Remembering Broken Fathers on Father's Day

It’s Father’s Day, and I’m watching as all the tributes to wonderful Dads fill the Facebook world. I expected them, and celebrate with my friends whose dads passed down remarkable legacies. But some of us had very broken dads, and we inherited a different kind of legacy. Part of my legacy is that, thanks to broken parents, I have learned to love broken people very well.

When we were young, my father was stable and left for work each day meticulously dressed in a business suit. At night, he would forego children’s books and instead made up vivid stories with recurring characters that he dramatically presented to us before bed. He coached Little League and joined us at the beach. He came home each night for family dinners around the kitchen table for the first seventeen years of my life – until everything fell apart. He lost one too many jobs, his marriage fell apart, and he no longer could afford a mortgage or rent. In the last years of his life, he lived out of his car.


But I will always remember who he wanted to be, and the relationship he wanted with his children. In honor of my dad who never found healing for those fractured places in his soul, I’m posting an excerpt from a longer piece I wrote and published a few years back called “Dooms of Love.” This is an actual dream I had shortly after my father’s death, filled with imagery and details from some deep, subconscious place:

I dream that night, eerily and vividly about my father.  The view outside the window is rolling hills.  He has a business that he works out of our home.  In our yard, three dogs are tied up with chain leashes and two of their leashes get caught together. One is being pulled down the hill by the other dog with the chain around his foot. There is no way to escape.  They are tied together permanently.  When one runs, the other runs.  When one falls the other falls.  They stay connected.

                Dad is working on some equipment—like farm equipment—in the living room but it’s broken.  Finally I hear him say with patient defeat, “Well, I guess it’s over. This equipment is dead and there’s nothing left I can do to keep the business going.”  He is preparing to close up shop.  Something has happened and his business will never run in the black again.  I hear him wondering what else he’ll do for a livelihood.  I look out the window at the green, lush landscape, wondering too how you make a living in this rural area.  In the dream I feel hopeful that something always can be bought or sold, a service performed, or a repair made.  He’s creative enough to find something to do.

                I go to the living room where he is packing up his equipment, defeated.  I stand before him, looking up into his face, noticing how much taller he is than me. He’s wearing a green plaid shirt buttoned all the way to the top and I like the pattern on him.      

             “Dad, it’s OK the business didn’t work.  It takes courage to start a business to begin with, and it especially takes courage to start another one after one has failed.  You’ve done well.”  His expression is familiar to me.  He wants to turn away and dismiss my encouragement as “nonsense,” but his face stops between dismissal and a hope of finding truth in my words. Was that a hint of comfort in his face?

                I wake at 4:30 in the morning going over the dream.  Some rare dreams have that feeling that you’ve really spoken to the person—like it was more than a dream. I know there was truth in those thoughts and images.  We were tied together, too, like those dogs on their chains; and when he fell, I fell. When he hurt, I hurt, too.  I’m the true product of a broken home and hurting parents, always dreaming in my most longing of dreams that I could’ve made all of his hurts go away.

             As the memory lingers, I wonder if it is ever too late to offer words of comfort to a person who has left his tormented life.  If a person is dead, where do words of encouragement go? 

Like everyone else honoring their father on Father’s Day, I loved my dad, too, despite his issues. I pray  today he knows the truth of that love and that he’s found peace. Happy Father's Day, Dad.

 

Book Review: Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers

I recently had the chance to sit in on a workshop called “Loving Our Neighbors and Enemies: Writing toward Reconciliation,” led by the dynamic author and speaker Leslie Leyland Fields.  Her balanced approach to addressing forgiveness within the context of broken relationships gave me an enthusiasm to read her book.

Leslie is the author of the recently released Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers from Thomas Nelson Publishers, a wonderful and inspirational book for us all, presenting stories of broken relationships between parents and their children, including her own estranged relationship from her father. Each example tells the story of someone who made the arduous journey back to a difficult parent and found relief.

