My Dad Wore Glasses

My father was born during the dog days of summer and so what would be a better way to celebrate the season of his birth than to recount the three worst experiences of my life with my father, yes? No? o.O

Well, if you've been reading my essays, then you already know in passing (actually from reading What's in a Name?) that I thought of my father as unconditionally loving. However, his life was not without negative impact. (Show me a person whose life is not.) Yah, yah, we love to focus on the positive and deny our shadows. There's this fear that if we even look at the negative shadow within that we'll be consumed by it, that the devil himself will ride up and spirit us away. Blarney.

Besides, when we deny our shadows and those of our significant others, we lose tremendous opportunities for learning, healing, and personal growth. The very things that help us become the people we were meant to be and contribute to our ability to have positive impact. I mean, if you can't have compassion for your family members shortfalls, how are you going to have compassion for anyone else's, including your own?

Trust me, I have no idea where this essay is going, but I will tell you this: Like most people, my childhood was not perfect, and with that said, you will not read a recounting of the worst of it here nor will I eviscerate anyone from my past for anyone's reading enjoyment. So relax.

The first experience is the genesis of a recurring nightmare. The nightmare usually takes the same form: I need to get from here, this land mass, to there, another land mass, where people I love will be. The here changes, the there changes, the way from here to there changes, and even the loved ones change. What doesn't change is the harrowing journey from here to there. Ah, sounds like life. (A special shout out to my cousins in Northern Ireland because despite the terror of getting to there, I always love seeing them in my dreams when the Emerald Isle is my destination.)

The real life nightmare: I was three, about yay high, no taller than a short chair, when my Dad took me aboard the ship he was assigned to in New London, Connecticut. I have no idea how we went aboard the ship, but for our exit, my Dad had us cross a canvas gangplank with rope handrails. Me first. Imagine if you will, walking over water on a string of pillowcases sewn together. And imagine being three. The handrails, if you can call them that (if someone knows what they are called, please note the correct terminology in the comment section below), were head height for a wee one. When I took a step while holding onto them, the canvas pitched me in the direction of the rope and I'd find myself looking directly into the drink, feeling like my legs were going to go out from under me. I was petrified. I froze.

My father cajoled me. My vague understanding from the incident was that I the ship had pulled up the solid gangplank and so this was our only option for egress. And so when cajoling didn't work, he let me know that THIS was the only way off. Then, he got angry. I mean, seriously, how he managed to pick me up and safely transport the two of us across a pitching gangplank with only one hand on the rope, I'll never be able to fathom.

Now, you could tell me that no such device ever existed, and I'd believe you, as I cannot confirm this story with my father because he has been dead for nearly 29 years as of this writing. So fact or not, my Dad and I crossed something from ship to shore that scared the bejesus out of me.

Then, when I was about six or seven, my father learned I couldn't swim. And so while at the Andrews Air Force base pool in Maryland, he stood in waist high water and encouraged me to dive off the side and swim toward him. He became quite frustrated with my reticence. I had a difficult time both understanding and expressing my feelings as a kid, and what my father didn't know was that I didn't want to get my face wet. Actually he knew I didn't like getting my face wet when washing my hair, and he failed to transfer this knowledge to my diving head first into a pool of water. The repeated diving was bumping me up against something I found extremely uncomfortable.

As my reticence grew, my father gave up and walked away in disgust. A friend of his took over, offering me more patience. Did I mention that my Dad was not a man of great patience? (More on that later.) For whatever reason, I was able to tell the man that I didn't want to get my face wet. His response was to have me stand at the side of the pool and swim out to him with my head above water as he moved further and further away. I was swimming in no time.

These two memories have stood out in my mind and it's taken nearly 50 years for my brain to construct thoughts that could morph into spoken words so that I might ask my mother if she had any idea about this apparent anomaly. I mean, my overall memory of my father is one where he is unconditionally loving with a streak of impatience (that I chose to either ignore or give him a hard time about), not of someone who would necessarily get disgusted with me or angry enough to walk away.

My mother said, "Your father thought his children were so bright that they ought to be able to do anything straight away." Sure enough, I was a quick study when it came to doing most things, though I was much slower when it came to learning how to tell time, tie a shoe lace, thread a needle, learn the times table, knit. My father was the parent who taught me how to roller skate, polish shoes (or polish anything until it shone), make a bed, do laundry, iron a dress shirt, ride a bike, and despite being a klutz and a danger to myself simply walking through a room, athleticism came relatively easily to me, as did cleaning and pressing clothes.

