About Your Parents Thread

"I know you want to leave me, but I refuse to let you go, Lillian! if I have to beg and plead ... to the symphony."

 

Parents died a few months apart three years ago.
I've posted quite a bit about my father, especially when I started the project with his letters and other writings, a project I still plan to pursue but the rapid onset of babies in my house has been quite time consuming.

Both grew up in poverty in the South Bronx during the Great Depression.
My mother was a sweet Irish Catholic lady who gave up plans to become a nun to marry my father. Alzheimer's made her a different person long before she died.
My father was a self-educated Korean War vet who wanted to raise his family away from NY and the life he knew as a child, yet he was constantly fixated upon and nostalgic about his childhood and youth.
He was among the most intelligent people I have ever met in my 47 years, and he was very edgy and difficult much of his life, although old age softened his edges quite a bit before he passed.
He cared for my mother himself, and I believe that my mother's condition provided him the chance to be the person he might have been had it not been for the many traumas of his childhood and youth.

He could be very prickly, but he was also very loving in his way.
Quick anecdote:
When I was a senior in high school, I told him I wanted to take a year off and figure out what I wanted to do before starting college.
As he started to tell me, sternly, why this was a bad plan, I interjected that 'I'm going to be working. I'm not going to be just resting on my laurels.'
At which point he literally laughed in my face.
He said: 'Do you even know the meaning of that expression? It's origin? Laurel wreaths were worn in ancient Greece as a sign of prestige and great accomplishment. What have you accomplished? Graduating from high school? Congratulations, so has everyone else.
'You need student loans either way, since you didn't get any scholarships. If you go straight to college, we'll help you as much as we can. If you want to wait, you're on your own.'
And he walked away.

 

In retrospect, I should have done that -- wait a year or so before going off to college -- but had I floated such a plan to my father we would have had roughly the same conversation. His great dream was for me to become a doctor. I had the test scores, but I wasn't remotely mature or directed enough to make the kind of grades that would have been necessary. Besides, I didn't want to be a doctor; I just didn't know what else to say I wanted to do. Had I raised such doubts, however, he'd have told me: A) grow the fuck up; B) quit thinking about finding something "fun" to do with my working life, because that's not what work's for; or C) some combination thereof.

To say not waiting to go to college is one of my great regrets isn't accurate, because life is so path-dependent; had I not gone to college straight away, I probably would have had more sense than to get involved with journalism, which, in a roundabout fashion, is how I met my wife. But the thought of being that young, with that many possibilities, and taking one of the non-standard paths is awfully attractive to this middle-aged man.

 

So, did you wait, anyway? Or no?

My dad always had a spontaneous streak -- something everyone in the family has noted that I must have gotten from him. If so, I can live with that, happily.

Two examples: We lived in Commack, NY, for most of my younger growing-up years. My dad had a potential job he was offered in Texas, and one weekend morning, he woke up and said to my mom, "Let's go to Texas, to check it out, and see if we want to move there. A couple hours later, my parents, and all of us kids, were piled in the car and on our way for a road trip to Texas. Our next-door neighbor at the time, whom we have remained close friends with throughout the many years since, recalled that incident in a eulogy at my dad's memorial a few years ago. And he laughed.

"I was outside and saw them getting ready to go somewhere, and asked what was going on. Dick tells me, "We're going to Texas to see what it's like. We'll be back in a few days. I couldn't believe it. They wake up, and, in a couple of hours, they decide to go to Texas and are all ready to go. My wife was still inside, getting ready to go to the store."

Another time: I needed tires bought and put on my aging car, and my dad was much more comfortable and handy with cars than I've ever been, and cared about them way more than I ever have. The problem was, my parents lived several hours from me in Central California. So, it's a Saturday morning and I decided to get this taken care of and, perhaps, put in a visit with my parents, as well. I called them up and suggested we meet at about the halfway point. I said, "Hey, Dad. I need new tires on my car, and I'd rather you handle something like that than me. How about if we meet at Costco in Santa Maria? We can get new tires put on my car, and have lunch there, too.

Within the hour, I was headed northward, and my parents were coming south. Yep, that was our idea of a good time: a couple hours' drive for new tires, and a lunch of Costco hot dogs.

We were all just fine with it, and had a nice, quick visit before we all headed opposite ways to go back home later the same day.

There are more stories like that where that came from. My parents were good like that -- even exceptional.

 

I lost my Dad in January. He'd been ill for awhile, so it wasn't a total surprise. Not that it makes it any easier. He was a tough SOB, we didn't have a lot in common, and we fought a lot, but the one surprising thing was that he was never afraid to say, "I love you" or give me a pat on the back.

Which I think is so interesting, considering he and his family were not close at all. Dads sure are confusing and wonderful at the same time.

 

I'm at the age now where I greatly appreciate being more like him, and wish I had been from the beginning.

 

Sometimes I think about how seamlessly I project the way my father was when he got sick to how he would have been in the coming years, and I wonder how accurate that projection is. I do think he would have handled losing my mother far better than my mother has handled losing him. She is, in many ways, no further along than she was the day he died 14 years ago. I talk with her and, in the course of a half-hour conversation, she'll tell me, "There's nothing here for me and I'm ready to move on" ... and then five minutes later she'll say, "People say I should get out of this house, but I'm happy here and I'm staying." And this is the way she was even in those first few months after his death.

