by Pamela McCaughey
image graphite portrait of my father by artist Virginia Lori
Today would have been my father’s 82nd birthday had liver cancer not cut his life short in July 2007. I’ve spent a lot of years mulling over my relationships with both my parents, separately of course, because by the time my father passed, they’d been divorced for thirty years.
The older I get the more objectively I try to examine my parents, their actions, their lives. This isn’t always easy because some of their actions negatively affected me and some of our other loved ones. As my cousin Bonnie has said quite wisely, sometimes we are angrier about actions taken that hurt those we love best, rather than those things that hurt us personally.
I believe my father was a complicated person. His actions and behaviours often belied his declarations of romantic or familial love. And as we all know, actions speak louder than words. Talk is cheap.
My father, or Freep as I called him, grew up in the Great Depression, the youngest boy in a family of six children. As a youngster he suffered greatly from asthma and lost so much time from school, that he was held back a grade. During his asthma attacks his parents feared for his life. This concern led, I suspect, to a certain degree of pampering, especially on the part of his mother, and throughout his life, hers was the only voice of reason he would listen to.
He seemed to have a desperate need to push every envelope, to pit himself against the odds, to gamble his way through every situation. And when that failed, he would often tell falsehoods to extricate himself from the consequences. For him, life was supposed to be one big party, with no limit to alcohol or good times.
While this kind of behaviour is deplorable, it’s doubly deplorable when a man becomes a husband and/or father. I realize now in hindsight, that without meaning to, my grandmother may have set him on a course of selfishness, despite the fact she was not selfish herself and tried to raise all her children to be good citizens of the world. My father’s early health condition scared her, and because of her kindness and devotion, he learned to continually put his own needs ahead of those of others – even those he professed to love. He got spoiled.
I do not want to speak here of my parents’ ill fated marriage except to say that at every turn, my father spared no consideration for those of us who were directly and negatively impacted by things he did or failed to do. It was as though he had no conscience. He didn’t seem to understand that poor judgements and bad actions brought their own consequences and the piper must be paid.
When he was in fine trim and good humour, my father was the life of the party, the class clown who kept everyone laughing, and he was possessed of a considerable amount of charm when he chose to exert it. In my relationship with him, he could be funny and sometimes generous with his time and his cash.
But as my stepmother and I have agreed, if he felt discomfited, pressed to the wall because he’d been caught lying, or had had that one drink too many – he could turn into an instant arsehole. Cruel, sarcastic, sometimes even capable of physical violence. He could be dismissive of the views of others, rude, disagreeable and moody. In his role as a father, he and I clashed regularly. He hassled me over school grades which were below A, my body build, my religious views, my fingernail chewing, my chin, my teeth, my clothes sometimes. It was the way we disagreed more than the reasons. He could be very nasty and condescending. Oddly enough, the only things we didn’t argue over were my artwork, my writing, my loves of hockey and SF and he never bothered me about dating. He once said he knew I could handle myself with boys and he wasn’t worried!
There were a couple periods in the relationship when we simply ceased to see each other. He was paranoid about remarrying and seemed to think I was going to harass him on the subject. By the time communications had been reestablished and my stepmom and I had a chance to talk, we discovered HE had been the author of all the alienation, criticizing her kids in one breath and bragging on me in the next. All the while angry with me because I’d dared to question his desire to remarry anyone after less than a year after the divorce.
His constant abuse of alcohol may have fueled some of his behaviour. He’d been known to get into brawls while drunk and he lost several jobs over the course of his working life as a result of the booze. This kind of thing doesn’t make for a smooth relationship with your significant other of your kids.
If I’d been wiser as a youngster about him, I’d have recognized the double personality and changing moods of a narcissistic personality disorder. His lack of consideration for others, his risk taking habits, his adrenaline junkie mindset, and his refusal to accept the consequences for his bad actions frustrated all of those who tried to love him. His stupid behaviour chased away one spouse and almost lost him the second.
As I grew up I saw my father as an anti-image. I didn’t want to be like him. I patrolled myself stringently, especially when I discovered a fondness and an incredible tolerance for booze consumption in myself. I knew that path led to trouble. And my father, who had no filter whatsoever over what he said to others, often characterized me as having the same problem “That big mouth of yours is going to get you in trouble!” (And yes it has!)
Yet, there are other less negative aspects of my father that I’ve inherited as well. The artwork is a big thing. We both were to some degree self taught, although I was fortunate enough to acquire an art mentor in Joe Collins. The humour is another. I’ve got a good memory for jokes and funny stories, and my father had a huge mental cache of these things. Books. We both were/are avid readers, even though the subject matter differed considerably. TV shows and movies: because of Freep, I was raised on a diet of old Westerns, SF, hockey and superheroes. Intellectually, we loved a lot of the same genres in viewing materials. My interest in these subjects will continue. Looks: if you were to place childhood photos of my father and I together you’d assume you were looking at a set of twins, born 22 years apart. Our physicality and the way we carry/ied ourselves was exactly the same.
Over the years, I alternately disliked and loved my father. It was largely dependant on his behaviour of course. We were still sword rattling when my stepmother decided enough was enough and she started telling my father off for his confrontational attitudes and she started generally taking my side of things. He didn’t like this at all but eventually we made our peace by pledging to let the past be IN the past, and moving forward in a new and better way. The sad part is that I don’t think he ever realized just what it was he did and said that made our relationship so difficult. In the last 20 years or so before his death, he did try to make amends and become a better father, and I credit my stepmother Joyce with this.
By the time my father died, he was a somewhat changed man. Many of his attitudes never shifted, but he had pretty much given up booze (because of diabetes) and that habit had directed a lot of his bad behaviour. Without the drinking he saw things more clearly. He was not a profound thinker by any means, but occasionally he’d say something that suggested he’d learned a few things about himself. After his mother’s death in 1994, I noticed a change in him and I asked if maybe he’d grown up a bit. True to form, he replied, “Nah, I’m just too old to do all the bad shit I used to!”
Perhaps the one thing I could count on with him was his pride in me. Every time I was in the newspaper he’d cut out the article to save it and I found out after he died he’d been keeping a scrap book of these clippings. When my first book was published in 1995, he attended the publication launch with bells on and introduced himself to everyone as the author’s dad. When asked that day if he ever expected to see his daughter’s name in print that way, he grinned and announced, “Yes, I did, but I thought it was going to be science fiction, not history.”
In the final analysis, my father was a man afflicted with character flaws, exacerbated by alcohol and some kind of personal unhappiness that may have predated either of his marriages. I don’t know if he felt he should have been more successful professionally, or if his addictions and the need to buck the rules of society made him chafe at the narrowness of life. I think he wanted a bigger life but didn’t have the education or skills to make that happen. His inability to control himself contributed to his failures and I don’t think he realized his dissatisfaction could have been cured by changing his personal choices of action.
Did I love my father? Yes. I did. But not until I was old enough to understand the internal forces that drove him. And to try to accept that there was nothing that he could do to change the past, even if he’d wanted to. He used to say, “The past can’t be changed, we don’t know what the future will bring – all we really have is the present – the here and now.”
Words to live by, even if he didn’t do so himself.
Blessed Be, Pamela
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