Post-Valentine's

Last week one of my sisters mentioned some Facebook status updates about gifts from fathers to daughters for Valentine's Day. She asked if that was a thing. I thought about it, realized that I had seen similar posts, so yeah, it must be a thing, though I had not previously realized it.

As soon as I understood that, I understood why she had to ask, and we all started laughing as I told her, "There's no way you could have known."

We laugh about our father fairly often when he comes up. It seems like the healthiest thing to do. We have joked that it's either laugh or cry, but we don't really feel like crying about it either. It's just one of those things, and it's familiar. A glimpse of something flashed across my mind though, and I needed to get back to it later.

Maybe it is the picture of the aligned chakras on my vision board. Maybe it is the sequence I have written across the top of two different working documents where it all starts with shame. There were definitely two related thoughts.

The first thought was just that Dad's course hasn't made him very happy. He may have mentally devalued the children that he threw away every time he disowned them (again, the fact that there was so much disowning is something we laugh at, because that's ridiculous), but he's wrong. He's a pretty miserable person. Thinking that led to the other thought.

His unhappiness with us was actually unhappiness with himself.

I had understood parts of it before. The need to always be right and never let anyone see any vulnerability was something I had inherited. As I got into college I could see how obnoxious it was, and how it could hurt the people around you struggling with their own insecurities. (It must also make you look really stupid to the people who know that you are wrong.)

That solidified on my mission, and I gradually got to a point where I can be open about my weaknesses and admit when I don't know the answer. It's not always fun, but most people like you better for it. It's less stress.

It almost feels like old news, but I had associated it with my teenage years, not with the small child who would grow up into that teenager. He was a lot worse when I was a teenager, but it was there before.

In Search of Fatherhood: A Mother Lode of Wisdom From the World of Daughterhood by Kevin Renner, 2011.

I'd mentioned before that this was the most disappointing of the books I read, because the author's interview made him sound like he had totally decoded the paternal influence on a woman's romantic relationships. If he did, he left it out of the book. I wanted some answer to why none of my father's daughters could ever get married, or even date much, and how to fix it.

I'm not saying that I have a total grasp of it now, but I'm at least accepting that the feeling that there was always something the felt wanting about me, and that I didn't know how to fix, was a problem, and that it came from someone who was never satisfied with his own life, but who could also never accept that anything was his fault, so it had to be the people around him.

I am also accepting that he was wrong. My father's unhappiness with his life is not on me. It does seem to be the best explanation for why I was always ashamed.

Where to go from there?