My father turned 84 yesterday.  Kenneth cooked a great dinner for him and his girlfriend Charlotte, who is also 84.  My father said the average life expectancy in the United States is 77, so he felt fine, he was living on seven years borrowed time.  We sat out on the deck and had a rousing conversation about the economy and the coming election, among other topics.  I feel a deep joy, and gratitude, to be with my father, to have this friendship after our many years of struggle together through difficult family situations, our long estrangement that was finally healed.

My students in my Critical Thinking class are reading Eckhart Tolle's  A New Earth.  All week we've been discussing the chapter, "Role-Playing: The Many Faces of the Ego."  The students are particularly interested in the part of the chapter about the roles of parents and children.  Reading their responses, I see how I did not experience their filial problems, in terms of the controlling issues that some children have with their parents.  By the time I was fourteen, I was pretty much on my own.  In fact, my father actually said that to me.  It was a September afternoon, we had been raking leaves together in the backyard.  We were eating lunch, noodles and bullion soup, our favorite.  I asked my father a heavy question, I can't remember what, but something about life or love or sex.  He kept eating his noodles.  Then he looked up and said, "I really don't have an answer for that, Sue.  I've taught you all I know.  You're on your own."

I went into my bedroom, stunned.  I was on my own.  It gave me the shivers, but I also felt elated, free, everything wide open, possible, whatever I wanted to do!  It was all up to me.  During high school, my mother would keep a tight leash in some ways, (the dating thing, the "don't-get-pregnant" thing), but my parents were both too involved in their own dire drama to offer much parenting.  When my younger sister was born, I would do a lot of parenting, not only of her, but also of my mother; my father would be mostly absent for most of those years, either on a business trip or drinking too much and not present one way or another. 

At eighteen, I went to college and never returned home again, except for visits.  I was married at nineteen, divorced at twenty-one and living alone.  I lived alone, give or take a roommate or two in my early twenties, until I was forty-one-years-old.  Yes, I definitely knew how to be on my own.  What I would have to learn is how to be with another person.   

My father said once that one of his regrets in life was that I was left alone for those years in adolescence, then went off into my own life too young; he felt I was forced into independence too soon because of the circumstances of our family problems.

But I don't know.  I loved being free.  Even as a child, I liked to go off by myself, taking walks alone, sitting in the pine tree by our house, reading a book, way up high in the sky, among the light and shadows, looking into a distance without borders, dreaming, thinking, imagining.

I went through a long time of wanting my father to be a father, the father one is supposed to have.  I needed therapy in order to see the situation differently, and to get out of the prison of self-pity and fear of intimacy.  However, the bonus of this experience is that I don't have much role-playing going on with my father.  Really, none anymore.  He is my father, of course, but he is more of a friend.  I see him clearly, (without the image, without the projection, without the wanting), as a human being, and I respect him and honor his journey, completely separate from mine.  This is a wonderful feeling.  It feels light and real, it feels truer. 

Real friendship and real love do not have anything to do with wanting something from another person.  I can say I truly love my father, and he is my friend.

Poem:

My Father Sends Me a Thank You Card

 

To say how much he enjoyed Father's Day.

I hope we have more tennis together, he writes.

I'll get a new racquet shortly.

He underlines love Dad.

 

I put the card back in the envelope

And stare at my name in his hard-pressed hand.

My father might not have been a father.

At nineteen, he could have died at Omaha Beach

In an airplane, dropping bombs on German subs.

Or in a tent in the desert, a knife stuck through his neck

As he slept, or crawling to his bunk,

Drunk nearly to death after R & R in London.

 

I both know my father's life and don't.

He's told me or I've been there for the plot points.

But the rest is guesswork; we're detectives

Of each others' hearts, puzzling out

The clues, the truth of our days

As errant as time, moving, changing, lost.

 

I'm grateful that my father and I have become friends. 

We're like a small town after a hurricane

Where the survivors drink a cup of coffee

In the only bar left standing, its roof blown off,

The floor covered with broken glass,

Mangy dogs fighting over the beer nuts. 

We sit on ripped-to-shreds bar stools,

And my father takes cream and I take sugar.

 

The truest thing is the love

Written down hard and underlined.