Happy Belated Father’s Day!

Once upon a time, boys and girls, in a galaxy far, far from here, I used to copy my husband’s music by drawing little black dots on transparent vellum which had the staff lines first printed on the reverse side. When I made a change, provided I didn’t smear the ink before it dried, it stayed changed. There were no sudden surprises during the course of my work where I would look back and see that all the systems in the movement I had just been correcting had lost the spacing between the staves and I had to do it all over again! Yes, this is what presented itself to me last night as I was making the corrections to the third movement of my husband’s latest ouevre. Needless to say, I was rather pissed. It was late, too, and I was tired, and I had saved the document in this form (it’s routine now to hit command-S after almost everything). So I went to bed and got up early this morning and continued pulling staves apart.

While I did so, I got to thinking about Father’s Day and fathers in general, and their relationships with their daughters and sons. Yesterday was Father’s Day and I think Hubby had a pretty good day, considering how disorganized I was about it. Little Princess took us all out for lunch to the Java where Buddy Boy beat his father soundly at chess. The rain poured while we ate and I was congratulating myself on closing the attic window, except when I got home I realized that that had been a false memory and, in fact, I had left it wide open and there was water all over the floor and window sill and fan, but not (thank goodness) on the printer.

Buddy Boy made supper: barbecued frozen Pacific salmon burgers and a salad; everything was quite tasty. We even opened a bottle of wine and I indulged in one glassful. I gave Hubby his presents: the first two seasons of TraiIor Park B0ys and more 2B leads for his mechanical pencil. The kids had cards for him. After supper they went downstairs to watch movies and I went upstairs to continue working.

This is what I thought about as I pulled staves apart this morning: I had a rather strained relationship with my father. In retrospect I can say that I loved him, but when I was a teen, I certainly did not. There were a lot of things that I didn’t understand then which I do now, things about his relationship with his own father, with my mother, his disappointment at not having been able to follow his chosen career path. As a teen though, I only knew what I felt, which was mostly resentment. Now that my dad is gone, I’m sorry that we weren’t able to have a better relationship. He had a lot of wisdom to impart and I find myself mentally asking him questions that I know he would have been able to answer. But alas, it is not to be.

My own kids have a very good relationship with their father. It helps that Hubby has a good relationship with his own father, I suppose, but we also decided on an open-communication policy right from the beginning. There is no guesswork, they know what we expect and the information flows freely between us. They do not fear our reactions regarding the occasional bad marks or stupid teenage antics. I took Buddy Boy aside when he was 14 and told him that between his father and myself, we had probably done everything stupid there was to do, so he shouldn’t feel that he couldn’t come to us and tell us when he had done something stupid himself.

The most important thing, though, is that we always treated our kids as equally intelligent human beings. In the beginning, as wee ones, it was necessary to make many of their decisions for them, but it was always explained why things were done this way. Later on, more and more of the decision making was left to them, overseen of course. Once they reached the age of majority, they were told that we had no control over them, just some ground rules should they continue to live with us. As a result, we have well-behaved, mostly law-abiding young people in our home who do well in school, have nice friends, and make us proud. They are also people I am happy to call my friends, not just my children.

But I know other young people who do not have such fortuitous relationships with their fathers. There is a girl I befriended in the D-land chat room whose father’s treatment of her could be called mental abuse. While she has never lacked for material possessions and he has never laid a hand on her, she also has no private life, no self confidence, and no friends. Anytime she has attempted to do something on her own, her father has somehow thwarted her efforts. He has made her feel small and insignificant and useless. He discovered her diary and exploded at her because she chose to present herself and her problems honestly to the reading public, revelations which cast him in a bad light. She managed to save her money and buy a laptop computer, which he immediately took in hand and tried to monkey with. She had to remove all sorts of stuff he had installed which screwed up the operating system. He then insisted that she tell him all her passwords--email, blog, instant messengers--so he could monitor her activities. She is a good kid; she doesn’t do drugs, she’s never had a boyfriend, and the part that burns me up is that she’s 19 years old, legally outside of her father’s jurisdiction.

I have another friend, a little younger than the former, whose father is an alcoholic, what I guess one would call a “functioning alcholic”. In other words, he is able to hold down a simple job and doesn’t get hauled in regularly for disturbing the peace. She too appears to have escaped being abused physically, and (unike the first girl) at least she has a good relationship with her mother (who has continued to stay with her husband through a sense of duty and appearances). She lives in a small town (more like a hamlet, really) where the only “fun” available on the weekend is drinking, yet she has somehow avoided getting sucked into that lifestyle, maybe because she sees how destructive it is at home.

While I don’t think there’s any hope for the father/daughter relationship of the first case I mentioned, just because the father is obviously making up for inadequacies of his own (which would probably fill a whole entry), I grieve for what might have been in the the case of the second girl. Her father really does attempt to parent, but he cannot because he is too pissed most of the time. She has lost all respect for him because of his constant inebriated state and his feeble attempts to discipline. There is no communication between them, and certainly no love. They are both completely ignorant of how to create a relationship, and she is beyond caring.

I just find this so sad. I know what it’s like to go through one’s teens hating one’s father. Teens see the world as revolving around themselves and very rarely do they have the insight to realize how their actions are also part of the problem. It’s always the others who are wrong. I know. I was a teen once. This is why I have made it very clear to my kids why they must phone me if they are planning on staying out all night--not because I’m a bitch who doesn’t want them to have any fun, but because I will stay up worrying that they are in a city morgue if they do not. I don’t think children willingly hurt their parents. They just don’t think, and parents so rarely think of telling them what they themselves feel.

Anyway, this entry turned out to be much longer than I’d planned. I’ve taken precious time away from making parts to write it, so I guess I should stop now. I hope everyone had a happy Father’s Day. I only wish I could tell my own father that I love him.

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