SYTB 4: Leave Nothing On The Table

Give relationships your all.

In the wake of my father’s passing yesterday, I would be remiss if I made it sound like, I figured it out, that things would never change, never be healthy for me and just walked away. Case closed.

That’s all true but that “figuring out” didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t wake up one day and say to myself, “he’ll never change no matter what I do or how I show up for him.” It wasn’t an epiphany that came from out of the blue. I’m 48 years old, and I didn’t come to the realization until I’d spent 45 years trying to get it right, trying to change myself to become more palatable to him and still got the business from him.

But I don’t want you to think 45 years is the magic number for trying. There isn’t a magic number. In hindsight, I often wished I’d spent less. It’s hard to say if they were necessary or not, you know? Maybe I needed that to feel complete with myself. Maybe it was just more to grieve. The last 3 phone calls I answered from my dad were complete exercises in futility. However, had I not answered them, I might have felt like maybe this time it won’t be so bad. Maybe it would’ve been something on the table. It had already gotten to the point where I could not talk about a single aspect of my life. In one of our last phone calls, I called him to console him about his brother and my uncle, Bob who had recently passed away. When my dad asked me about me and my kids, I just said “they’re fine” and immediately changed the subject. Somehow he still got into that “I worry about you” thing where he would obsess on his disappointment that my life didn’t look like the postcard he envisioned for objective success according to Men’s Health Magazine or whatever.

Up until that point, I had thrown everything at the relationship. I asked for him to make an agreement, the same agreement like 5 different times and he kept saying “yes” but doing “no.” Every one of those times, I blamed myself for not phrasing the agreement in a way he understood it. What did that sound like?

Me: “Dad, I really mean it this time. We can’t have a relationship if you do X to me.”

Dad runs straight over to do X to me.

I blame myself for not stating X clearly enough.

Only after 4 years did it dawn on me, I’m beginning to think he doesn’t give a shit about me. He’s only saying what he has to in order to get me to shut up and fall back in line. It took me 4 fucking years to notice that’s what was happening. Up to that point, I was certain I was just a lousy and ineffective communicator. I was exasperated with myself. I kept asking, what did I do wrong this time? And how can I be better so we can get along?

Yes. There’s already a book about it.

Now, someone who knows him might say, “No, he really cared about you. You can’t say he didn’t give a shit about you.” They’d be wrong. He cared about the idea of me. He wanted everyone in his family to get along so he could say there was no disharmony in his house. It was a reflection on him as a man and as a parent. He wanted me to be something I absolutely wasn’t to make him look better to other people. It’s not all he was, but my dad was a narcissist. Most people think that means that they love themselves. The story of narcissism is the story of a man who fell in love with his reflection, his image. They don’t really ever love themselves. In fact, I think my dad was deeply uncomfortable with himself. But that image was paramount.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m angry about any of this. I’m not. This is just how it was with him. It doesn’t matter how I felt about it. However, understanding him and his motivations explains a lot of his highly uncharacteristic behaviors made in an effort to handle me. I did not fit into the image he wanted to project about his life and family to the world. Worse, I was successful at making up my own rules that seemed to him to diminish by comparison (remember, beautiful people don’t compare) his own “accomplishments.” Mostly, he wanted me to copy his way of doing things in hopes we would share the same failures. I hate to say it this way. The truth was, he didn’t like the things that I devoted the extra miles to that he didn’t, and watching me succeed in those things made him feel like a failure. He downplayed my successes and progress outright to my face, and he belittled the things where indeed I had absolute, bonafide mastery so he wouldn’t feel small for not investing in those same pursuits.

It wasn’t always that way. When I was single and still living in California, it was ok to him that I marched to the beat of my own drummer. In fact, I believe he saw himself as progressive or something for accepting my outlier oddities.

Things between us fell apart was when my son started showing signs of autism. I grabbed that bull by the horns and decided no one in my house was going into adulthood without being well rounded, having strong functional language skills and becoming independent: intellectually, emotionally and physically. I dove into the “cures” and the success stories of autism. They all had one thing in common: a devoted mother who refused to take a doctor’s diagnosis of her child’s life long dependency as gospel.

