In my church we like to quote that the greatest thing a father can do for his children is love their mother.
Usually when people take exception to it, it's because they know of a man who had children with a woman who was very hard to love. I know people who have had that problem myself.
I get caught up more on whether the man loves his children, Or himself.
We also say that you can't truly love others unless you love yourself. That isn't quite accurate either, though there are elements of truth to it. It certainly affects how well you love.
My father was never satisfied with any of us. I don't think he was satisfied with himself either, which is its own tragedy, but it was combined with a refusal to ever admit being wrong. This eliminated apologizing and change.
He definitely could have been worse, and I think he has hurt himself more than anyone else. Nonetheless, there was this vague sense going back further than I could ever remember that there was something wrong with me. I was not good enough, and I did not understand why, which made it worse.
So much of who I am comes from that.
This has affected his relationships with all of his children. Reminiscing with my sisters usually ends in "He is such a dick!"
It might have been worse for me, because I was kind of born to fill a gap, and it didn't work.
Not every child in our family was planned, but I was very deliberate. My father told my mother "You WILL get pregnant!" (or he would go elsewhere) and she did.
That happened a few weeks after both of my father's parents died in a small plane crash.
In fact, every aunt and uncle who was in a relationship at that time has a child my age. Most of them have names with our grandparents' names in them somewhere, though I don't. On a smaller scale, it was like the baby boom after the war.
That was major trauma for all of them, but it may have been worse for my father because he'd had a fight with them not that long before and was not speaking to them. Well, the fight was more with his father (and his father had indeed been rude). I know his mother was upset about it.
My father did not learn from this. About two years later when one brother died, a dispute about property led to him cutting off ties with his two other brothers. He said that they were the ones who were not speaking to him, which is probably fair; for years they were not in touch with any of their sisters either. However, my father also ended up disowning every child he had over time, and multiple times if they apologized and resumed relations.
The first time he cut me off was pretty big trauma at the time, and I recognized that. Well, probably not right away at least. I mean, there was a level at which I knew it was hard, but there was also some denial where I told myself that this was easier than dealing with him, which also had some truth to it.
It took me a lot longer to figure out that at my base there was this problem where I was always feeling inferior, and somehow wrong.
Not that I would admit to being wrong easily; I did pick that up from him. It seemed like it was the most dangerous thing to do, like that's when other people move in for the kill. The penalties were so high for being wrong, that you could never admit it.
Then, over time you see that it is really obnoxious. Refusing to admit when you are wrong annoys the people who know anyway, pokes at the insecurity of others who may not be sure, and keeps you from learning and growing. Also, not admitting it does not change that you are in fact wrong. I did eventually figure that out.
Over time there were all of these things peeled back -- assumptions about what I was like and how the world worked -- and despite other factors they were largely rooted in my belief in my deficit, but I couldn't identify that until I had been through everything else.
Getting here was good, but it was not easy.
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