My father never told me why he liked Jack Daniels, a stiff vodka martini, a Heineken better than he liked me. And I could never figure it out. And so we fought, he and I, and though I suppose you could say I lost, since he never stopped drinking, in fact, never would admit it was a problem, I’m pretty sure neither one of us won.
My daughter trusts my husband like a bird trusts its wings. She knows that he will protect her from whatever’s under the bed, or clobber the robbers, she’s so convinced are lurking just outside of our house as soon as the sun sets. She’s sure he has the answer to most any question she can dream up, and that he will be patient with her for as long as she needs him to be on days when her mood is ugly. That he will be at every moment of every soccer game, every basketball game, every school event, every inconsequential class breakfast, despite a bad schedule or a bad weather forecast. She also knows that he will notice and compliment her simply for breathing in and out. She knows he believes in her like a good Catholic believes in Jesus. And she believes in him back.
I watch them like I am visiting another planet and observing how aliens interact. I picture how I must look watching them sometimes– a puppy with his head cocked sideways, big eyes asking, “What is it you do when you’re human? How come you don’t eat out of the bowl and why do you use your hands to catch a ball, when you could use your mouth?” I’m very clear about the fact that I don’t get this relationship. I only know that I am grateful for it. It’s so big and so filled with all that is good that I can almost feel what it must be like to have a father.
The guy had stuff, my dad. Sure, he had plenty of stuff. Psoriasis covered his body in scaly raw patches that made him itch and fell from him like an Aspen blizzard. This disease with no cure brought him on more than one occasion to spend weeks on end in the hospital bathed in tar—yeah tar–one of the only treatments available back then. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d also lost the sight in one of his eyes in his 30’s, the product of an accident, I think, and had serious problems with the vision in his “good” eye, so he carried with him like a cavernous backpack, the fear that he’d one day become totally blind and unable to provide for his family (he never did, which I take credit for, since I spent every girlhood birthday cake blow-out-the-candles-wish that he wouldn’t). In hindsight, he likely had undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and anxiety and depression, too. So, there was reason to self-medicate. Plenty of reason. But with three kids, and a wife, that’s more than enough reasons not to.
My son is unusually loving. At 18, he will still lay his head on my shoulder as we watch a movie together, or wake up in the morning and give me a kiss. We talk about what’s happening in his life, at school, in the world in a real way, and we always have. We tease each other until we laugh so hard, we need to run for the bathroom. Sometimes I wonder if this is how it could have been with my Dad if he had been himself and not his disease.
For a long time I secretly, and then not so secretly wished my mom would divorce my dad. I could have a whole new life, without the crazy guy who would ground me for a month, after yelling at me so loudly, the walls would shake because I’d forgotten to replace the shampoo cap, but not for skipping 7th period science, who made every dinner time for a kid who hated all foods except spaghetti a loud and violent battle, with my sisters and I prisoners of war, and my mother an innocent casualty, who, for no reason would do the unreasonable, like make me go up to bed by myself refusing to allow me a night light in a creaky 100 year old house where Jack Nicholson in The Shining seemed about to appear behind every door. When it was clear she wasn’t going to divorce him, I wished she’d at least leave him. I would live with her, and no longer be tortured by the inconsistency and screaming fights that made my stomach ache and gave me headaches. But my mother, who I loved more than anybody, would never leave him. Not because she was a martyr, but because she didn’t know how to leave him, how to take care of her kids without a man, how to tell her Italian family, for whom the word divorce seemed not to have a definition, that this marriage was not a good one. And so she stayed. And I created a new wish—I wished that maybe at least, maybe I was adopted (I wasn’t).
It was the unpredictability and fear, and total irrationality, the not knowing that my father had an alcohol problem, that made growing up with him the hardest. In my town, it was commonplace to have a martini or two come 5 0’clock, so much so that we never knew that my father’s anger and tantrums were because of his alcoholism. And he went to work, never drank in bars, had a genius IQ, read the New York Times and the New Yorker cover to cover, loved classical music and theater, he couldn’t be an alcoholic, right? It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that it all became clear. My oldest sister, who found herself in therapy, uncovered what was really wrong with our father.
Once we learned what was underneath all the craziness, we talked to him, each of us, alone, together, in a group, in every configuration we could, dozens of times, over and over again, but he didn’t seem to hear. “I don’t have a problem with drinking—I love it,” he would say with glee. “That’s funny, dad, gee, that’s a good one, a knee slapper.” Is that what he though I was going to say during the hundreds of times that I tried to tell him how I felt. How bad I felt. How bad I felt about myself.
It all came down to one thing and one thing only. It was that I never mattered enough—NOBODY ever mattered enough for my father to change, to look at himself and who he was and the options there were for him to be in the world in a different, better, way. For his family. For himself.
But for my daughter, it’s different. Her father is there. Her father is RIGHT there, with a love that is indestructible and unconditional, and IN HER FACE. There are no questions. Nothing to be confused about. A father and a daughter. I get to see what it’s like. I get t to see what it’s like to have a dad. Lucky. I’m really lucky. Because for my daughter it’s different. It’s so different. And that’s so good.
*the gratitude-a-thon 