Postures of Presence
I just got home from spending the day with my dad. He’s 88 yeas old with Parkinson’s that causes his right hand to shake, spinal stenosis that has deadened his left foot, obliterated rotary cuffs in both shoulders that prevent him from the execution of daily tasks, Dupuytren Contraction in his hands (that cause his fingers to bend toward the palm of his hand), and half shuffles with a cane.
Still, every day he gets up, spends hours washing and putting on his clothes, and seeks to connect with the outside world. Anything but staying inside the house, which always reminds him that my mom is dead, that she is no longer here.
Today, he arrives at the doctor’s office commending the handsome Persian Orthopedic on his bedside manner – “It doesn’t cost anything to be kind,” he likes to say, sitting unaffected as the doctor injects his left shoulder with cortisone. He pulls out the needle and tries again, its nose is met with great resistance meeting muscles that no longer have rigor.
“I don’t want to miss a summer in Greece,” he continues, “it’s where my soul comes alive”. I get it - it’s where he met my mom and forgets for a while, lingering, instead, in the relationships around him that make him feel more at home than the empty house in Fort Lee.
Still, I have to confess, I was annoyed that the Turnpike was a parking lot this morning and that it took me an hour and a half to get to him, but, that receded easily in the light of my admiration for his determination and strength. And, though his body is dying and his heart is heavy, his mind is a hell of a lot sharper than that needle making its way through his flesh – unbound by the conditions of the body.
Like these roles we agreed to inhabit – the individuation of father and daughter in light of the death of my mother. And how his presence now in the face of his future absence continues to trigger the lessons of daughter that I have yet to learn or understand.
Something happens when he postures toward me as his daughter, something shifts inside of me and I can’t help but rebel! For example, we went for lunch after his appointment, and I was talking about how amazing Bill was on our time in Lake Champlain - making us pancakes and bacon and filet mignon and lobster tails for our anniversary and all.
My dad loves bill and bill loves my dad. In many ways, my parents were more parents to him than his own, though, I know for sure that we all try our best. Nothing we can do about it, sometimes it’s just so — we don’t get to choose our form and circumstance, though there’s no doubt my soul chose my family.
“Just as long as you aren’t fighting …” he started.
Jeez! here we go again!, cried an inner voice … I’m being judged!
Grudges were the worst! They were a trap - kept me hostage and made Bill feel very vulnerable in our relationship, in ways that propelled memories of growing up that were hard and confusing. Grudges are bad news, especially the one that was building inside me as I felt judged by my father.
I responded with courage, “you know dad, I just think this is what it seems like to you. Because you valued harmony above all else, I never learned how to deal with conflict.”
Believe me, as a little sister, I knew how to provoke conflict - knowingly when I blamed my brother who I loved “for” whatever because I was jealous “of” something; or when I saw how much my parents doted on him and his accomplishments and all.
And, I provoked unknowingly in the ways that I challenged all external authority over me. I may not have had the vocabulary or understanding to articulate the clear pattern of preference and expectation that was trying to disempower me, but there was something deep down inside of me that knew MY authority, and no one was gonna’ stand in the way of that!
My dad looked confused.
“Well dad, I could feel tension - I could see how much mom wanted to say something and how you wouldn’t let her, had authority over “what” she needed to speak. And that was really confusing to me.” I could identify with how that felt, in the ways I was told to be speak like a lady or accept the limited expectations put upon me.
No matter! I had experiences that offered me the opportunity to declare my boundaries, feel them out while under the loving protection of my parents – those commanding a safe environment within which to grow. Now, I know with all my being that my parents loved me and each other, but it wasn’t always so.
In the beginning it was terrifying for my mom.
Her marriage was arranged at 18. She had just finished high school, was an excellent student and had hopes of becoming a nurse or teacher – this was the late 50’s. But this was not the life or opportunity beholden to her, her family was poor, struggling from a post Civil War, and here this handsome but uneducated Greek with a firm foothold in the Americas was a prize.
Well, when I was in my twenties I asked my mom about her experience. I wondered, what was it like to be married or intimate with a man you didn’t know. And she told me that my dad never put himself on her. That she cried “bitterly” every day for a year for her family, and he was still tender; and when she over salted and undercooked most of her food and he ate it with gratitude; and that after a year of marriage, one day and quite suddenly, she realized what a loving kind man my father was and how life shifted when she allowed herself to receive it.
What I was seeing at the dinner table as a child was the same bitterness under different circumstances but also under the same patriarchal ordinance - the feeling of oppression, of having one’s choice to speak or express their truth taken away. It’s very difficult to describe, the subtly of being silenced, told to suppress your curiosity, to ignore the voice of the inner child that always speaks the truth.
These small stories that we tell ourselves and piece together become less inclined to tell the truth when they are threaded together with misunderstandings and feelings of “not enough”. The way I learned to not tell the truth if I wanted to receive my fathers love. all from a simple experience taking the tram up a mountain in at concord new Hampshire.
I keep returning to that story because nothing is separate from it, it is included in everything that proceed and everything that followed. And it comes up to remind me of the power of these misunderstandings and the power of the meanings that we believe about them.
All I can say is that I still remember the crushing sense of abandonment that I felt at that moment. And, the only thing my little seven year old limbic brain could think was, don’t ever tell the truth again .
'“If you want his love, don’t ever tell the truth!”
And you can imagine how these simple errors, miscalculations and sins just missed the mark. And how these experiences were asking for comfort, unconditional love, forgiveness, correction and accuracy and that it was in the swift action of this knowledge that any and all identities can and will fallaway, when fear fades into fearlessness and when we come to an understanding as I did this day eating my grilled chicken sandwich with my dad:
I am not your daughter and you are not my father. And that person that is buried in the ground is not my mother. Rather, one is the thread, one the needle, one the hand and the other the cloth, all coming together as one identify weaving the world.
Blessings.🙏