My father

I must say that the great freedom of this blog so far derives from my belief that no one is reading it and that no one ever will. So why write into the ethernet, publishing my thoughts as opposed to simply recording them in silence? We are all looking for audiences.

And that is the theme of tonight's post. My desire for an audience from my father, for attention which I never received and which, according to Freud as well as to my brilliant therapist, accounts for the symptoms that I'm suffering from now.

I went into a kind of daze in CA, going through my father's office and files and things. Everything he had touched in the last fifteen years, and many things he hadn't touched--the walls, the ceiling, the photographs, in there was covered in sticky, yellow, nicotine grime. (Years of smoking four or five packs a day. And to think that it took so long for him to kill himself. He survived for a week after we took him off life support. The man's brain was dead, but the stem remained and the heart pumped away, the lungs rose and fell, for days, until he finally died of dehydration. Like a plant.

But let's not go there just now. )

I discovered all sorts of wonderful things about my now newly wonderful father. That he loved roses, that he was funny and beloved in the hospital; that he was a GREAT MAN. The daze I went into was an infantile rage. How do you separate infantile rage from adult rage, especially when it concerns your father? Do you write careful poems about his painful and often hideous bodily decay, as Sharon Olds has done? I don't know. It's a problem.

But after the week of being very sensible and rational and measured and enduring---after making that damned arrangement with his widow and agreeing to give her much more than she deserved, some part of me began to fall in love, again, with my father. Or to ressurect the old, never-to-be-killed, aparently, vegetable part of my heart and brain that idealizes, even idolizes, my father, the perfect one. And there I was going through his account books, which were treasures to me because, after all, I was there to finish them, to close them. And finding out from S.M. that he loved roses and raised them, nurtured them (as he never nurtued me, but I wasn't thinking this at the time). And discovering his records, Tristan and Isolde, Tannhäuser, dark, passionate, romantic music, and his books on sailing, and his scuba equipment. I found out that he pioneered Sports Medicine. That sports medicine wasn't even a concept before my father started to work on athletes--back in the 1960s, in Germany, and that he was incredibly talented, smarter and funnier and more interesting than I had ever known.

And I was feeling a great deal of anger and rage not just because this woman had come in and taken my father away from me, had filled his head with poisonous messages about his children (that he was all too willing to believe, face it), and making it so hard for me to see him--but also because she had been so incredibly cruel, truly evil in her selfishness and manipulation and hostility for all those years, for fifteen years. I blamed her for taking away my father and for causing me an incredible amount of pain. I wasn't thinking about the fact that he had chosen her, but rather was rescuring him, as always, by convincing myself that she had manipulated him, had tricked him when he was down. And even though this is true, true that she really did take advantage of him at his weakest moment, when he was devastated not just by the death of the love of his life, but also by the loss of his professional power due to alcoholism. She got to him. But still, he might have been able to see through her.

What is true, what was clear to me at the time he married her and what eluded me when I was out there, is the fact that she mirrored all of his uglinesss, all of his faults, and none of his complex virtues. He was talented and wealthy and successfull and intelligent and well-educated; she was talentless and unsuccessful and dim. She, like him, knew nothing about intimacy in a loving relationship. She did not know how to be generous, caring, nurturing, magnamimous. She cared about money, getting it and spending it. She cared about looking rich and important. She cared about being able to look down on people who didn't have money; she was racist and sexist and classist. As he was. She was perhaps even more attached to things, more miserly and ragged in her heart than he was. She had no compassion or empathy for others in need. She had never developed the part of her mind and heart that makes it possible for people to understand and listen to other people. And neither did he. They were, both of them, extremely damaged and extremely unhappy, tied together through weaknesses and insecurities.

My father loved my mother. Did he ever figure out why, in the end, after his miserable marriage to a selfish woman who wouldn't allow him to share her bed, who refused to bathe him or attend to his most urgent and basic bodily needs in his illness, who allowed him to wallow in filth, who never once took him to the doctor or dentist, who threw temper tantrums until she got what she demanded--diamonds, furs, sports cars that were too small to fit his wheelchair into-, who kept three vicious and unhousebroken dogs in the house, whose incessant barking and pissing and shitting drove him crazy, who could not have a conversation but could only talk endlessly, shifting from one self-pitying topic to another, who dressed herself in tiaras and furs on even the hottest days, who spent whole days and thousands and thousands of dollars ordering useless items from Q.V.C., the television shopping channel, who was so lazy, that she refused to pack her own suitcases and who, rather than go up one flight of stairs to get the suitcases they owned, would buy new suitcases for every single trip they went on. They must have had 40 or 50 sets of luggage. And he paid for it all because he was tired, and sick, and sunk into depression, and because he couldn't be bothered to have it out with her, because she was such a bully and a screamer and a wailer and ultimately, truly, the coldest-hearted woman I have ever met. He simply couldn't stand her.

So he gave into her. And I started to get caught up in the details of it all--the $10,000 she stole from our bank account during days after he died; the whole houseful of furniture and dishes and rugs, down even to the very hoses on the garden wall, that she dragged off with her to her million dollar condo, all the while claiming to be destitute; the $250,000 earrings she bullied out of him shortly before he died; the three Mercedes convertibles she forced him to put in her name--I started to think that this was all her doing, that he was just an innocent, disabled old man who had been badly wronged.

And I lost perspective for a while. I got caught up in my desire to punish her. The furies got into my hair and my heart (the furies, those ancient household gods) and I stopped acting as trustee and protector of my brother and sister and began to think in terms of vengence and retribution. I stopped thinking rationally, but only for a little while. It takes a great deal of self-control to prevent oneself from being taken over by hatred, which always destroys not the hated one but rather the self. Fortunately for all of us I came to my senses again (with some help from my lawyer) and accepted that we had won, in the long run. What remains must be shepherded, not squandered in court.

It is tomorrow and I am sober while she is still ugly.

The impossible situation I confine myself in as long as I regard him as the ultimate love object--this man who never really showed me love, who never gently and lovingly made it clear that he was my father, married happily to my mother, and therefore who never made it possible for me to divert my libido from him to other, more appropriate targets.

Flash of insight: What is true is that it is no longer his responsibility. It's mine. I have to make the break, recognize his unsuitability. I have to stop looking for him in the world, stop regarding him as the best object of my desire, and find other, better objects in men who can actually love me, whose love for me I can accept and cherish.

It's so cliché. I have to learn to be able to experience intimacy, to be able to trust in myself enough to know that I am loveable so that I can receive and treasure intimate love when it comes my way. To stop choosing men who remind me of Daddy: distant, withholding, withdrawn, emotionally immature men, men like I.B. and C.Y.

So much to learn. So little time.