 

I certainly did not have any career focus or academic focus at the time; however, my father, as usual, was right.
I was a real knucklehead as a kid - big on the social scene, drinking and drugs. I got by on talents and intelligence with which I was born rather than working to really develop those talents or acocmplish anything on my own through actual work. I've always been a hard worker at work. I've always had a job since I was 10, but I took classes and school for granted that I could pass anything any time I wanted with minimal effort.

I went straight to college out of high school. I drank and drugged my way through four years, and finished my fourth year without a degree, returning home in ignominy.
However, had I not gone straight to college, I would've been working and hanging around NJ. The drinking and drug taking may well have been considerably worse. I would not have discovered any new focus in a year. I may well have wandered off to follow the Grateful Dead or engaged in some other pointless endeavor. I would've probably found myself in legal trouble.

Although my first stab at college was not successful in the sense that it did not end in a degree, it was a transformative experience, and I think a year off would have left me much more aimless than I already was by nature when I was young.

I am grateful that he steered me in the right direction, as he so often did.

 

Another great story just occurred to me.

My parents were staying with my brother, who was very ill. My GF (now wife) and I drove overnight to go visit.
We arrived late morning, and my wife says: 'We saw a donut truck at the truck stop around 2-3 a.m. dropping off donuts for the morning.'
My father says: 'Does this story have a point?'

That was after he had mellowed a lot.

 

My folks divorced when I was 3. They cheated on each her, or so I've been told by my aunts and uncles on both sides, and never could reconcile things. Dad married and the woman he cheated with; she left him on Easter Sunday in the late 90s. Mom is still with the man I call my stepdad.

Custody arrangement meant I got to see my dad every other weekend when I was a kid. This lasted until I was 8 or 9. He dropped me off at my grandparents one weekend, said "I'll see in a couple of weeks" and drove back to Tennessee. "A couple of weeks" turned into 10 years. I spoke to him once in that time, after he wrote me a letter asking for my forgiveness when I was in seventh grade. We spoke on the phone one day while I was at school (I told my teacher what was going on, and he let me use the phone to speak with my dad for about 15 minutes). And then nothing ... again.

Came home from school one day in my junior year, and my mom was sitting in the kitchen reading what I assumed at the time was a letter. Little did I know, but my sisters Bethany and Lindsey wrote me letters and sent them to me. My mom opened them, thinking they were from my dad, and accused me of going behind her back and talking to him. I tried telling her I hadn't been talking to him and I had no idea about the letters. Bethany was 9 or 10 at the time and she didn't write very much in her letter, but Lindsey's tore me up. Lindsey said her and Beth wanted to see me, but they had no idea how to make that even work.

The letters started a big fight between my mom and I, and I wound up storming out of the house. I went to my pastor's house, where I stayed until 11 or so that night. This was before cell phones, so my mom had no way of calling me. She eventually called the parsonage and my pastor answered. I told him I didn't want to speak to her, but she asked me to come home so we could talk. I did and we talked to an hour or so, and she apologized for jumping my shit earlier. I told her I was sorry for leaving the way I did, but said she wouldn't listen or let me explain my side of things. There was no point in staying there, because she wasn't going to let it go. We eventually moved on, and I didn't think much of my dad for a few more years.

I was living in Lexington at the time, in the late summer of 2005, and I decided to look Bethany up on MySpace. I found her profile and sent her a message asking if she remembered who I was. We talked for a few minutes before she gave me dad's cell phone number and asked me to call. We spoke for three or four hours that night, till around 3 a.m., even though she was a freshman in high school at the time.

A few days later I call ... and my dad answers. I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to say or anything. I freeze. I let him tell me his side of things without saying much. We were on the phone till 1 or 2 that morning, but I still hadn't said much. Second time I called, things were a little bit better -- and then he asked me if I would forgive him for everything that happened. I told him I needed time, because I was still sorting a bunch of shit out, and he said that was fine. It was better than me saying no.

It took about a week, but I called him one afternoon and said "Dad, I forgive you," and hung up. I called that night and Beth answered, and she told me dad had come home from working crying. I told her what I told dad, and that was pretty much it.

I asked dad if I could come spend the night at his house when I had gone home for something, and he said I could. I took Bethany to school that next day and then went back to Lexington.

Fast forward 11 1/2 years, and things are great with me and my old man. My mom has come to accept the fact that I wanted my dad in my life, which I was worried would never happen because she is a very vengeful person. She can hold a grudge like nobody I know. She constantly asked about him in the days and weeks after he had his motorcycle wreck last summer, which just blew me away.

I have one niece and seven nephews that I don't get to see as much as I'd like, but I couldn't be happier with how things have turned out.

 

My mother keeps "lovingly" telling me that before she can hold her grandchildren, something has to happen first. Yup, your daughter loves being perpetually single.

The nice thing about being an only child is when my parents tick me off, I remind them that I pick the nursing home. My grandmother called hers "The Dump on the Hill" (the Wenders' family version of Shady Pines) so I'm constantly like "That's it, it's the Dump on the Hill for y'all in a few years!"

I have a much better relationship with my parents now that I'm an adult (kind of). But sometimes, I wish my mom wouldn't call *every* day. And I worry about her for when my dad goes.