A Better Parent

I suspect most of us become parents at least partly out of the determination to be better parents to our children than our parents were to us. Or at least, I thought that for most of my life. Every once in a while, I bump into someone who says that they only had the goal to be half as good at parenting as their parents were to them, and I wonder—what in the hell it would have been like to grow up in a family like that.

My father was physically and emotionally abusive and I struggled alternately with a desire to win his approval, a need to rebel totally against him, and finally, an attempt to figure out how to have some kind of a relationship with him that would not damage me if I created good enough boundaries. In that last phase, as he was dying, I told myself that I would go visit him every week, as he requested, in order to help him write his life history. I was a writer, and this seemed like a small gift to offer to him, even if he’d never much cared about my career as a writer and had often tried to talk me into going back to be a college professor.

I imagined that I would somehow find out the “secret” to my father’s limited emotional language, some truth about his past that would explain how broken he was—while he was also determined never to admit any flaws or weaknesses. He either didn’t remember much about his childhood or refused to share any of it. The one thing I did learn a little more about was the story of the missing middle finger of his right hand. He’d always made a joke of it when I was a child, told anyone who asked briefly that he’d lost it when he was a child in an ice cream maker.

What I found out when I wrote his history was that his father had made this ice cream maker and that it was unfinished. In fact, his father was an inventor and had many inventions (probably dangerously left out) in the basement. My father was only four years old when he lost his finger, and he told me with some vulnerability about how he had to go to many doctor’s appointments after that, where they were trying to restore motion to his hand and to make sure that he didn’t lose more than that one finger. It got so bad that his parents had to think up inventive lies to get him in the car, because when they told him the truth about where they were headed, he would jump out of a moving car to escape that level of pain. I suspect they didn’t use any anesthesia on him. This is, I’m sure, an explanation of why he hated and mistrusted doctors his whole life, even though he relied on medical science for many of his life decisions.

He never spoke a word against his father, but I’ve come to accept that my father was a much better father to me than his father likely was to him. If he made the goal I made, he achieved it. On his own terms, he was a good father. He had eleven children, and if we were often poor, we were almost never hungry. Not one of us was injured and lost a digit or any limbs from any of his projects that we worked on with him (and there were many). He provided financially for his family in the way that he thought was his responsibility (this did not include nice clothes, sports teams, dances or other events). His attempt to control us all was most likely a twisted expression of love.

My generation (X) imagines that being a good parent includes emotional closeness to our children, being vulnerable, allowing them to make choices (even bad ones) and getting them and us therapy to talk openly about our problems. This was not only not part of my father’s idea of being a good parent, but I suspect would have frankly horrified him. Bad things weren’t to be talked about. They were to be hidden away or forgotten, if possible. Made jokes of, even. They were not for his children to carry forward another generation.

It is sad to me at times that he never realized how much he was shaped by the wounds of his childhood. But then again, maybe it is better for him that he wasn’t. He doesn’t have to be a good parent on my terms. If I give my children the freedom to make their own choices, even if I don’t agree with them, perhaps I can find a way to give that backward in time to my father. I struggle to say “I love you” to him those last few years. But here I am, writing about him in a way that shows my love for him, even so. Maybe he would not see this as loving or as a gift to him, but it is. It is the most generous prize I can offer him, to admit that he was a good father, as he defined fatherhood.