Leslie is one of the fortunate ones. She has escaped the generational hold of broken parents and gone on to have a successful marriage, family and career. By all appearances, she and her siblings care deeply for each other and remain bonded together. Her whole and productive life appears to be the result of her choice to forego bitterness, anger and hatred over her father and to choose the way of peace and forgiveness. She details these learned lessons and this journey throughout the book. Co-author and clinical psychologist Dr. Jill Hubbard asks: “Have you ever wondered why certain people who have horrendous life stories appear to rise above their pain, while others with comparatively milder sorrows endlessly struggle and anguish?” Leslie is the example of someone rising above her pains.

As a Christian, she introduces the idea found in the Ten Commandments that torments anyone who, both has a broken relationship with a parent, and wants to honor God: “Honor your father and mother” Exodus 20:12. How difficult it is for many sons and daughters to honor a parent who is without honor, yet her book highlights people who achieved the task.

Leslie gives an accurate and gritty picture of what it means to forgive parents who remain broken until the end of their lives. In her own case, her father never managed to say the words she longed to hear, or become the engaged parent she and her siblings hoped for all their lives. He remained broken and their relationship remained one-sided. But Leslie walked away free, knowing she had been obedient to God in this area, that she had offered forgiveness.

Dr. Hubbard offers her own perspective at the end of each chapter. Discussion questions follow, making this an excellent book for a small group study. Dr. Hubbard’s sections are helpful – and necessary – for anyone whose estranged relationship remained estranged because she introduces the idea that not all relationships end in two-sided reconciliation. When I read stories like the ones found in Leslie’s book, I always look for the nugget that resembles my story, a story with no reconciliation, but one with the peace and the fruit of forgiveness, despite my mother’s desire to never heal what broke between us. Dr. Hubbard reminds us that reconciliation is not always possible despite achieving forgiveness to a person because reconciliation involves two people – and often, boundaries remain necessary in unhealthy relationships.  

One of the strongest challenges in the book involves Leslie’s call for us all to move beyond a selfish and individual forgiveness to forgiveness that will heal the brokenness of our world. She encourages us all to practice forgiveness beyond our families, but beginning with our families: “Clearly as a nation, within our families there is much to be forgiven. If we are to thrive as human beings, if our countries and our communities are to prosper, if our families are to flourish, we will need to learn and practice ways of forgiving those who have had the greatest impact upon us: our mothers and fathers.” 

Many people reading this book will be in tough and messy situations, but forgiveness is still a possibility - and making the attempt to reconcile is worth the effort, despite the end results.  Her challenge is a hard one, her standard high. But Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers provides a much-needed message for a culture so desperately in need of healing in our relationships.  

Grateful for Youth

I’m grateful for all the youth in our lives these days. Not my youth, of course (which packed up and headed for warmer territory many years ago), but the youth of our many young friends, my sons, and their friends who all color our lives and bring a vibrancy that an aging couple can’t help but joyfully appreciate.

We just spent the long Easter weekend in Chattanooga with three of our sons, one of their roommates, our daughter-in-law, and her former college roommate. The conversations and laughter and all that energy and creative thinking inspired us and made us forget that one of us needs a set of hearing aids and the other one….well, never mind.

Our weekend began with seven hours in the car with one of our  25-year old twins, seven hours heading away from Chicago to watch the leaves slowly unfold before our eyes, ushering in springtime in the course of our travel time while we processed life and felt privileged to be invited into our son’s thoughts, questions, and celebrations. As the leaves budded on the trees and the road rose and fell until finally rising once and for all into the mountains of Tennessee, we listened to a young person’s perspective and private thoughts.

 “I have a few books on tape. Wanna put one in?” I asked several hours into our drive.

“I’d rather just talk, if that’s all right,” he answered. Of course it’s all right.  

