been receiving treatment for an un-named psychological problem. She was twenty-three years old. I couldn't help re-living the way we all held our breath in case something went wrong when I was a child. Mental illness can come of as merely the toleration of eccentricity. But in less time than it takes to notice there is a need for therapy, it can crush and shatter the lives of all touched by the suffering person. I played the same song over and over in the car, on the way home from the funeral. It's called Beautiful and it's by Julian Lennon. He wrote it for his father, a man whose life was also taken by someone with untreated mental illness. “You gave your life for love. I know you're safe above”
I watch my husband come to terms with our infertility as we play football with our neighbors and the five year old little boy who lost both his parents in one day. I count my blessings and take nothing for granted, including the Field Marshall.
I hate Father's day. Summer re-runs. Take your meds. Go to therapy. Give yourself permission to become one with the couch just for this day.
Then tomorrow, we move on.