Being an emotional son cared for by an intellectual father was so hard.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. Far from it, I owe my father everything. I mean, everyone does to some extent…they owe their conception, their home and material goods (at least in part usually), and usually a good part of their intellectual formation. I owe so much more however.
The modern world, especially here in America, doesn’t deal well with feelers or idealists. I was both. On top of that I was intellectually precocious. So every time I went out into the world, starting with preschool, I caught the blunt end of the ‘not like everyone else’ stick…usually in the face. Yet each time it happened, there was my father to explain it to me - or rather teach me find the understanding on my own. He was like that – no answers, just the means to find the answers. He taught me to learn and to do it on my own. That worked great for knowledge, but he never understood that it wasn’t as good for emotional issues.
I didn’t really catch up socially until high school, and when I did it just tipped the balance the other way. Suddenly I went from being a total introvert (interacting almost exclusively with my father in any meaningful way), to sharing my life mostly with people who had been strangers not long before. I rewrote the book on adolescent fuck ups. Hell it wasn’t even a book; I had to create an entirely new medium to hold that puppy. I rebelled, and lashed out, and turned inward, and rejected, and quested for answers, and everything else all at the same time. I think a lot of it was contradiction between my natural emotional inclinations and my father’s formal intellectual methodology. I can’t imagine how he lived through it.
But live through it he did, and probably earned his works of sainthood in so doing. Not just lived through it, but came out on the other side ready to be the one to show me the way yet again. This time it was helping me through my mother’s death. Losing a parent is always hard, and losing one while still in high school is nothing short of eviscerating. But whenever I was lost, there was dad with a map and compass. What does it say of someone who does that, when they themselves have to be brutalized by the loss?
Were that all I would still owe him everything, but it continued time and again. Through my divorce, losing custody of my daughter, lifestyle changes, career path changes, and so on he was always there. Time and again, whenever I needed a new perspective, or to understand what I was going through, a helping hand, or just a reprieve from a world I never belonged in, my father was my cognitive salvation.
The down side of all this for an emotional person is that it forges bonds both deep and strong. Why is that bad, you ask? Because no matter how strong the bonds, they can’t stop one flowing through time. The end result is having to eventually say goodbye to something that’s as much a part of you as any limb or organ. When the parting is swift, and entirely physical, it hurts but it heals…much like quickly pulling off a bandaid. But when it’s slow, or when it’s a mental loss…ESPECIALLY a mind which encompasses the very nature of the person…there are no words.
You see, helping my father with the physical things he can no longer do is no big deal. In fact it’s like a gift to me to be able to finally pay him back for all those things he did for me. Shopping, cooking, driving, cleaning, maintenance, and all the other things actually relieve stress, not add to it. It’s light as a feather to me. But watching his mind fade, no FEELING his mind die…that’s another matter entirely.
All of the memories of my father are of him teaching me…his mind improving mine, him being the logical one. People accuse me frequently of being like some kind of robot…a rational machine. But compared to my father I’m a chaotic simpleton. So the contrast between then and now, to see him change before my eyes, is worse than any loss I imagined. But still I have to do it. Though the duty is heavy as a mountain sometimes, it’s the least I owe him.
I sat with him tonight, in his bed a while. He had woken up after only a couple hours of sleep, and was confused. He couldn’t understand why it was light outside if it was night. I had to explain about it being summer, and the length of days. He was frustrated trying to figure out his medicine schedule, scared that he’d missed a pill. After many minutes of unsuccessfully reassuring him, I finally had to take him by the hand and lead him with his faltering steps back to bed, his fear of what he couldn’t remember near paralyzing him. Instead of being able to return the intellectual favors he’d shown me for a lifetime, I had to make do with just sitting beside him exuding a peace and confidence I could not feel until his exhaustion finally returned him to the peace of sleep. It wasn’t until I left and closed the door that the tears finally came, mostly knowing that tomorrow he’d remember none of this and wouldn’t be able to use his magic map and compass to lead me out of this wilderness.
