In which I blame my father

Happy Father’s Day after all! This is really just how the timing worked out. No offense to other fathers out there.

Generally speaking, I have no patience for people who blame their parents for everything, because you still have choices. It can’t all be parental anyway, because children raised the same way turn out differently, especially if you look at my family.

There is one trait that seems to be shared among my sisters though, in that none of us are married, or have even come close. Now, in some ways this is an advantage, because it can be really hard for the lone single woman in a family of married siblings, and we can support each other. People don’t just wonder what’s wrong with me—they wonder what’s wrong with us. The downside is that there are no nieces and nephews either. (My brother is married, but they have chosen to remain childless.)

It’s not that we have all necessarily remained single in the same way. If perhaps one of us is consistently attracted to disrespectful guys and one of us is consistently attracted to gay guys, and one is consistently attracted to guys who are nice to her but not interested, that’s not exactly the same. Personally, I always managed to focus on guys who were gone. They were in different towns, at other schools, or graduated already, and when I did fall for one who was actually at the same school, I still believed I was into the guy who was on the mission, at least long enough until I was gone, and then the other guy was gone, and frankly, a bit alienated as far as I can tell.

None of us did that consciously, but we all did it, and after starting to think that was not a coincidence, I think it may have been our father. First of all, he never treated our mother with respect, and he withheld affection a lot, so we didn’t really have a good model of marriage. Secondly, we were never good enough for him.

I can look back now and have a certain amount of compassion for him. He has his own issues, and they have made him at least as unhappy as he has made us. Actually, I would say he is considerably less happy than half of us. At the same time, he left the females with a hard time relating to males.

One of my earliest memories of my father is that he had taken me to the dentist, and then we stopped at Tryon Creek on the way back. He gave me a Hostess cupcake, which got my face messy (I was about four), and then took out his handkerchief to wipe my face. This should be a good memory, and the fact that it is not is more me than him. I said (as a bit of an overly analytical nerd even then), that it was good that he had the handkerchief in case he sneezed and needed to blow his nose. He said, or in case I find a girl with a dirty face. That should be cute, but I immediately had this image of him meeting up with another little girl and taking off with her. Even then, I didn’t trust him.

When the first affair happened a few years later, other than the emotional damage it did to Mom, and the changes that came after he started setting conditions for her and changing around the home life to suit him better, the biggest thing was that he was spending time with someone other than us. I had no concept of sex at 9, so all I understood was that he wanted to be with someone other than us. I guess it hurt, but there was so much else going on it almost seems like the smallest part of it, and also, I had felt that it was coming all along.

Was that when the shame started? It didn’t help, but I think it was there before. First of all, the Suzy incident (where I began to see myself as fat) had already happened, showing that I was already receptive to the message that there was something wrong with me. Also, my big reaction to the affair was trying to take care of Mom, which may have indicated that I was already into accommodating. Of course, that there was something that I desperately wanted to fix that I had no hope of fixing could conceivably have reinforced the message that there was something wrong with me, and I needed to really make up for it. (And then, the first time he disowned me, and that put strain on their marriage, that didn’t really help either.)

I know there will be people who feel like we children should not have known about the affair at all—that Mom should have kept us from finding out. I see the point. I also don’t think she could have done that, and even if she had tried, there would still have been emotional changes in the air, and the changes that happened later would still have happened, because Dad was the one who made her take a night job where she was gone after that. It would have still been cataclysmic.

We all came out of this differently. I’m a People Pleaser, but we also have an Attention Seeker (wound: lack of love, coping behavior: narcissism), and there were two where I could not decide for a long time, but I think the deal is that one was leaning towards Skeptic (wound: betrayal, coping mechanism: cynicism) and the other was leaning towards Cool Cucumber (wound: deep emotional pain, coping mechanism: denial), but because they were so close they needed to share, so each became half and half.

That relates to our emotional state, but also, more than that, I think we just don’t trust men to love us. Even though I do believe that Dad, the first man whose job it was to love us, did love us, it didn’t always feel like it. You simply could not be good enough for him. Marriage didn’t necessarily look like that much fun anyway. Sure, I never believed my marriage would be like that, because I knew mine would be better, but maybe I only thought I believed that, because my marriage ended up being nonexistent.

I know that things turn out differently. Some women end up in serial awful relationships because they have a bad pattern set up, and they keep acting according to that pattern. We have just managed to avoid romantic relationships altogether. Our previous theory had always been that it was because we just weren’t attractive enough, but I don’t know anymore. I mean, we often see fat girls with boyfriends. We assumed it was because they were putting out, but it seems to be more complicated.