Miracle and Heartbreak
On Fatherless Fathering and its Challenges
The You encounters me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. ~ M. Buber
When it comes to fathering, I was raised with plentiful examples what not to do, which for a while I thought would be enough.
For instance I knew that much of parenting is about “setting boundaries,” as if such a task—or language game, as I have written about previously—is simple. I knew how not to set them: capriciously, inconsistently, or reactively.
But none of it is simple, for this father at least. Because the lack of modeling leaves a void as wide as the sky. Only in love does said void find its illumination.
I remember early in sobriety we were talking in a men’s meeting about fathering gone awry, and the toll taken on the now-grown children chiming in, many of whom drank to cover the pain. Then a long-timer spoke up: “What I’m hoping to hear is mercy, ‘cause I’ve been so massively imperfect as a parent.” It took time to appreciate this comment.
My own father admitted, posthumously it turns out (a story for another time), that he “could have done more” in the parenting department. It was a crumb, sure, but I hungrily accepted, given that the remark was made at his funeral by a friend of his.
My father was terribly compromised by his alcoholism, which made being there so difficult, for himself let alone his family. It is also possible he had no idea what to do, which is what I feel some of the time. But his not being there is what hurt the most—or when he was there, it was mostly about shoring up himself.
In an alcoholic or otherwise noxious system, caregiving is demanded rather than given by caregivers. Often what a child most needs, I have found, is being as present as you can, just being there to listen, bear witness, see your kid.
You set aside a day to attend a recital, or dress rehearsal, to watch your child’s 90 seconds in the spotlight. It may take decades for them to appreciate it. Still I am cognizant of showing up in a way my daughter expects but that I myself did not experience. The mystery of parenting is, at times, less daunting than it appears.
Along such lines, I find love is not so much “generated” as accepted and taken in, discovered: the byproduct of the effort of arriving in the present. I make the effort to be there as best I can (though I could still cut down on the doomscrolling); love is a shy, unexpected visitor awaiting discovery. One accepts it as a kind of surrender to something more powerful than any individual effort.
The power of relatedness is also discovered as being bigger than participants, belonging to all and none simultaneously. (Winnicott often noted this paradox.)
Such power reveals itself in glimmers, much as Martin Buber described, via our inexorable connectedness, in which our separateness becomes necessary for reference, a function of language, until we again notice unity, glimmers of a friend or loved one as more than “a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he or she is You and fills the firmament” (Buber.)
A firmament, I add, suddenly seen as previously, colossally empty in terms of my own early experience, with a father who was lost in the bottle. When parents are consistently absent, aspects of the child disappear as well.
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One morning, just after she learned to talk, my daughter hugged me goodbye before I left for work and quietly said, “I really love you daddy.”
I was subtly devastated, for reasons unknown, as often happens in fatherhood. It was like the slow-motion impact of a meteor.
I have written about shadowy grief, a slow-creep of near-overwhelming sadness, that undertow of concentrated melancholy that swells unbidden from time to time, that I am slowly convinced is at the heart of so many of my dreams.
These type of rare but seismic parental experiences are never predictable (unlike asking her to clean her room or eat her vegetables, or my compulsion to check the news.)
Her comment was so spontaneously pure, and precisely what I too was feeling but felt unequipped to say, unpracticed—similar to the bittersweet edge of revelation and grief I stumbled into when first falling for my wife. What is this?…some relief and quiet happiness that blends with mourning. I think it is often why we see tears at recovery meetings.
My analyst at the time suggested I had discovered something new to me, beyond the words: a glimpse of unconditionality, more discovered than generated, reminding me of Buber’s statement that “all actual life is encounter.”
With my daughter’s goodbye there was also shadowy grief, in the sudden illumination of a hollowness that still reverberates (we never quite get over it). Here too the notion of fatherhood was discovered in being a father; our children reveal to us our parent-ness, we do not “become parents” in advance. We discover who we are, as parents, in offering a boundaried but loving reflection of our children, in a surround larger than its parts.
Such potency of illumination in my daughter’s case, revealing the emotional emptiness mentioned above, was also due to the novelty of these simple words, which I cannot recall saying to my own dad, nor hearing them. In many ways he was a stranger. Intimacy was a foreign language in childhood (leading later to passionate fan letters to Fonzie and Steve Austin.)
It was unthinkable for instance that either of my folks would show up for all that my wife and I schlep to (happily, for the most part): my daughter’s gym practices and competitions, school plays and events, dance rehearsals and recitals and so on. I only realized when writing this that one reason I was so hesitant, in my own childhood, to participate in extracurriculars is that they seemed so insignificant, due to their systemic neglect. Why bother?
Recently my wife and I attended a state gymnastics competition. I was struck by how our daughter acknowledged us from the floor, between events: the briefest of smiles, registering our presence while staying on point and in the zone (she did great by the way). Such presence was expected by her and appreciated. I see you, she conveyed to us with a glimmer before getting on with it.
So often I want to say to her, whenever we’re butting heads, you’ve no idea how good you have it. But my father used to say that to us, words slurred with gin, and I hated him for it.
