The Bad Dad

I have been contemplating whether or not I should go to New Jersey to visit my Father for Father's Day.

There's a lot of ambivalence about it, really. Like my Mother, my Father was not a good parent. He wasn't raised with a Father, but with an odd assortment of people, including a Grandfather who I don't think cared all that much about him.

So, my Father, like (I imagine) a lot of men, got his ideas of what it is to be a Father from the media.
from all those wonderful images that seemed to put it out there, in simple terms, how a man could be a Good Father

But those were only images with no backstory. Idylls of family life. And men, like women, can't know how to behave properly if they do not have proper role models.

As a family, we would dress up and go places. We would look like the Ideal Family.

Underneath it all was a lot of confusion, hurt, anger--you name it. Buried so deeply, if it was there at all, was love. Any kind of love. My Father supported his family, but I think that it was often out of a sense of Kantian duty, and a selfish desire to hold on to the home and property he'd put his money into. Mother was one to threaten to take everything from him if they divorced. When it came down to it though, Mother was very Catholic, and divorce really wasn't an option.

But he didn't know that.

By the 1970's, and certainly after my sister got married in the Summer of Love, we stopped trying to put on the facade of a Family. We stopped dressing up and going out together in public. Everyone retreated into their own little worlds to watch The War, The Presedential Election of 1968, and The Decline of American Civilization.

I grew up with a man in the house who really wasn't a Father--just some guy who felt a duty to take care of me, to a degree, and did it with a mix of ambivalence, resentment and confusion. He had no idea how to think about me or what to do with me after I stopped being a pre-adolescent tomboy. He couldn't think of educating me, or guiding me--but he could think, like my mother, of getting me out of the house as fast as he could.

So I know I feel guilt about not going to visit him because, like my Father, I've learned to take my cues about family from media. And media's telling me how I need to love my Father because he's, well, my Father. What my heart tells me, though, is that I don't really feel much of anything for him other than some detatched compassion for his particular human condition. When I think that I "love" him simply because he is another human being, I don't feel guilt, but more of an ambivalence about seeing him.

If there is one thing my Father instilled in me, it has been a desire to know more about men--about what makes them tick, and why they do the things they do, and how some can be very good fathers and also have private lives. In all the men I've known in various ways, I've learned a lot of things--that even when they live private lives, some are still very good men. Their love for their children is often times a separate and different love than the love they have for their wives--and this makes the notion of family a very complex thing that can't be depicted in a carefully posed photograph. We expect a lot from men, especially that they know the Answers and that they will automatically know how to be Fathers--because, after all, Mothers naturally know how to be Mothers. Real Fathering, like Real Mothering, isn't instict at all, but something learned, even passed on from generation to generation. I've learned that men can be total bastards, have real probelms with women who are smarter or as smart as they are, will sometimes do whatever it takes to win a contest (athletic or intellectual), and that they all desire to be Number One with Someone. I've learned that men are neither inferior nor superior to women, and that one without the other has trouble maintaining a balanced perspective about The World.

We need each other because we teach one another about the human condition.

I've learned to love, despise, tolerate, and admire the lives of men--because they are so much more complex than they themselves like to admit. "We're pretty simple," most of my men-friends like to say, "not much to figure out." Oh really? Or is it just that y'all don't like the scrutiny? ;-)

So I'm still thinking about whether or not to drive the four-plus hours to central New Jersey to visit my Father. and I think that maybe I could make better use of that time up here. It's not that I don't love or care for him. It's that I don't know how to make sense of my relationship with a man who never could make sense of being a Father--and that maybe I don't have the strength to figure it out for the both of us. When I'm there, I put up with a bellyfull of anger and a head full of detatched Reason for a couple of days just to visit him. Is it worth it? Media guilt would tell me it is. My heart, and head though, make me think that maybe it isn't.

Photos courtesy of PicturesNow and Life magazine.