I want to talk about my dad...

I imagine being able to open up about all that, recognize it, and begin to understand how your relationship with your father has played such an important part of why it's taken you so long to accept yourself, must feel both like a massive weight off your shoulders and a "gotcha" moment that brings so much clarity to your life.

You have reach a massive milestone on your journey.

 

Hey COS,

This is such an important issue, if there is one underlying social problem in western industrialized nations, it is the issue of absent fathers. I suspect it is the principal reason that boys are not doing as well as girls on a whole host of markers with regard to health, ethical behaviour and education. It is the reason that areas where poverty and single motherhood are common are prone to have problems with gangs: young men who band together because they crave and need some form of male presence, even if it is with others who are similarly deprived of the guidance and love that only a fully-grown man can provide.

Before the Industrial Revolution, fathers and sons worked together on the farms, sometimes murderously close, but the sons could learn something about the world, the sons knew what their fathers did during the day. This is no longer the case, fathers are gone all day and come back tired, unable to share or even pass on what it is they do, unable to grieve this deeply felt alienation from their own children.

Sons seem to need some kind of initiation into the world, and fathers seem to be necessary for that to happen. Ancient initiation ceremonies were designed in a way to "kill" the child in their sons, with the full cooperation of their mothers, prior to letting them grow into men. This required an active and constant presence, and being a role model to follow. This no longer happens to any significant degree and we are left with what the poet and writer on men's issues, Robert Bly, has called a "Sibling Society" where no one is particularly grown up or mature. Couple that with an infantilizing environment where every indulgence is satisfied immediately, and it is no surprise that there is a deep wound in our psyches that never seems to heal.

So children grow up on their own, left to their own devices, needing to deal with life's difficulties on their own. Instead of support, the father either becomes a threat, or becomes irrelevant. We fear how out-of-control things can get, we fear the sense of abandonment that comes from the original sin of absent fathers, we fear trusting others and trusting ourselves, so we hang on for dear life to whatever shred of connection we are able to muster, even if it is to our own detriment.

From an early divorce, I grew up without a father, he moved away and I rarely heard from him. My mother married again, and I ended up with a very cruel and abusive stepfather. Naturally, what you wrote above strikes a deep chord within me.

You are right to stay away from your father, he has forfeited any right to expect anything from you. This requires you to understand the wound that he has inflicted on you, and to grieve for it. The ancient initiation ceremonies almost always involved some kind of symbolic wound inflicted on the initiates, this could include circumcision, or breaking a tooth, or scarification, among other permanent "markers". This would be unthinkable now and I am certainly not advocating any of these practices, but we are no less wounded by our fathers, in far deeper ways, but unfortunately these wounds are also barren of the symbolism and significance of entering into manhood. At least, the permanent initiation-wounds meant something important. I suspect that the current fashion of tattoos and piercings among our boys and girls is an attempt at recreating this effect.

May I suggest you get a copy of Robert Bly's Iron John, you may learn something about the need for a "wild man" to help a boy become a fully grown human being. You will discover words and concepts related to "katabasis", and ashes, and the need to go down into our wounds to re-emerge as someone who understands what it means to transform oneself into a fully grown and confident man who contributes to bringing order into the world for himself and others.

 

This is a wonderful thread, thank you for sharing. I am lucky in that I had a wonderful father who was loving and was married to my mom for 50 years before he died of cancer two years ago.

I'm only sorry that he never knew the real me. I know he would have accepted me. I always had a good relationship, but I know that we could have been so much closer as father and son. I think I always kept a distance from him after my puberty years. I'm guessing it was because I was ashamed of myself for being gay and would rather have died than him knowing it.

I did a lot of "manly" things so that he would be proud of me. Playing football and baseball, wrestling in high school. I secretly hated those things, but I thought I needed to do them to win his approval. And, of course, live the life I thought I was supposed to live - get married, have kids, buy a house, etc.

His death, ironically, was the impetus I needed to re-evaluate my own life and wake up to the fact that I'm gay. I'm now embarking upon a new life for myself. When my brother got divorced from his first wife, my dad was super supportive of him. He told my brother that he only had one life to live, and he needed to do what it took to be happy. My brother related that to me last week after I came out to my brother. That's why, even though it might have been difficult for him, I believe he would have been accepting of me trying to find my own happy place.

I am going to use this as a learning experience for being the best dad I can be to my own kids.

 

You have described very well how alcoholism fucks up the lives of everyone around the alcoholic. As you indicated, in some ways it turned you into your dad's caretaker, instead of him being yours.

Alcoholics sometimes quit drinking. If so, then it's a long road to restore trust with the people they have hurt. That trust is never fully restored to the way it would have been, without the crazymaking and the bs.

Realizing that there are many levels of forgiveness, you should consider finding a way to forgive him---but not until you can forgive yourself. This last part is extremely important. And "forgive him" may mean nothing more than fully accepting that he was a flawed individual. It can often be easier to forgive someone for such fuck ups, once youv'e been around long enough to have made some of your own mistakes. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean welcoming him into your life (which in a way you still do even though he has died) or continuing the past. In fact, it usually does not. This is a process of lowering your expectations of him, to match the reality he offered. He fell far short of your expectations, so the fault for this needs to be placed on his shoulders, not on yours where it is now.

You have written yourself that you did many, many things against your own preferences to try and impress him and get affirmation from him. There is a present tense feel to some of these things you wrote. It is difficult, but your first goal is to affirm yourself, to rely less on pleasing others, to the exclusion of your own needs. This is very basic, very hard, and isn't confined to just sexual orientation or any other single area. Think big picture, when you think of this.

 

Found this rather relevant quote from one of my favourite thinkers:

 

I wrote a similar post at one point. I recall I copied it and sent it to quite a few people! I think, if like me (my mother also had addiction issues), you will find a lot of things start to fall into place. This is the beginning of a new chapter for you.