When I raise my voice impatiently, usually after a very long day, and see the stress on my child’s face, there is a shudder of horror and tremendous shame; I can still recall the verbal fusillades of my fighting parents, that thundering volley of obscenities, the terror I felt at midnight as an eighth-grader, arguments raging on the top floor, echoing down the stairs and into my bones. I had to make it unreal somehow, retreat to my fantasy world (hello booze and pot) to keep it all moving.
Here I also recall that comment about mercy heard in the meeting, mentioned above.
To accept such a beautiful moment as my daughter’s embrace and comment, spoken as if she were as surprised as me to discover it, is also to acknowledge its historical thwarting. This tenderness, belonging to both parties and none, is what my father in the grip of his addiction could not help but subvert and destroy.
My siblings and I picked up the slack; everyone for themselves. In the chaos of such living, a child loses track of what is needed, and settles for crumbs to survive. My wife and daughter show me the ordinariness of such needing, its everydayness, a bottomless depth that is foundational when met, devastating when denied, leading over time to an amnesiac fugue. What is painful repeats, as Freud noted, even as the roots of such patterns are blurred.
When roles are reversed in chaotic or neglectful homes, caregivers cannot tolerate the child’s “neediness.” In a violent household, or in an indifferent foster care scenario or in sociocultural abuse or neglect, such indifference or violence can lead to criminality, a Darwinian survival mode. Experience is always the lead instructor; here life teaches the person that satisfaction is only found outside the law, or rules of the system, which serve the powerful.
But the revelation found in later life, if one is diligent and patient (and perhaps lucky), is that love is not something that is done but rather accepted, a kind of byproduct of consistently showing up the best one can, contra the endless demands of an alcoholic household in which a child’s talents are strip-mined for export. The relationship seems to “show up” along with participants.
Only in recovery did I learn what this means. I spent much of my life hiding “backstage,” bottle in hand. Only there could satisfaction be found.
It happens as a therapist too; in showing up consistently for patients, aspects of myself appear in surprising ways.
To feel re-vitalized, after all, or restored or integrated, does not always mean flowers and rainbows. It can mean impatience, anger, frustration, you name it, that plethora of expression muzzled since earliest days. Healing is often painful, the difference being self-integration (in a caring surrounding) versus further dissociation or self-fragmenting.
Sometimes whatever curiosity and understanding I bring to bear with patients is sometimes viewed with suspicion, an inborn skepticism. As one patient told me, “This feels too good to be true.” Many were certain I was going to get sick of them and throw them over sooner or later. It has long been dangerous or selfish to expect help from anyone.
In an earlier post I talked about the conditions for thinking, or an environment that nurtures a child (or patient’s) distinctive perceptions and thought. I meant something like the unconditional, the acceptance of the “you” inherent in “me,” the shared ground upon which we find inter-relation.
How to say that what is not said or how whatever is said, is most important? This can be a grave insult to the intellect, which wants to bring emotion to heel.
Therapy, a bit like familial love, is an attempt to give words to rich but wordless experience, more implied than explained, underscoring the emptiness of words if they are not founded upon connectedness. Explanation in fact becomes a kind of narcotic.
Such numbing characterizes the expressions of love many patients hear in early years, rote and mechanical on the part of caregivers. “I have an anxious attachment style,” a person might say, as if this explains everything; in fact it is a little like saying the temperature rises in summer. Jargon can distance us from the painful truth.
Yet we have to start somewhere. Thus we join our patients in the lived conundrums of words that point the way rather than illustrate our dilemmas.
I often have to say to patients, more than once, to forget the fancy words, or trying to “nail it” verbally—speak from the heart or gut! Words become something of a liability, both of us entrapped in our roles as precocious kids, explaining our way around emotion, to understand the past in freeze-dried terms rather than live it in the present.
Some patients are not yet ready for this; it’s too dangerous, too raw. This can lead to self-doubt, my own perspective tangible only in its insignificance, as talking around the problem does little: a repetition of my own childhood imprisonment.
This often happens when a patient is seeking or demanding an explanation of their problem and a likely road map to health, as if it were a recipe. I understand the impulse and the uselessness of explanation. Yet again my father’s shadow falls; I feel as though I am once more paying homage to the almighty intellect, which he used to defend his own increasingly shaky self-esteem. (He often admitted to me he was messing up, which I mistook as a sign that change was afoot.)
But like my daughter’s utterance, what is curative is sudden, illuminating like lightning an ambience that the two of us have built one painstaking brick at a time.
So if I say, at the right moment, “You’re scared I’m going to fail you like so many others” or “It’s overwhelming and this is the one place your smarts don’t seem to help,” or even, “You need to know I know what the hell I’m doing, because you’re putting your trust in me, so scary to do.”
In such moments I discover paternal presence, in facilitating safety for feelings of danger, being present and recognizing its long absence for the person before me.
The therapist’s caring and a patient’s trust, or the perceived absence therein, remain elusive to the tongue until they are suddenly plain as morning, after a night we finally recognize as both terrifying and (most thankfully) impermanent.