Being an emotional son caring for an intellectual father is so hard.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. Far from it, I owe my father everything. I mean, everyone does to some extent…they owe their conception, their home and material goods (at least in part usually), and usually a good part of their intellectual formation. I owe so much more however.
The modern world, especially here in America, doesn’t deal well with feelers or idealists. I was both. On top of that I was intellectually precocious. So every time I went out into the world, starting with preschool, I caught the blunt end of the ‘not like everyone else’ stick…usually in the face. Yet each time it happened, there was my father to explain it to me - or rather teach me find the understanding on my own. He was like that – no answers, just the means to find the answers. He taught me to learn and to do it on my own. That worked great for knowledge, but he never understood that it wasn’t as good for emotional issues.
I didn’t really catch up socially until high school, and when I did it just tipped the balance the other way. Suddenly I went from being a total introvert (interacting almost exclusively with my father in any meaningful way), to sharing my life mostly with people who had been strangers not long before. I rewrote the book on adolescent fuck ups. Hell it wasn’t even a book; I had to create an entirely new medium to hold that puppy. I rebelled, and lashed out, and turned inward, and rejected, and quested for answers, and everything else all at the same time. I think a lot of it was contradiction between my natural emotional inclinations and my father’s formal intellectual methodology. I can’t imagine how he lived through it.
But live through it he did, and probably earned his works of sainthood in so doing. Not just lived through it, but came out on the other side ready to be the one to show me the way yet again. This time it was helping me through my mother’s death. Losing a parent is always hard, and losing one while still in high school is nothing short of eviscerating. But whenever I was lost, there was dad with a map and compass. What does it say of someone who does that, when they themselves have to be brutalized by the loss?
Were that all I would still owe him everything, but it continued time and again. Through my divorce, losing custody of my daughter, lifestyle changes, career path changes, and so on he was always there. Time and again, whenever I needed a new perspective, or to understand what I was going through, a helping hand, or just a reprieve from a world I never belonged in, my father was my cognitive salvation.
The down side of all this for an emotional person is that it forges bonds both deep and strong. Why is that bad, you ask? Because no matter how strong the bonds, they can’t stop one flowing through time. The end result is having to eventually say goodbye to something that’s as much a part of you as any limb or organ. When the parting is swift, and entirely physical, it hurts but it heals…much like quickly pulling off a bandaid. But when it’s slow, or when it’s a mental loss…ESPECIALLY a mind which encompasses the very nature of the person…there are no words.
You see, helping my father with the physical things he can no longer do is no big deal. In fact it’s like a gift to me to be able to finally pay him back for all those things he did for me. Shopping, cooking, driving, cleaning, maintenance, and all the other things actually relieve stress, not add to it. It’s light as a feather to me. But watching his mind fade, no FEELING his mind die…that’s another matter entirely.
All of the memories of my father are of him teaching me…his mind improving mine, him being the logical one. People accuse me frequently of being like some kind of robot…a rational machine. But compared to my father I’m a chaotic simpleton. So the contrast between then and now, to see him change before my eyes, is worse than any loss I imagined. But still I have to do it. Though the duty is heavy as a mountain sometimes, it’s the least I owe him.
I sat with him tonight, in his bed a while. He had woken up after only a couple hours of sleep, and was confused. He couldn’t understand why it was light outside if it was night. I had to explain about it being summer, and the length of days. He was frustrated trying to figure out his medicine schedule, scared that he’d missed a pill. After many minutes of unsuccessfully reassuring him, I finally had to take him by the hand and lead him with his faltering steps back to bed, his fear of what he couldn’t remember near paralyzing him. Instead of being able to return the intellectual favors he’d shown me for a lifetime, I had to make do with just sitting beside him exuding a peace and confidence I could not feel until his exhaustion finally returned him to the peace of sleep. It wasn’t until I left and closed the door that the tears finally came, mostly knowing that tomorrow he’d remember none of this and wouldn’t be able to use his magic map and compass to lead me out of this wilderness.
Being an emotional son caring for an intellectual father is so hard.
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