Daddy Issues

My father was an abusive husband when he drank.  And he drank a lot.  He was an alcoholic who got into enough car accidents that his license had to be revoked.  Thankfully, he didn’t kill and injure innocent people while behind the wheel.  Surviving in a household with a mixture of love and affirmation, violence and terror, occasional affluence followed by poverty, all resulting from one parent’s alcoholism takes some resilience and work to achieve and maintain emotional stability.I often think that my resilience comes from my genes.  I inherited the genes of mostly Nigerian people (thank you DNA through Ancestry.com).  These ancestors endured separation from their homeland, survived the middle passage in chains on slave ships, lived through slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, and the great migration to produce me at the stirring of the Civil Rights Movement.  How can I not be resilient?  And how can I not grasp that my brilliant father whose intelligence and talents were not acknowledged, appreciated nor rewarded in the society in which he grew up would have major emotional  issues?   Given his circumstances, alcohol must have begun as a reasonable emotional escape, but it also hampered his ability to control his fury born of righteous indignation over the injustice he experienced every day as a black man in this country.  With enough alcohol in his system, that outrage was visited upon the person closest to him: my mother.  She was 5’4″ while he was 6’2″.  His was displaced anger.  He found fault where there was none.  He heaped upon her accusations without evidence.  She became all that was wrong in the world in those moments.  Son my twelve year old self was glad when we left him behind just after the school year ended.  I could finally sleep soundly.  But then she did the unthinkable, she decided to give their marriage another try.

When my mother invited my father back into her life after our escape to the valley, I was fifteen and I was furious.  I reverted back to sleepless nights, waiting for violence to erupt.  I had lost all respect for him and couldn’t speak to him with a modicum of respect.  One afternoon I refused one of his demands and he went and got this horse whip with which he intended to  strike me.  As the whip came my way,  I grabbed the end and yanked the whip from his hand and exclaimed, “Who has the whip now?”  It was an out of body experience for a girl who had been taught that God commanded children to honor their mother and father so the it would be well with me, the child.  I gathered the whip and walked out the door.

That incident brought my mother to her senses and she insisted that he leave for what was to be a final separation.  It was about a year later that I was able to write a heartfelt letter to my father, forgiving him for the past and asking that he forgive me for my  rage.  He never responded to the letter, but our relationship continued with me visiting him on occasion at his home or office.  He gave me away at my wedding, working hard at being sober and remaining sober for the occasion.  When I had children, he could visit when he was sober and we would visit him, provided he hadn’t been drinking.  As soon as the first drink was poured, we would leave.   As a consequence of this boundary, my children never experience their grandfather’s alcoholic rage.  And those rages continued to be a problem for him in his relationships with other females.

A therapist once said to me that I too readily excuse the poor behavior of others.  I don’t believe that is true.  I just believe that most of us are doing the best we can with what we have under our particular circumstances.   Some cope in more positive ways than others. What I do is set boundaries for my interactions with others that I can live with.  I’m told that medically, I have a high pain threshold.  The same might actually be true of me emotionally as I am slow to anger, quick to forgive, and I am not bothered by small slights or insults.

I might be a different person today had my mother not fought back each time my father attacked her.  She was never passive in interactions with him.  She stood up for herself every time.  Although I could see that he often became further outraged, it was important for me to see that she had the guts to not allow herself to be a victim.  She was a role model to me in that regard.  In retrospect, I think the reason I was initially attracted to shorter men in my youthful dating years was because I didn’t want to be at the same physical disadvantage my mother had been in with my father. All my boyfriends were about my height or a little shorter.  My life was shaped in other ways, too.

I made a pact with my brothers when we were teenagers, to never drink.  I didn’t touch alcohol until my early forties when I accompanied friends to a wine tasting.  To this day, I have never been drunk or even a little tipsy.  I might have a sip of this or that, but never more.  I made my very first “non-virgin” strawberry daiquiri a year ago and everyone laughed at how little alcohol was in it.  Given my family history and the genetic component to alcoholism, I’m not moved or tempted by any sort of pressure to drink.  Someone once commented to me, “You don’t know what you’re missing.”  I just smiled and thought to myself, “And I have no desire to find out.”

The other coping mechanism I undertook was a Twelve Step Program for Adult Children of Alcoholics.  That program helped me to understand elements of my behavior, like perfectionism and hyper-responsibility, that were common to adults who had grown up in households like mine.  I developed ways to temper these and to appreciate the ways these attributes actually help me succeed.  In the group, I was allowed to grieve the lost of my childhood and to forgive my alcoholic father again for stealing it along with my sober but enabling mother who was doing the best she knew to do at the time.

No one’s parents are perfect because there are no perfect people.  I’ve tried to be a good parent to my children and they have turned out pretty well.  But I would be delusional if I thought they didn’t bare any scars from the times I got it all wrong or didn’t give them what they really needed.  My prayer is that my children or anyone reading this blog with open wounds from childhood trauma caused by parental failure, would forgive their imperfect parent(s) and do what is needed to find understanding and  healing to move forward with debilitating resentment.