out there in the rain

Well, fuck.

You who have lives off the internet likely don’t remember the whole story of what happened with me and my dad in March. He emailed me the day he flew back to the United States to tell me he was coming to town and could I see him on a Tuesday, two days away? I said no, I was busy, and maybe a little more planning ahead would be nice. He didn’t respond. He had also mentioned in the email that he was flying to his home state to see his mother shortly after arriving on the east coast, and that he would be coming back to the coast in order to fly home after a couple of weeks. He didn’t mention that he wanted to make any plans at that time. A few weeks after this exchange, BF and I were enjoying a normal Sunday morning when the doorbell rang, and my father and NW were at the door. I let them in, and he stood in my living room with a glass of water for about 20 minutes and looked uncomfortable while NW chattered relentlessly and support emanated towards me from BF in waves. Then he left, after giving me the ol’ disapproving eye and some comment about how we should email more often.

I found it hard to rustle up a great deal of emotion about this little visit, but what did rise out of my heart had anger mixed in. I found it inconsiderate, this visit, and I thought it was motivated by equal parts a wish to control and his own pissiness. I thought it made him angry when I was unavailable when he came into town at the beginning of the month, and he decided, “Well, she’ll see me whether she’s busy or not” and barged on in. I figured that the deeper-level goings-on here were that he was used to being a) in control and b) a priority in his daughter’s life, and having that not be the case – me not asking “how high?” – made him upset. I thought that his coming over like that was certainly clumsy, no matter his aim, but I assumed that if he was trying to get a message to me, the message was surely “I said jump, girl.”

Mom, when hearing this story, told me a significantly different version of a story she’d told me years ago about how they decided to get married. They were both young naval officers in Newport, romancing, and Dad’s orders came in for him to go elsewhere. Mom told me that one night she couldn’t find him, so she went to ask his roommate where he was. The roommate pointed out the window where there was a long jetty pushing out to sea, and there was a small figure out there hunched against a miserable Rhode Island thunderstorm.

“What’s he doing out there in the rain?” my mom asked.

“He is just so miserable about leaving you,” said the roommate. “He doesn’t know what to say to you.”

Mom went out to him. He was crying over a glass of wine. He said he just couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand it, that he had to leave her. Mom was befuddled, because the solution was so obvious to her: “Well, why don’t we just get married?” (The Navy considers this when deciding on transfers.) Dad reacted with joy, hugging her and telling her this was exactly what he’d hoped she’d want.

She used this example to show me that Dad is completely stuck in tar when it comes to expressing his emotions. That he is just incapable of explaining his emotional needs when he’s wrapped around something and needs help. I had known he was inexpressive, but I had never known he was practically crippled by it – that even when he was troubled, he was unable to reach out. I had always thought he just wouldn’t talk about how he felt to my mom’s liking. He’s not a man to hold back hugs or I love yous. He has had frank talks with me about his life and his mental anguish before, even if he is thoroughly muted about Vietnam.

But Mom told me that Dad visiting my house that Sunday was a desperate plea. That he was trying very, very hard to reach out to me in the only way he could. She noted that he couldn’t reach out to her all those years ago, that he went out to the edge of the Atlantic in a thunderstorm rather than tell her he was in anguish about their parting, but he managed to come to my house to try to reach out to me.

I was stunned. Speechless. Gobsmacked. The idea that Dad was hurt about the downward spiral of our relationship was something that I’d never considered. I figured that because he’s always been so firm with me, especially about the way I should behave towards others, he would have told me if he was displeased with how we were interacting.

I didn’t realize that for him, things had snowballed until he didn’t know how to fix them any longer, didn’t know how to come clean with me and have a conversation about the problems between us. For me the problem got bigger and more painful because he wasn’t communicating with me; for him, the only solution he could think of was to put off communicating with me until the underlying problem – that we’d grown apart – somehow solved itself.

The growing apart stems from me becoming an adult, from the years of his not-there-ness running all the way back to the mid-80′s, and mostly from the way that I felt he deserted me while I was struggling in New England. I think I would have been much more able to move on from all this on my own and try to establish an adult-styled rapport with him if he hadn’t fucked it all up by being so unresponsive over the last couple of years. But that unresponsiveness, my mom showed me, is not because he’s self-centered and oblivious to me, but because he cares too much about me to know what to do next. In this way, he’s no different to me than any other man I have guided through the shoals of emotional connection. And oh, are they perilous to so many men.

It was a clumsy gesture, his coming over to my house that Sunday. But I was thoroughly wrong about its underlying purpose. He was uncomfortable because there was so much he wanted to say to me, some toppled thing in our relationship that he wanted to set aright, but NW was talking and talking and he didn’t know where to begin or how to talk to me.

Oh, God, how wrong I have been.

I’m trying to leave aside how shaken I feel about my mom understanding this emotional intricacy which has escaped me, because that throws into question everything I’ve depended upon in the tripod of my relationship with my parents over the last ten years. I’m trying just to focus on what I need to do next, how I can repair my relationship with my father now that I have this new, terrible understanding of how sad his position is, how cold-hearted and wrong-headed I have been. BF has tried to comfort me by telling me that my perspective is entirely understandable, and that if there were ever a situation where I couldn’t look at things objectively, this would be it. I still feel not only like a rotten person, but also a rotten daughter. I also feel as if I’ve discovered that one of the load-bearing posts of my personality is filled with termites and half-collapsed.

In any case, my next move is…what? The first answer I came up with was to write him a long, heartfelt letter explaining (more or less) what I’ve discovered here – that it bothers both of us how we’ve grown apart, and (more or less) how I feel about this problem. Writing out how I feel about something has sometimes helped to settle problems in my past relationships. However, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I wrote a letter like that, he replied with equal sharing and acceptance, and then nothing changed. The point is not just to confess but to move forward, and it seems likely that that wouldn’t happen in that scenario.

I’ve been thinking about what to do with this new knowledge for almost two weeks, and I haven’t really gotten anywhere. The central thing is for me to adjust my attitude towards him with this new information, and that I have already done. Now that I understand his incapacity, I will actually try to adjust for it, rather than finding it unfair that I should have to, and I think the only thing that involves in terms of action is emailing him more often and pretending like nothing has happened. Part of me thinks that trying to talk it out would be cruel to him, if he’s really that unable to communicate. Confessing how angry I still am at him will probably do no good except to get it off my chest, which is why I have a blog. Asking him to understand my position is not really necessary, as he’s my father, not my husband. So that leaves me with…more frequent communication, and a halt to my own resentment. I might be missing some more significant resolution, but I don’t really know; I feel lost, all of a sudden, instead of firm in my chair of anger and hurt feelings.

My poor father. He loves me so much. I can’t excuse him for hurting me the way he has, but understanding a little more why he’s acted this way in the past few years makes him a piteous figure instead of a threatening one.