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| At dinner with my father and my brother Jon, fall 2013 |
He was immediately back in touch with me via email and was warm and completely lacking in acrimony. I'd given him the opening he'd apparently sought for a long time.
My husband Rob and I went to meet him in the town where he'd lived for about 30 years, an inner suburb of Boston. We'd arranged for a dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant. We arrived first, and I stood up and gave him a hug when he arrived. We didn't talk too much about the past that night. In fact, a lot of the evening's conversation took place between him and Rob, largely about their shared passion, 20th century European and American history; they'd read a lot of the same books.
My father has been plagued by medical problems since that time, requiring an aortic valve replacement, surgery to repair a broken femur from a fall, and another hospitalization due to sepsis. He's had the best of care, given that we're in the Boston area, but his life has changed profoundly in these last 18 months: he's gone from being a part-time realtor to being retired; he walked unassisted back then, but has walked with a cane and is now in a wheelchair (possibly permanently); he's moved from a late Victorian house he restored and lived in for 35 years, to an apartment, to his current place at an assisted living center; he lost his wife, my step-mother Joanne, to a fast-moving cancer at the age of only 59. Still, he remains largely positive, an avid reader, and deeply involved in a men's group in which he's taken part weekly for a few decades (the other guys in the group have been kind enough to switch their meeting location to my dad's assisted living place, of late).
Overall, being back in touch with him has been positive and even fun at times. It seems to have been a help to him, as well; he and I talk a lot about culture and he and Rob discuss history on an ongoing basis. It's fascinating to see how we're different and how we're similar; genetics is a powerful and sometimes hilarious thing. We certainly don't have a typical father/daughter relationship; there are some odd times and some painful times, but overall, it's really OK. We have an interesting friendship instead.
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| From my father's library: educational! |
I've also enjoyed getting to know my two half-siblings again (a sister, Ariana, and a brother, Jordan). My connection to Ari has been particularly fun and interesting. A watershed moment happened during the summer of 2013, when both of us were working to move my father out of the large house he'd lived in for 35 years and into a smaller apartment. She found some letters which had been exchanged between her mother and my mother. Amazed at the sheer negativity of the letters' poison pen tone, she suggested we use them for a future dramatic reading --- with a mischievous look on her face. Validation, so late in arriving, now abounds.
As I was helping to organize his office awhile back, I came across a poem he'd written long ago. It names no names overtly, but it's obviously about a certain someone. I asked him if I could hold onto it. It's a vivid testimony of a relationship which began in a conversational German class at Columbia University in the 1950s and led to a marriage which started off auspiciously, but ended in nearly-constant discord, plenty of pieces of crockery thrown, lots of adultery, threats of compelling the children to testify in court against the opposite parent, and sky-high legal bills. Retrospectively, it's not difficult to make an educated guess which side of that legal procedure served as an engine for most of that negativity. The title's inclusion of the word exorcism is striking, as it's a word I've used many times when considering the process of going "no contact" with my mother. The fact that the poem has the tone of liturgy is all the more poignant, as my father was once a divinity school student; the nearly decade-long process of their breakup and divorce, filled with acrimony and nastiness at almost every turn, likely required him to hang onto a clear statement of personal beliefs and worldview.
Exorcism for a Midsummer's Night
Gather we now the dying light to mourn
Unshackle past from present anchors worn
Augur blessings amongst the decade's nuptial scorn
Perhaps the morrow to praise and joy reborn ...
From love-betraying trysts with friends unspoken
Lustful couplings beneath the cuckold's spawn
Deceitful webs that shame the marriage token
With endless lies to ease the knife of dawn:
Deliver me now from remembrance past
Cleanse my heart from the dross I cast.
From nursery fears of parents' love withheld
That shaped a life of shrewd manipulations
Strewn with friends abandoned or repelled
And offspring wracked by moody irritations;
Deliver me now from remembrance past
Cleanse my heart from the dross I cast.
From games of favorite forced on puzzled children
Demanding love that's best reserved for saints
Rejecting one who failed this race to run
To praise those two who followed her constraints:
Deliver me now from remembrance past
Cleanse my heart from the dross I cast.
From greedy lunging at the latest fad
Esalen, Africa, Sufi and T'ai Chi
From Sausalito houseboats to an Uppsala pad
Spending all to fill her bottomless Me:
Deliver me now from remembrance past
Cleanse my heart from the dross I cast.
2 comments:
"Deliver me now from remembrance past"
This is my prayer also. After 5 years of no contact with my N mother and sister and no contact from any of my other relatives who are all taking my mother's side, I have spent too long remembering and trying to make sense of what was.
This is a very profound and lovely poem. Thankyou for posting it.
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