So here it is, four score years. Four score years rather than eighty, because that is the way I imagine you saying it, choosing words that reference Judaeo-Christian culture rather than mere unadorned fact. And right there, with that opening thought, I see yet one more connection between us: that fascination with words as a cultural semiotic, firing the imagination and granting entry into other worlds, and overcoming the perception of separateness through the vicissitudes of time and space.
We are father and daughter; in me is you, a blood legacy that is both distant and immediate. It is, of course, the immediate that most concerns us; we have not travelled far from Homer’s exhortation that “It is a wise child that knows its own father” or from Shakespeare’s relatively recent inversion that “It is a wise father that knows his own child”. So, to mark the occasion of your four score years, I offer up some images of you and, in so doing, I also offer up a little of myself. Let us begin by recognising two things. The first is that my views of you are shaded and refracted through the dark glass of my own understanding and experiences. What is it to know another human being, when it is the unfinished business of our life journeys simply to know ourselves? The second stands in paradox to the first: that it is possible for others to see us more clearly than we see ourselves; that what we attempt to keep most hidden about ourselves is often that which is my obvious to the eye of the beholder. So, without further musing on the nature of truth, I invite you to step back through time with me, revisiting the rooms of my memory in which there are images of you.
What is my very first memory of you? The images are blurry and most moments of clearer focus have a suspicious correspondence to oft-viewed images in photo albums or the storylines of family recounts. However, I am guided by the visceral nature of some recollections. I remember, for instance, you stroking my cheek and asking me “Whatsa matter with the baby girl?” and the welling up of emotion as I reconciled the love of your touch, the security of being held, with the foreboding feeling that if you, the person I trusted and loved thought there was something wrong with me, there inevitably must be. And I fuzzily remember the infamous ‘stop acting like a two year old’ incident; hiding in the garage at Grandma and Grandpa’s, feeling scared, sad, and ashamed (what had I actually done that precipitated the incident?) and somewhat defiantly determined not to reveal any of the above emotions to those around me.
I look back at those two incidents and muse about how they connect to my propensity to hide from others when overwhelmed, or to show anger and defiance rather than mere sadness when I’ve been hurt. I remember the youthful tears and hurt that combined with a child’s perceived impotency to produce the infamous tantrums of my youth, the melodramatic maelstroms designed to readdress the power imbalance in the only way I knew how; the heady mixture of fear and delight as I raised the flood of your ire and allowed myself to be carried away by the unleashed furies within us both.
What was so important that it could precipitate such emotion? I remember a little Dutch porcelain shoe that you once used as an ashtray despite my begging you not to. You could not understand what I was making such a fuss about; I could not understand why you would smear grey ash over something that was mine. And most of all, I hated that I could not make you see it through my eyes, or even more frustratingly, that you did not instinctively understand. The powerful and frightening realizations that even those to whom you are bonded in blood and love are separate from you and outside of your control, and that, as a consequence, you can be set adrift in the world, alone and unconnected. Such are the traumas of a child whose psyche it is not content with being loved, fed, housed and educated. The personality wants endless validation, and once having detected the smallest wound to its sense of sufficiency and completeness, selectively collects evidence in an increasingly crazy attempt to prove itself right. We seek the reflection of ourselves in others, while capable of seeing only what we expect to see.
What is a child’s love for a parent? In essence, a needy, solipsistic thing made charming by the combination of strangeness and familiarity in which the parent recognises both themselves and something beyond themselves. For a child, love lies on the same polarity as hate. How I hated you at times for your transgressions against me. I remember the triumph of an accusation made to wound that finally found its target. Listening behind the kitchen door and hearing you say, “She really knows how to hurt a person”. At last a victory! This strange love is one that only a parent would forbear.
While a parent’s love may be uncoupled from hate, it is not so easy to escape from fear, love’s other dark companion. Age five, I am having my evening bath with my sister. Suddenly, some internal alarm clock signals and I attacked by the thought that it is past the time that you should be home. I start to cry and I am inconsolable, until you walk through the bathroom door and relief renders me exhausted. Age twenty eight, I am a new mother, unable to sleep at night, crying at the pain of the vulnerability to which my love for my son exposes me. Only those whom we love have the power to hurt us in such undeliberate, unforeseen ways to which no blame can be attached.