In Tennessee, we met up with the rest of the crowd and then all of my son Kyle’s friends. Over the course of the weekend, we were welcomed into homes for delicious dinners prepared by hospitable young women, offered to us with generous plates of engaging conversations.  In Chattanooga, we enjoyed several restaurant meals with the gang, laughing uproariously over jokes and silliness, like the moment my husband mistakenly took a stranger in a coffee shop to be our son. While we all waited for our coffee orders, Bill sidled up to this young man leaning against the wall who wore the same white t-shirt and dark hair as our twins. Shoulder up against shoulder, Bill began to sing “Resurrection Fern” by Iron and Wine way too close to the young man:

And we'll undress beside the ashes of the fire
Our tender bellies are wound around in baling wire
All the more a pair of underwater pearls
Than the oak tree and its resurrection fern

Could there be a more awkward set of lyrics to whisper into the ears of a stranger?  One by one, the members of our group realized Bill’s error. Taylor’s roommate watched it unfold from his place at the counter. I stood on the stranger’s other side and thought Bill had his arm around the young man. We both noticed about the same time that this young man didn’t belong in our family and Bill scooted away, apologizing profusely. Jamison suggested our entire family gather round and put all of our arms around the stranger who by now wore a panicky little stricken smile on his face. Sometime during our hysterical laughter, he slipped away with his coffee.  

 We laugh a lot with the young people in our lives. And laughing makes me feel so rich…and so young.

The laughter also visits when we are with youthful friends in the Chicago area who join us for nights by our fireplace or nights at our favorite Thai restaurant, or for brunch, or a chat by my desk at work, or in the living room of friends where our small group meets. They remind us that aging doesn’t need to mean segregation from different generations. We still learn from all these young people – and maybe at times they even learn a little from us.

Our weekend ended much too quickly. Exhausted but contented, we headed back to the Chicago area, watching the leaves fold back into  their buds, allowing a sense of winter to return for a moment as we arrived back home to our leaf-less trees, but thankful for the chance to watch spring unfold before us once again.    

Changing the Endings

At lunch recently a co-worker shared that growing up, her father owned a funeral home in a small Tennessee town; she and her siblings were all part of the business. They had a dark comedic side that they brought to the work, like getting a chuckle when their favorite flower arrangement arrived complete with a phone and the caption “Jesus called and so and so answered.”

My own father died a few years ago and one of the greatest griefs came in the form of an empty parking lot. The funeral home hired parking lot attendants to squeeze in all the cars as if we were showing up at a mega-church with a parking lot ministry on a Sunday morning. But at my father’s funeral, there were no more than a half dozen cars outside the funeral home. He had alienated everyone in his life, including his family.

When I look at my writing, I realize I’m a bit obsessed with funerals. They seem to appear regularly in my work. In my novel Try Again Farm, the main characters have an odd and darkly humorous hobby: they enjoy boosting the funeral attendance at the funerals of all the lonelies out there. “And there are more than you realize,” says Mabel in the story. They look up obituaries in the newspaper and recall those people who had little to no one in their life and they attend that person’s funeral. I wonder where that idea came from?

Over Christmas we went to see the movie Saving Mr. Banks, the story of Disney trying to adapt Mary Poppins to the screen, all to the dismay of PL Travers, the author of the book. Spoiler alert here:  Mrs. Travers (a pseudonym) recreated the character of Mr. Banks to represent her drunk father, but the screenplay adapters were struggling to see her vision for the story and for this important character. Ultimately, Mrs. Travers admits to wanting to redeem her father, the man she knew to be so much more than just the compilation of all his failures. I know how Mrs. Travers felt. Unconsciously, I see myself doing the same thing in my writing.

Such is the beauty of writing. Like in Saving Mr. Banks, writers can adjust reality to erase and revise what is ugly and painful. We can make the dad help fix the kite as in the movie, or we can send kind old ladies to boost the crowd in the funeral home, to honor people who often lived without honor in their lives. Such power to change the outcome of painful stories of reality and ease the world’s pain with imagination and words.

Comfort Food

 I read the blogs of friends who are in the midst of raising families and one friend who blogs (beautifully and deliciously!) about food. I recall my domestic days that seem in the distant past, those moments of making a family feel safe and loved. But now my sons have sprung, flown the coop, left the nest, hit the road, moved out on their own, and I’m left behind in the empty place.