It's been often said by my mother that when I was a child, you could have eaten an egg off of my bedroom floor it was so clean. (Of course, Mom would say that in context to my becoming a messy teenager, something I have yet to live down.) No doubt my ability to make things spotless made my father proud because Dad cleaned and cared for everything that needed caring for as if it were an honor. He also treated guests who graced our home in the same manner. I suspect that my father had the same attitude about caring for people and possessions that I do: when I clean and care for what I have, I also honor the resources, both human and physical, that went into its production. It is meditative and reminds me to be grateful for not only all I have but all there is, and I carry that over to my care in those I've invited into my home. (Of course, there are some social niceties that I can't seem to master like remembering that it is not only polite but a kindness to offer someone a drink.)

My mother's take on the motivating force behind my father's impatience was new to me. I knew my father thought his kids were smart, and my brother certainly got spoken to for bringing home poor grades, but I never felt any pressure to perform academically. As long as I wasn't failing a single course, and I brought home at least one A, my Dad was satisfied. As far as he was concerned, we had room to be whoever we were going to be, though I suspected that as a girl, my Dad thought I'd be a wife and mother and so my brother's grades were of more concern.

On the other hand, my mother appeared to believe that my being smart was not of much use because I lacked common sense. Oh, I was a problem solver, I could figure things out, but I had no sense when it came to people. Meanwhile, my brother had plenty of friends, putting into high relief for my mother that I appeared to have little interest in playing with other kids, preferring, usually, to interact with adults. (It wasn't that I didn't want friends. I didn't understand what motivated other children to be so fickle in their affections. Adults were kinder and far more predictable.) Mom knew that having a good head on your shoulders when it came to reading people was every bit as important as how "smart" you were, and she appeared to think that her pointing out that I lacked common sense when it came to people, whenever she saw it lacking, would cause me to go out and find some. When she talked to me about what she saw and I missed, she might as well have been speaking a foreign language.

What we didn't know was that I had Asperger's and have a devil of a time reading social situations. Having grown up with a chronic illness (I started having symptoms of ME early in grade school), I have had this saying, "If you always peed green and never saw anyone else's pee, you'd think that everyone peed green." This is true about Asperger's. While I knew I was different, while I knew I didn't fit in, I didn't understand why. I thought I saw what others saw and others saw what I saw and interpreted it differently, in a way I couldn't fathom.

I always thought that I somehow missed out on various people-related pamphlets that must have been handed out on the day I was born (e.g., "How to Flirt," "How to Pull One Over on Your Teacher," "How to Engage in Small Talk, Enjoy It, & Feel Connected," etc.). I'd even missed out on the reason why many of these pamphlets were necessary. (I understood why I might want to pull one over on my teachers. I was not without the desire to be mischievous if good fun was part of the equation.) It was one big confusing mess to me and for the most part, there didn't seem to anyone who could tell me what it was I needed to know to make sense of it all. Now I know I don't see what others see and I interpret various social interactions differently because of what I miss, and with the diagnosis in hand, I am beginning to understand some of what I did not, which has me wondering what I might be entirely clueless about.

After that day in the pool, I don't remember my father showing disgust toward me. And I credit my mother for that. Knowing my mother, she pulled my father aside and told him not to be so hard on me when I was learning something new. When my mother was being rational, she really used her noggin and had great people sense. I remember her coaching my father at times when the motivations of others stumped him completely.

Indeed, my father's willingness to share with me what puzzled him about the motivations and behaviors of others in the work force--what it seemed to take to succeed and how irrational that seemed to him--, helped equip me with insights about the world of work that would have taken me years to get on my own. Somehow my father's puzzling got me to put on my thinking cap in a way that my mother's pronouncements about the nature of people could not. Mom expected that I'd be able to connect the dots that she didn't realize I could not see. My father, other the other hand, showed me the dots that didn't make sense to him, much in the same way the dots don't make sense to me. I guess puzzling through why people have done what they have done helps me recognize it when I see it later. In theory anyway. Because none of this comes naturally and must be puzzled out over time every time, this also means I am a slow learner when it comes to people, and sometimes it seems that I must learn the same lesson over and over because I have difficulty seeing the dots when they present.

I simply did not take my father's impatience personally. As far as I knew, it had nothing to do with me. Don't get me wrong, like most children and teens, I often took criticisms totally to heart and thought that anything negative said spoke volumes about me and nothing about the speaker. (And thank goodness I eventually learned that that is not true.) But with my Dad, I could see that he lost patience with himself, often with a project he was working on, and I would remind him to keep it. And so, logic told me that his impatience with me could not have had anything to do with me. If I saw my Dad was getting on edge with me, I'd say, "Dad, calm down," and he would because he knew we worried about his health.

