It’s football season, which means my dad and stepmom have been coming to the house on home-game weekends. The last few times they’ve visited, I’ve felt this urge – at the end of the night before I go to bed – to want to call or text someone as part of some end-of-day unwind conversation. It’s felt like I’ve gone into my room as an aggrieved teen looking to have a hushed and lengthy phone call with my girlfriend. I don’t have a girlfriend, but the desire to reach out highlighted a level of closeness that I miss, perhaps have needed, and often took for granted… Sure, your partner is considered family too, but they’re a special type of family. They’re the type of family to whom you can talk shit about all the other family. They’re a super-secret, double-pinky swear type of family. And the feeling of wanting to have that conversation, that escape, that unwind was surprisingly strong and familiar. It was a little like anticipating the car ride home after a holiday get together – you know, when you debrief about what a mess aunt Susan is and how cousin Joe is a racist.
This urge made me wonder how much of our desire in building a new life with someone else is tied to escaping the old life from our family? No pressure – you’re just my lifeline, my refuge, my ladder and bridge to something else. Two kids running away from this two-bit town hoping to make it on their own. I also began to wonder about the importance of those confidantes in our lives who serve as pressure release valves. When work sucks, we need outside support. When family is challenging, we need different, closer family. For me, this has always been a part of my definition of home – that safe space from the rest of the world. And maybe that’s what I was feeling at the end of the night as I shut my bedroom door – a longing for a secluded safe space and a few words of reassurance. I suppose, for some, that’s what therapy is for.
With my parents in town, tensions are sometimes high. With them in town, I’m constantly trying to keep the dog out of their way or keep him quiet or restrained. My father has made it clear how much a pain in the ass he thinks the dog is. With them in town, the TV is always on, and TV hosts are always shouting something into the camera (I never realized how often sports analysts shout nor how much I’ve grown to appreciate quiet). With them in town, I’ve found myself mentally confronting (and sometimes not so internally or quietly confronting) my lifelong reaction against my father’s tendency to be dismissive, self-righteous, critical, and abusive. As I do this, I also find myself worrying that I’ve unknowingly exhibited some of those very same behaviors and I suspect that I’ve become increasingly intolerant of those behaviors in anyone/everyone else. The things you like least in others are often the things you like least about yourself. And then I begin to think I need to exhibit more patience and grace – with them and with everyone else.
For the past two weeks, in addition to wanting to chat with some fictitious partner at the end of the day, I’ve been trying to write about this tension. I’ve been trying to write about these internal and external confrontations (my father and I had a pretty heated exchange at dinner a week ago). I never get anywhere with the writing because either there’s too much backstory (too many examples of brutish and dismissive behavior) or I feel like I’m being overly cruel or critical in my judgments… or worse, that I’m a whiner who, as my father has said, lives in some la la land where he wants everyone to be nice and get along. In my backtracking and dithering, I’ll use the word abusive and then feel bad for doing so (as though to say my father hasn’t been as abusive as some real abusers are).
During this time, I’ve been trying to trace my own deeply held values of kindness, compassion, and understanding back to this firm opposition to my father…. I’ve also been reconciling the fact that when it comes to understanding how to care about, or for, another person, I’ve had to build my own philosophy – one based mostly on how not to treat other people, but also on this malleable willingness to tolerate, and make excuses for, other people. The truth is, I did not have a role model for how to be a good partner, how to set boundaries without being petulant or punishing, or what unconditional love might look like. My parents divorced when I was in third grade and I didn’t get to see what a loving relationship looks like. This “awareness” and contemplation has also made me wonder if what I’ve been seeking in others is the chance to correct or fix what I couldn’t correct in my relationship with my father – love without conditions. I’ve considered that perhaps some of my relationships have been one long argument with him – one in which I’m always hoping/pleading/pushing for a bit more compassion and self-reflection (two things he has not been terribly good at).
The net effect of this wrangling has been a few bouts with self-criticism and self-doubt and a whole lot of writing down and listing out of examples of contradictory, unkind, and bad behavior. Examples that I end up deleting because I feel they miss the point (and get too in the weeds). In this respect, I feel like I’ve tied myself in knots much the same way I did as I tried to understand how my engagement failed. The main difference is that I always felt the engagement was salvageable, because I believed we were both capable of self-reflection and “owning” our parts. With my father, I’ve always known our relationship would be strained and that I was often fighting a futile battle to improve it… mostly because he is so adamant that his worldview is superior to everyone else’s.
After a while (say two weeks of this), it all gets exhausting and I eventually punch myself out. At which point, I begin to see things slightly differently. I begin to think in terms of future relationships and how much I’ve learned these past few years. Tired from “fighting,” the alternative “not fighting” seems pretty easy. Be kind. Be generous. Let things go. And maybe that’s a little of what I was yearning for in missing those late night conversations and texts, the chance to be generous with someone else and feel that generosity returned. The chance to return to my corner of the ring knowing someone is waiting there.