At this vantage point, I’m asking myself the meaning of those comforting times we indulged in that were only a flash in time.  Did I help my four sons by making them feel so safe if they’re just going to move out into a world that’s unsafe? Does that make our home life seem like a mirage? What did our comfort give them? Obviously I think we gave them lots more than just comfort and food. We gave them a springboard to jump into life and the tools to do so, but what did the comfort provide? Was it too much? Did it make them soft? Did it cushion or prepare them for the blows of the world?

We’re in the midst of record cold here in the Chicago area. Hard to contemplate an area as frigid cold as Chicago having record cold, but here we are. My husband and I are stuck in the house today (not a bad thing) and I’m being domestic for once. Me who loves to cook and provide warmth and comfort to others but rarely has a chance to do so these days with work and school. But last night I put on some music and started pulling out pans. We smashed some chicken fillets until they were thin and sautéed them with mushrooms and a marsala wine sauce to be served over linguine with steamed cauliflower. We decided to forego eating off our laps in front of the news and instead I set the table and lit candles. We listened to music and discussed lyrics while eating our delicious dinner with a glass of nice red wine. How comforting.

But what is the long term value? I sound like someone who feels guilty having down time and maybe I am, but what point does comfort serve in our lives? I’m reading The Book Thief and watched Saving Private Ryan for the first time this weekend, thinking of the horrors and sacrifice of war, of other mothers' sons being sacrificed to war. In one particular scene, a wounded dying soldier calls for his mother and his last thoughts turn toward home. In a world that breeds mindsets that destroy and hate, my comfort seems besides the point.

In Eric Metaxas' wonderful biography on pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was arrested and eventually executed for an attempted plot on the life of Adolf Hitler, Metaxas tells how Bonhoeffer's comfortable upbringing often returned to him as a solace during his imprisonment. Bonhoeffer grew up in the midst of a warm, loving, musical and educated family and those moments fashioned him into a man with great strength, courage and morality. In one letter home to his parents Bonhoeffer wrote: "Spring is really coming now. You will have plenty to do in the garden. I hope that Renate's wedding preparations are going well. Here in the prison yard there is a thrush which sings beautifully in the morning and now in the evening too. One is grateful for little things, and that is surely a gain." His mind turned to beauty and thankfulness despite his surroundings. Probably his comfortable upbringings served as a resting point in his life. And is it bad to have a resting place, a stopping point, on a road to making the world more comforting for others? I can accept that idea of comfort.

We gave our sons a long resting place to grow and acclimate slowly to the climate of this world. They learned the hard lessons through school bullying, cliques, accidents, and sport defeats. But we spared them lots of messes at home. All we have to do is look around at those kids who have grown up without comfort and know that comfortable moments count for much.  And hopefully our sons learned to offer comfort to others in a broken down world.

For now, with below zero temps outside, once again I have the urge to cook – maybe some quiche, maybe some cookies. We’ll pull in, make ourselves warm with homemade ingredients fresh from the oven and the let the warmth prepare and gird us before we step outside once again to return to it all.

 

Thirty Novembers Later

You turn thirty today. How can that be? I hope you feel more joyous about this milestone than I felt on my own thirtieth birthday, heavy with a twin pregnancy, feeling old, old, tired and old and full of dread toward entering another decade. 

Today, more important than my own 30^th birthday, I’m celebrating your arrival into my life, that day when your birth christened me “mom,” and changed me more than any other event in life by snapping me out of my self-absorbed existence to focus on a child. No other success or failure or realized or unrealized dream will ever compare to my introduction to you and my new role. I felt my heart snap open when we met, and it keeps snapping, giving me a larger capacity to love and empathize with others. And becoming a mother motivated me to enter into an unwavering self-examination and self-analysis like no other demand on my life  – not always a pleasant experience, but I wanted to be worthy of caring for you and your brothers who we hadn’t even imagined yet.

I heard someone say recently that every child comes into the world searching for someone who is searching for them. I was searching for you, Kyle. I didn’t know it until I met you, but I was searching for you and feel so grateful to be gifted with your presence for these thirty years.