And yet we learn to cope with such pain, as we must, since life itself was designed to pull us apart: father from son, daughter from father, mother from son. I hated and resisted puberty because I understood it was a point of major change in our relationship. I hated myself and the changes in my body that I wanted to deny were happening. I remember how you said I smelled bad; I needed to lose weight. I remember when you said I couldn’t sleep in the motel room bed with you while mum tended to my sick sisters because people might get the wrong idea. I remember how you talked about sending me away to boarding school in Australia for my own good. I remember all these things and how they brewed up such a viscous concoction of self-loathing and misery that, in retrospect, it is totally unsurprising to me that I ended up hospitalised aged twelve. The blessing of illness was that it allowed me to see that you did care, the glimpses of pain and fear in your eyes perversely reassuring. From my very first hospitalisation, age six, I discovered that illness disrupted the normal operation on the world to place me forefront and centre. I still have the necklace you gave me on my very first trip to hospital, an adult looking necklace that seemed appropriate for my entry to an adult world. I was determined to be impressively brave at that time, and that very determination led to my fear of needles. I wrongly applied my observations of puncturing balloons to the puncturing of skin. Having observed that balloons were more easily punctured when their skin was tight, I thought the needle would go in more easily if I tensed the muscle in my arm. A wrong application of theory that led to other fraught encounters with each other down the track, such are the chain reactions that are set off by the seemingly smallest of beliefs.
Always this desire for you to be proud of me, and frustration and disappointment with myself when I felt that I’d done something that went against that. Even as an adult, I stayed with Mark longer than I should have because of the shame in facing you and telling you that I’d failed at my marriage. To my shame, I remember thinking how it would all be easier if you were dead, because then I couldn’t disappoint you. I understand the irrationality of such a belief, given that you have always allowed me to go my own way. But we allow ourselves to be imprinted young and then spend our adult years cautiously pushing at the margins of those imprints, while wondering what new designs we might forge outside of our self-imposed lines. I remember going to University with you, through those then magically impressive sliding doors in the library and seeing all the books. It seems my subconscious took note of what was worthy of my father’s attention, and sent me on a trajectory of learning and nail biting on which my current workplace is the latest pit stop. I remember back to my excitement at cracking the code of reading, an excitement made even greater by my realisation that you were impressed as I sat on your lap and read you “Alice in Wonderland”, not a baby book, but a real book of words and worlds that I had not met before. So in my mind, to learn and be smart is to earn your love, just as, for you, to give your children the best education was a way of expressing your love. Even now, past middle age, childish as I recognise it to be, I cannot help but feel a little thrill to tell you of yet another High Distinction, the truth being that it is only my parents and I who find worth in such a thing. You no longer joke with me now about the missing 2% from a score of 98, you simply say ‘Well done” and I realise that I spent too much time of my young life lamenting that missing 2% rather than celebrating its complement.
How can we know what words our children will covertly and unconsciously use as weapons against themselves, until they are adult enough to wake up from the stories they have been telling themselves? For all around us lies the counter-evidence to the fabrications we have been telling ourselves. Another image of you, leaving Matsuyama airport after a visit to check on me. We wave our goodbyes through a glass wall as you walk towards your departure. I see you stop and set down your briefcase and wipe your eyes. I play the game I think we are playing and mock sniff and pretend to wipe my own eyes. My host mother hits me on the arm and asks what I am doing. And with that I am struck by the realisation that my father, who never cries, is actually crying, and I suddenly feel small and confused, no longer proud of my tough shell of independence.
To love someone is to allow them to escape from the definitions we put on them. For so much of my life, I thought of you as rational and unemotional, a product of a certain generation in which boys didn’t cry and men expressed love by upholding their duty to provide for their wife and children. I mused a little on your personal history: what it meant to grow up as an only child, without a father, and with a mother who had to take on that masculine role of provider, but I never felt its true emotional impact. It may be that what was hidden from me was also hidden from you, that you waited until the circumstances of your life permitted you to travel to distant worlds to retrieve the missing parts of your life story, even now the facts and figures of geography and history allowing for some shielding from the sheer emotion of finally connecting to your lost father. I see your tears and I want to cry too. Tears for my lack of gratitude for what I have had that you did not, tears for the parts of my father that have been lost to me through my own limited perceptions, and finally tears of recognition that you exist outside of your role as my father, as a fellow human being seeking meaning, purpose and expression.
I cannot see you as an old man; maybe I will one day, but not yet, since the life force remains strong in you. That is inspiring, and, in reversal of the usual parent-child dynamic, let me say I am proud of you, not only for outscoring the biblical allotment of years, but for continuing to learn, grow and share.
So happy birthday father. I wish you good health, continued vitality and the ever expanding ability to know and realise the longings of your heart and soul.
In love and gratitude,
Ann
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