My Dad's health was poor from the time I was four on (he nearly died twice at the age of 34, then again at the age of 42 before passing away at the age of 57), and I always figured that high blood pressure and poor health put him more on edge. As someone who became totally disabled at the age of 48 with ME, an illness that totally saps me of energy, I understand how lack of energy can seriously put a person on edge because I was once a relatively patient person and I've seen my patience, when it comes to working with things, wane the more ill I've become. It's difficult to hang in there and slowly explain something or have to repeat yourself because repeating yourself takes even more energy, energy you don't have. It feels unreasonable to have to expend the energy. Yes, I'm well aware that's irrational (it's neither reasonable nor unreasonable), and I'm a work in progress.

My Dad never hit me, though there was that series of black and white pictures of from one of those photo booths when I was about one year old. In one, I'm looking at the camera. In the other, I'm looking down and messing with my father's wedding band. And in the third, I'm crying for the camera. Even I can read between the lines on that one! However, I don't count this as one of the three worst experiences with my father because I have no memory of it.

Typically, I was not disrespectful toward my Dad. He was a gentleman, save the impatience, and his basic grace and goodness commanded reciprocity. When I was 15 though, he was instructing me about something (probably the fact, that I had yet again--insert teenage angst with that phrase--, failed to clean out the sink in the main bathroom after brushing my teeth), and I was talking back, being more than my normal, playful self. No doubt at that moment I was pushing the boundary of respectful behavior, and it was as if he suddenly regretted never using corporal punishment and realized that this particular moment represented the perfect opportunity to rectify that oversight. He slapped me on the upper arm. It was hardly a swat, but Oh My Sweet Lord was he wrong in his estimation. In that moment, my father tumbled hard and far off of the pedestal that I had him on. Constructed, in part, because he had managed to parent well without resorting to physical punishment or even threats of punishment.

The worst part of that incident, however, was watching the immediate recognition in my father's eyes of the tumble he'd just taken. That was definitely a case where the corporal punishment hurt the giver more than the receiver. What I eventually learned from this (after constructing a smaller, more human scale pedestal for him), of course, is that no one is perfect even if we think they are and it's important to have compassion for both their efforts and their basic, imperfect humanness. Imperfect is plenty good enough. (Which is not to say that I would ever tolerate an adult laying a hand on me. Boundaries, as few as they might seem, I definitely have them.)

Looking back, I suppose my father actually learned from his experiences with his children. He must have learned to spot thoughts and feelings that could morph into disgust, and after that he never made me feel like I wasn't measuring up somehow (of course, I'm not very good at reading disgust on the faces of others, as it looks like indigestion to me), though I could definitely tell when he was disappointed in me. My mother who might have to tell us to do something three to four times--both my brother and I buried ourselves in reading most of the time--to the point of total pulling-her-hair-out exasperation with us, apparently never learned why my father did not have to ask us twice. Mom also didn't wear glasses.

That last statement will make sense in a second or two... you see, typically when Dad was asking my brother Michael and me to do something, he was already doing something himself and so the message was clear from the get go that "it takes all of us around here to make this home work." Also, he wore glasses. He'd ask us to do something. "Okay!" we'd holler at him in a chipper voice. A few minutes later, my Dad's countenance would grace a doorway with something or other in hand (a part of whatever he was working on at the time), and he would simply look in at us and then over the top of his glasses in disappointment. It caused us to hop up and get cracking every time.

My Dad might not have discovered a way to get rid of the edge that came with impatience over doing things, but he didn't need to. The people in his life loved him and made allowances. It's easy to make allowances for someone who never calls you a name, who'll be fully present and listen when you have a problem, who will take the time to teach you what he knows, who will share his philosophy about life, who is not shy about expressing his feelings, and who will be an all around decent person to you and others. While my Dad had high standards, he didn't expect me to be perfect and I didn't expect him to be perfect either.

Because of my Dad's health, for most of my life I felt like he was on loan to our family. Perhaps Dad represented a constant reminder of the fragility of life, and this helped me better accept imperfections (don't most children expect their fathers to be both Superman and super perfect?) and focus my love, particularly when it came to him. Perhaps that's not such a bad attitude to adopt with everyone we love, including ourselves. I miss my Dad.


POST SCRIPT: Though it might be hard to believe, but identifying my feelings remains a struggle for me to this day, which may explain why I spend so much time processing my experience of the world. Writing these essays is helping.