 I know you’ve heard the story of your birth so many times, but I want to recall again how my introduction to your personality came within minutes of your arrival in the delivery room as everyone watched and exclaimed, “Whoa! Look at his eyes. He’s staring right at us!” You entered Brigham and Women’s Hospital that night with curious eyes wide open, staring everyone down. And you continued to stare everyone down for hours to come. In fact, once they wheeled me off to my room with you in tow, they had to come and whisk you away because we stared at each other for so long that your body temperature dropped and the concerned nurses put you under the “grow” light to regain some heat.

 And you stared and stared right into your future as you moved through life carrying a deep and sometimes paralyzing sensitivity and awareness, but one that allowed you to be a photographer today who stares for a living to capture events and parts of life and people that others might miss.  

I’ve heard it said that parents get the children they need. That statement may be meant to be derogatory, but truth be told, I know I needed you.  I needed your endless empathy and power of observation and sensitive ears, the way you categorize the world without missing a beat, the way you feel way too much way, way too often, and way too deeply – especially for a male. I needed your fierce loyalty, and your strong sense of justice, and your articulate and persuasive words, however annoying when they came out of the mouth of a teenager.

 I even needed your defiant, high-strung nature to teach me to corral my own impatience and temper when I couldn’t change you or force you to do what I wanted you to do without ripping you into pieces. I needed the way you instigate laughter when you’re in a room, holding camp with imitations and multi-character improvisations and quick wit. I needed the way you write a song that hurts as you depict moments in time and moments in life – most often yours and most often the more painful ones I wanted you to forget. But somehow you make them beautiful by writing a tune that always seemed destined to meet your words.

You see, I’ve been staring, too. And I’ve never grown tired of keeping you in my sights ever since that day thirty years ago when we met in a hospital delivery room and spent hours bonding, just you and I.  And I’ll always keep my eyes on you until that day when one of us stops breathing and our eyes close on this world forever. So here’s to a celebration of thirty years with you, my beloved son. With love,   Mom

 

Let’s Bake Peace

When my mother died five years ago from throat cancer, we had been estranged for many, many years. For the first time since her death I have been working through our history by writing a memoir about our relationship for my MFA program. As a person of faith, it’s always been my wish to “honor” my parents, but I was graced with two very broken people whom I called Mom and Dad. As I attempt to discover how you “honor” a broken and difficult mother, I’m looking at ways I can offer a truce, however inadequate a truce would be for a deceased person. At least that truce will exist in my heart and memory, and perhaps in what I verbalize to my sons.

While much of our story is unpleasant, I have been reaching to find those moments worth remembering as part of my effort toward peace. I’ve gone back to the more simple moments in our life, before our family fell apart, before my parents divorced, and before some really ugly moments entered our relationship. I’ve been remembering how we used to cook together and writing about those days. As part of the remembering, I’ve pulled out my old wooden recipe box my mother gave me when I graduated from college, filled with index cards where she had written out the recipes she cooked for her family over the years.
I’m cooking my way through the recipes for the first time. Because of the pain in our relationship, I never pulled them out and never felt the normal bond many daughters feel to incorporate their mother’s traditions into their own family. But it seems safe now, and it seems right. So tonight, I baked Butterscotch Brownies, basically Blonde Brownies, a treat I hadn’t tasted since my childhood. I have no sons home anymore so I’m baking for my writing group at work, a group of colleagues who have already read an early draft of this story. It seemed only appropriate they should be the first to taste some of the fruits of this journey.

As I read through her handwriting on the recipe card, still tremble-free back then, I imagined our old times together, once free from conflict. I put the batter in my Pyrex pan, but clearly remembered the old aluminum pan we used to cook with, my mother and I. I could see the dents from all its use. Tonight as I pulled them from the oven and sliced into the still hot treat, I remembered a chewy bite on a school day afternoon with a cold glass of milk. I poured myself my own glass of milk and thought of this journey.  How do you love a parent who is gone and, if still alive, would continue to be someone you would keep at distance? I know. I think I’ll try and bake some peace.