On Dads

For me, the most surprising thing about becoming an adult was discovering that I actually liked my dad. It certainly hadn’t always been that way. At times throughout my childhood I’m fairly certain we mutually despised each other, though he might protest that he never, ever stopped loving me. As if you can’t love someone and hate them in equal measure at the same time. For most of my upbringing, I’d say he thought I was brilliant and selfish and I thought he was brilliant and, well, selfish. We fought a lot.

In a way, I think we grew up together. Young parents and their kids often do. I was born when he was 24. I’m aware it’s not a young age for a father from a biological perspective. I co-host a radio talk show about sex, and the other day a caller proudly said, “I’m a grandmother!”

“You’re a grandmother!” I exclaimed. “You sound like you’re 22!”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m 37.”

So my parents weren’t that kind of young. But having reached and passed the age of 24 a few years back, I can say with some certainty that the average 24-year-old American adult male is not prepared for fatherhood–not in our culture of perpetual youth, of forever-adolescence. I know things were different in 1980, when I was born, and that my father did not emerge from the type of fast-paced. cosmopolitan lifestyle in which delayed adulthood was (and remains) the norm. Having a daughter at 24 probably made more sense to him than doing key bumps with Elton John somewhere in Manhattan, which I assume is what his hip, cool big-city contemporaries were up to. For some reason, everything I envision about the 1970s and early 1980s involves Sir Elton John and cocaine. I have been told by those who were there that the reality was far more prosaic, unless you were in fact Elton John or, perhaps, Bernie Taupin.

Last weekend, my younger brother came over to my rented studio apartment to help me build an IKEA wardrobe–by which I mean he built it and I helped a little, mostly by keeping him in a steady supply of Guinness. He saw a picture of my father and mother holding me on my first Easter, and noted that Dad looked kind of scared. I studied it later, and I don’t quite agree. Overwhelmed, perhaps; a bit of a deer caught in the headlights type of look. But not scared, exactly. (Mom, on the other hand, looks peaceful and sleepy.)

It is strange to realize that my existence was more or less a planned affair. When I hear of 24-year-olds getting pregnant today, I assume someone forgot to take her Pill, or put on his condom, or both. But actually, my parents had been married since my father was 22 and my mother was 21, and they worked various low-paying jobs and still managed to own–own!–a house. I was as much a part of their plan as the three-bedroom ranch-style dwelling with the pear trees and the forsythia bushes in the backyard. Dad had a white-dude ‘fro of curly red hair, and was probably a full six feet back then. He always had pale skin and freckles and burned easily in the sun. Mom was tiny, about five foot one, and had luminous olive skin and lovely black hair that betrayed her 100% Italian (alright, half-Sicilian) background. Somehow, this overgrown leprechaun and pint-sized Mediterranean mermaid brought forth a son and daughter who look like the nice Jewish girl and boy your parents always wanted you to marry. Be warned: we are nice, but we are not of your tribe. I’d consider converting, but my brother probably wouldn’t.

Incidentally, I have learned certain appropriate strategies to deal with being a single New Yorker who looks like, but is decidedly not, the future mother of two adorable children named Hannah Rivkeh and Aaron Moishe. Once, a very nice, geeky young doctor asked me out and I responded apologetically, “Oh, honey, I’m not Jewish” without blinking.

He was taken aback, and responded, “Yes you are!”

“I’m not,” I assured him apologetically. “And you’re not in the market for a Gentile girlfriend. ” (You can usually tell which ones are and which ones aren’t. It’s a sophisticated sense I’ve developed since this began happening when I hit puberty. When I date Jewish guys, they’re of a different breed–the kind where mom grew up smoking weed with black kids at civil rights marches and dad believes that religion is just another tool of The Man.)

“You’re right,” he said. “Thank you for telling me right away!” He was sweetly relieved. It was as if I’d tapped him on the shoulder on the street and said, “Hey, buddy, you just dropped $20 back there. Here ya go!”

“Good luck!” I told him sincerely.

Incidentally, my Catholic father has told me repeatedly over the course of my life that he doesn’t care about the religion of the person who I bring home. “As long as he’s nice to you,” he says. Should I have offspring, I intend to pass the same attitude on to them. Life is too short and love is too precious to squabble over which version of the God fairy-tale you were forced to listen to on the weekends.

Dad is perhaps the least nerdtastic of a family of Irish Catholic intellectuals, which is saying something because he’s rather smart. The youngest of four, he loved sports more than his sisters or brother, and he played football. On a team. On purpose. I imagine that if I were sent back in time, Marty McFly-style, to hang out with my father and his siblings, I wouldn’t have known how to talk to my dad. Who chooses to play football? I’m actually way nerdier than either my mom or my dad, and to their eternal regret I didn’t play team sports in high school (beyond one stab at the 9th grade lacrosse team, which resulted in exactly 3 minutes of playing time.)

Grades were of the utmost importance in his father’s household, and thus in his own. I learned early on that high grades merited approval and a certain hands-off approach to my extracurricular life, while low grades (and in math they were always low) resulted in tense father-daughter tutoring sessions that generally ended with someone cursing (that would be him) or someone crying (that would be me). The fact that these sessions even occurred at all was evidence of how much he cared, but I’m not going to sugarcoat the fact that he could be a total asshat when frustrated.

He spent a lot of his thirties and forties in a state of high stress, for a variety of reasons. As it happened, I also spent a lot of his thirties and forties in a state of high stress, some of which I chalk up to adolesence, some of which I chalk up to an emerging pattern of mental illness. We clashed often. I’d say we didn’t enjoy one another’s company much from when he was 35 (and I was 11) to when he was 45 (and I was 21).

