ONLY THE NAMES ARE CHANGED

Fathers and the Sins of the Fathers

Memoirs 3 — Dreams deferred …

But what about the man who married my mother? What did he bring into the psychological stew into which I would emerge and begin to develop as a baby? What sins did he bring into this mix, what were the sins of his father and mother, and the sins of the generations before them? What wounds had he suffered as a child, wounds that would in turn be unconsciously passed on to his children?

Each of us enters life wounded and suffer wounding from our parents who have no intention of wounding their children. Each of us brings these wounds into our relationships where they act beneath the level of our awareness, as toxins which become part of the fabric of our relationships. My mother and father were no different from anyone else. Their conscious acts were based on the unconscious scripts that their separate childhoods had imprinted upon them. In their own ways, they did the best they could.

My father was much different than his older brother, J who was a quiet young man like his father. Lou was like his mother, a commanding presence who was sure of herself. Lou had done extremely well at school though he hated the nuns and priests who didn’t seem to recognize that he was smarter than they were.

He never forgave them for the beatings he received at school. My father told me he had often been physically punished for writing left-handed. The nuns forced him to write with his right hand, often tying his left hand behind his back.

He saw himself as a leader, as someone who would one day be famous and rich, as soon as the world came to realise just who he was and how smart he was. There was a underlying belief he was owed and entitled to fame and fortune.

My father hated being poor. The poverty had been entrenched in his parent’s house following his father’s trucking accident, an accident that had taken the life of a young female child. This accident happened while my grandfather was under the influence of alcohol. That tragedy had kindled a fierce determination in my father to escape that poverty and to swear he would never drink alcohol.

Living in the family home on 52 Marquette Avenue in Ottawa and being dependent upon his father for work, left my father feeling the need to escape and find the fortune being denied to him in Ottawa. Only two years earlier in 1947, the city of Ottaw had named a street with the family name.

In the family home, it was my grandmother who was the dominant person. My father had learned early that in order to unconsciously save himself from engulfment, from the dominant too-muchness of his mother, he had to find a way to move from under her shadow or he would end up like his father and his older brother, a passive victim.

He vowed that he wouldn’t touch alcohol, for it was his dad’s alcoholism that had been responsible for the family losses. He hated the tensions at home between his mother and father. He wasn’t aware of the history behind the tension though he guessed it was all about the alcohol.

It helped that my father was an extrovert and had a certain charisma which allowed him to become the male leader in the house. The role of being the male head of household had been vacated by his father. As he became a man, Lou had cultivated his appeal to what he understood were the real holders of power — women.

Yet, here he was, only seventeen years old, married to a girl who had just turned sixteen; and he was still dependent upon his mother and father.

With the addition of Bev into the house, there were now seven women to five males. One couldn’t count the two youngest boys as they were too young. My father revelled in his new power as a father-to-be and the continuing approval of his mother and sisters.

Yet he knew that if he was going to truly become the master of his own fate and achieve the fame and fortune which was out there waiting for him, he needed to escape the house. Lou had a plan, a dream.

As I wrote the words above, I hadn’t been aware of other things going on in the family home at that time. I knew that my grandfather enjoyed drinking and smoking cigars, but I wasn’t aware his drinking had been a problem. I only learned more about this family dysfunction later.

I learned from two of my father’s female siblings that my grandfather had repeatedly sexually molested some of his daughters. I learned of how the older girls worked hard to protect the youngest of my father’s sisters. All of this information had added to the complexity of trying to know what had made my father respond the way he did in his role of “father,” my father.

Like all young men of his time, Lou heard that real fame and fortune now lay in the west. “Go west young man, go west,” were words heard in newspapers, on the radio, and in the movies. It was a dream burning inside of him to go west.

But now, with the burden of impending fatherhood and a marriage to a girl from a different culture, it seemed his dream was slipping away. In this dead time of winter with no construction work to fill the hours, and with my mother being so dependent upon him, almost suffocating him with her need, an anger was triggered in my father.

My mother saw this anger and it triggered old fears associated with her own father’s anger. Knowing if she met her husband’s sexual needs, she would be safer. That was the lesson she learned at her family home.

Sex became the honey to soothe my father’s frustration and impatience. But, sex also became a poison which felt so much like a cage preventing him from becoming the man he believed was waiting for him if he would only dare to reach for that future.

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Carrie, Block Wife, Benighted, Britt H., Benjamin Workman, Robert, Au Naturel, James Grigg, Diana Meresc, Chris Floyd, Ridge, Margie Willis, Adrian CDTPPW, Luis Rosa, Dan Carlson | Meandering Naturist, Adrian CDTPPW, Patrick OConnell, Maddy Mirza, Jorden House-Hay, and Adrienne Beaumont