My Daily Reflections: on Father's Day

Today is father’s day and in many ways I struggle with how to remember and honour him.  My father has long moved on to whatever lies beyond life and I have grieved losing him before I got to know him better, before I got to ask him some important questions that will now probably never be answered unless we meet in the hereafter.

My father was a good man and a good provider. I think in his own wounded way he was a better parent to me than his parents were to him.  I also know that moving to a new country, starting over after a war and escaping from a country that was being taken over by Russian armies left lingering trauma upon his soul.

Having said all of that I am still faced with the struggle of healing my childhood wounds that were unintentionally caused by his unresolved woundedness. 

Yes for sure; I fully understand that he did the absolute best he could with the skills that he had.  I am not in any way detracting from the amazingness of what he was able to accomplish.  Starting from zero as an immigrant and building a business and buying a home he made sure that I always had the security of a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in and food to eat.  I was allowed to go to school and get an education (still considered somewhat a privilege in those days for a girl), heck I was even exposed to music and music lessons because of his love of the accordion.

But after all the good things are accounted for there are also all the things that did not happen, the omissions;  that are actually what causes the lingering wounds that I continue to struggle to heal.

I came across this poem today called: How do we forgive our fathers?

How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us often or
forever when we were little.

Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.

Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying
our mothers?
For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of
warmth or coldness?

Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs
or their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our fathers what is left?

~poem from smoke signals~

The fact that someone put words to paper lets me know that I am not the only one with lingering questions that remain unanswered.  I am not the only one working through issues of feeling abandoned, unheard, discouraged, frightened even.  Things that a child feels but can’t express in words only internalized in feelings and emotions; that remain buried in the subconscious as values that don’t quite reflect the reality.  The experiences of a child are shaped by the feelings they have in response to their environment, and when that environment feels unsafe, the child internalizes (not knowing any better) that it must be their fault, that they are not good enough, not lovable enough to receive what they need.  And that child grows into a wounded adult with a false core belief that they are somehow broken, for if they had not been so unlovable they would have been nurtured in the way that they needed.

The adult in me can see that my father was a man of integrity.  He worked hard every day of his life.  He strove to be kind and loving and caring.  I think in many ways he cared more deeply even than he let others know, maybe because he was taught that men are supposed to be tough.  I saw him smile and laugh and sing, and I saw him fall asleep in exhaustion during even the most festive of family celebrations.  He was talented and creative and built amazing furniture with even the most primitive of tools, much of what he made was before the advent of power tools!  He loved nature and cared for birds and bees, planting single handed fields of clover. These are just a few of the characteristics he demonstrated and a few of the things he accomplished.

But his working such long hard hours meant I rarely saw him and I so wanted to be with him.  His caring seemed to directed almost exclusively to my mother, and he smiled most often when with his friends.  And I was not welcome in his workshop, possibly for fear I might get hurt, but I felt it was because I was a girl and not a son.  I felt I was not what he wanted; I had failed in in some inexplicable way by being born female.

And so I struggle every father’s day, how do I honour this man, who fathered me, but was so rarely around to be a father.  This man who was the proverbial threat when I misbehaved “just wait till your father hears about this!”  This man; who taught me to love reading because he loved books, but never sat at my bedside to read me a bed time story.  He taught me to love history and to be curious because he demonstrated those attributes, but I learned by watching him (hoping that if I became more like him then he would pay some attention to me and show me that he loved me) not because he shared these passions with me.  There is so much that I admire about this person I never really got to know, the intimate stranger in my life. 

I cried so long and hard when he died.  But now I wonder if my greatest grief was not that I had lost a father, but rather that I never really had the opportunity to know who my father really was, and that when he left this earthly plane, I lost the opportunity to ever gain the acceptance and love that my inner child still craves to this day.

“I love you Dad” seems a pale imitation of what I really feel, a sense of personal loss.  That what I actually love is a fantasy of what might have been, what could have been if life had not placed so many obstacles and challenges in his path.   

“I miss you Dad” not because you have gone on to the afterlife; I miss what we never had the opportunity to cultivate, to create; a relationship where I knew who you really were, what you dreamed of, what dreams you had to give up, and where you were interested in my dreams and sorrowed with me that I too had to give up on so many of my dreams.

“I honour you Dad”, not because we had a successful relationship but for doing the best you could. 

“I do forgive you Dad” not because you did anything overt that requires forgiveness, but because you are human and we humans make such a mess of relationships simply because our past leaves us so ill equipped to do a better job.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 06 – 17 



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