I have a hazy memory of actually trying to punch him in the face when I was a teen, a quixotic endeavor at best. This is actually a traditional Irish rite of passage, though it’s generally the son who tries to knock his father out, generally at a drunken family wake in which the words, “It was you that killed Ma! With yer drinkin’, and your lyin’!” or “Little Brigid would still be here if not fer you!” are uttered at a high volume. In this case, I was just really incensed, probably the angriest I’ve ever been, and no one was drunk or dead or named Brigid. I’m not sure if he remembers it. I can say I did not have the pugilistic success of one of his personal heroes, Muhammed Ali. I am also fairly certain I was sent to my room.

Raising a child with a sometimes-debilitating mental illness cannot possibly be a simple task, no matter the extent of your previous experience with the ailment in question (either as a sufferer or as a caregiver). I do believe that, as is often the case with families, my mother bore the brunt of dealing with my periodic and ever-worsening descents into panic and depression, and I’ve made a small attempt to publicly acknowledge her fortitude. However, my father also contributed time and time again to my road back to health, as much as by what he didn’t say as by what he did.

He did not, for example, call me crazy, or weak, or accuse me of pretending when I haltingly explained some of the things I felt. Parents are generally smart enough to realize that they never get the entire story, and if a kid says she’s thought about killing herself once or twice, you can generally multiply that by fifty to one hundred. Over the years, long before I came around, my father had seen and felt enough of what would eventually plague his daughter to be able to identify it when it appeared and to try as best he could to steer me towards wellness.

I said earlier that we didn’t get along particularly well until I was 21, and that’s true. Things certainly began to improve once I moved out of the house at 18, but we didn’t begin to build a real adult relationship until I moved back in at 21. Halfway through my junior year in college, I had what used to be called a nervous breakdown. I still call it that, simply because it’s a more convenient and better-understood term than “a severe depressive episode” or whatever the DSM-IV might say. It involved, among other things, developing an acute fear of leaving my studio apartment. I also feared eating in the morning, having a wet head after bathing (perhaps the oddest part of it), and traveling as a passenger in a car, bus, train, or plane. I feared crowds of people. I feared driving. Also, I sometimes peed in places that were not the toilet (glasses, bowls) so that I would not have to go to the toilet. I feared having a panic attack on the toilet. I feared going to school.

In short, I feared many things that healthy 21-year-olds, even the weird quirky artsy kind, should not fear. And when it became clear that I needed more help than I could provide myself, and that the emotional and psychological bumps of my adolescence had been small compared to the mountain of trouble I now faced, it was time for me to go home. And in going home, in admitting defeat, in giving up on what college students foolishly think of as adulthood, I became a child again. And this is when my relationship with my father finally changed.

After many years of trying to act wise beyond my years, of attempting to impress my dad with my intellectual prowess and my academic accomplishments, I gave up. I padded around in pajamas. I cried openly. I numbly refused to do anything I didn’t want to do–and he accepted my refusal. A few times, early on, I crawled into bed with my parents and sat in the glow of the flickering television, watching who-knows-what, killing time before, inevitably, I would have to go to my own bed and try to fall asleep. I hated going to bed because the mornings were so difficult and fraught with terror. My goals became very small: get out of bed before noon. Take a shower. Get dressed. Take your pills. Do the relaxation exercises they taught you at the medical center. Make a sandwich. Try to eat it. Half of it is good enough. Take small bites. Chew thoughtfully. Even if it takes an hour, you can do it. Go outside for a few minutes. The next day, a few minutes more. Take a car ride around the block with Dad. Take a car ride through a couple of neighborhoods with Mom. Go with Mom when she gets groceries. Stay in the car and breathe. It’s okay; you don’t have to go inside this time. Go with Dad when he picks up the dry cleaning. Go inside with him, this time. Stand there. Say hello to the cashier. You can do this.

Sometimes it was too scary and I had to go home before the conclusion of a film, or a shopping excursion. But it got better and better all the time. And along the way, haltingly, my father and I began to reconnect and understand one another in a way that we never had before. More importantly, I think we began to trust one another.

Once, when I was a baby, my dad sat in a rocking chair with me and held me until I fell asleep. He has a great affinity for babies, and they bring him joy and peace–which in turn tends to make him sleepy. That particular day, my 24-year-old, overworked, underpaid, semi-clueless, probably-totally-freaked-out dad relaxed so much that he fell into a slumber of his own. His arms relaxed, and I rolled down his torso and legs into the crook of his feet. I didn’t scream or cry. I didn’t even wake up. We were just there, breathing together, two bundles of nerves and feelings, sleeping in tandem, and even asleep we both knew we were safe.

Shortly thereafter, my mother appeared and raised holy hell, as was her right. Having carried me successfully inside her body for nine months, she was naturally peeved that my father could not carry me for ten minutes without falling asleep on the job. Shifting the blame, Dad protested that it was my mother’s yelling that caused me to wake up and start screaming. In a sense, he was right; I have always been painfully sensitive to my mother’s shifts in moods, a tendency that I later learned to curb by holding her at a distance, sometimes harshly. My dad laughs about the story now, and teases my mom. I have to say that if my future babydaddy ever falls asleep while sitting upright and holding my spawn, my reaction will mostly likely not be sunshine and cupcakes, either.

But the key element I take away from the story is this: even when he fucked up and fell asleep on the job, he didn’t drop me. He still held me up, by the skin of his teeth or the crook of his feet. His heart–and his ankles–were in the right place, even if his brain was on vacation. And so as an adult, I’ve come to define what I want in a partner not by whether or not he drops the ball, but whether he manages, somehow, to catch it at the last second. And to try harder next time. And to forgive himself for fucking up. And to laugh about it later.

So, belatedly, Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Thanks for never letting me hit the ground.

P.S. I could use like fifty bucks. I’m just saying.