I studied lifestyle, toxins and diet and radically changed our relationship to food. It paid off in ways very few people can wrap their heads around. It was an overnight miracle how my son responded directly to those changes. It was probably my greatest triumph as a human being. All my dad could say was, “a lot of people do that stuff but it doesn’t really make any difference. Kids with autism usually just spontaneously progress at random. Trust me. If I could wave a magic wand over my son and have him be normal, I would, but this is who he is and all I can do is love him.” I never responded to that comment. It was probably the single most insulting comment in the face of a miracle and hard work I have ever received in my life. I believe it is why my dad couldn’t find a nice thing to say about me- ME me, not his ideals about me, ever since. There’s no “magic wand” and to my dad’s chagrin there was nothing “random” about my son’s progress. What I, what Aaron and I did since it took both of us united to do it was nothing short of human sacrifice and devotion, all our own. I never judged my dad or any other parent for not doing what we did. I knew better than anyone how much effort it took. That would be like climbing Mt. Whitney and thinking somehow everyone who didn’t devote themselves to the same pursuit was beneath you intellectually. Technically if you climbed Whitney, most the world would literally be beneath you. 40+ hours of maternal labor, writing, editing and publishing a 350 page novel in 8 months, driving two toddlers for 5 days across the country in the dead of winter and a 21 day water fast were absolutely trivial pursuits by comparison to week one of GAPS Intro while nursing a screaming infant. Nothing I have ever done has been harder. But it worked. My son started speaking authentic, complete sentences which he thought up on his own. He had functional language, and that made it worthwhile to me.

For my dad… Seeing it work first hand challenged his worldview and his feelings about himself as a devoted father to a son of his own with autism. So basically, all he could say to deflect from his insecurity was that it was just a coincidence or an accident and certainly a waste of time and effort on my part. I honestly don’t mind that he felt that way. In my opinion, he should have kept those sentiments to himself, but from that moment on, every topic from homeschooling to homebirth to homesteading, essentially everything I am today was taboo and sharing in my successes and breakthroughs was no longer of any concern to him. In fact, it was a point of contention for me to really describe my life to him.

The last time I saw my dad was in Las Vegas. He and his family drove out for the first time to see us. I was really excited about it. We had come twice the distance to get there that they had, but I was the lucky one. The other times we saw him we had come from Utah all the way to California or Virginia to California. He’d never come to visit my children, his grandchildren from me, once prior to this. He gave the impression that even the trip to Vegas was a bigger effort for him with teenagers driving 3 hours than for me with little guys driving over 6 hours. It was readily apparent that he was happy to see my kids, but with his uncharacteristic biting sarcasm toward me, it was clear he was very uncomfortable seeing me. I remember he said nice things about the kids, and he may have said nice things to me. I don’t remember a single one of them. I just remember feeling that he didn’t like me anymore.

I’ve kept a lot of this inside. I never wanted my dad to know while he was alive that I knew the source of his insecurity or that his mistreatment of me stemmed from his insecurity about his own parenting abilities. Yes, I wrote a book about how he behaved, but I never said why. I never told him about the book. It wasn’t a secret though. Anyone who looked at my social media page was advertised to the fact. I also wasn’t out to destroy him or hurt his feelings. I wrote the book for other people to learn and grow from my misadventures. While I’m still sad he could never see me for my abilities and my gifts, I have long got over those hopes.

I never looked back and thought, if only we had more time. He got plenty of my time and attention. My only regret is to myself- that I was so focused on him for a time that it steered me from my purpose and the life I really wanted to live and create for my family. I think if I had stayed more true to myself, I may have felt confident in my decision to walk away from the relationship much sooner. I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. Either way, as long as I was in the relationship to him, I was really trying to get past all his insecurities and compensate with grace toward him where I felt he gave himself less than he deserved. I really put my all into it and left nothing on the table that needed to be said or done.

Myriad people have told me throughout my life that I would feel a lot of different things when my parents died: regret, remorse, sorrows. All of these projections of how I should feel are what I would objectively say are bad feelings. That is, of course, because I wasn’t doing what a “good child” does by sucking up to people who didn’t like me. I am happy to say that I feel none of those. Either I am a sociopath, but I find that hard to imagine since I feel a lot of love for my dad despite all his imperfection and despite realizing I needed to love him from a safe distance. Or maybe, the fact is, I lost him so long ago that his death is but a formality. At any rate, I am at peace. I don’t feel any different knowing he is dead today as I did thinking he was alive somewhere yesterday: none. It doesn’t change anything for me personally. I mean, it gives me peace of mind that all those people I always thought were wrong about me and my relationships were, in fact, wrong. I no longer have to second guess my choices and wonder if I am “going to be sorry when he dies.” I am not. However, it creates a hurdle for my relationship with the remaining sibling whom I still contact.

From here, I must try to be present and leave nothing on the table with regard to her and how honorably I treat her because she has just experienced a great loss. She probably won’t understand any of this, maybe ever. It’s incredible how a person can show up so differently for one than another. Her relationship to her father was polar opposite of what I had with mine. But as long as I understand it, I can use that understanding hopefully to love her and be sympathetic even to her lack of understanding if that is what is required to make our relationship work. And in the vein of evolution, I will remember to do one thing different than I did in the past and that is to keep whatever effort I make on anyone’s part within the framework of my life’s focus to create harmonious, loving relationships, teach others, model good behavior for my kids, be a loving, devoted wife and live in peace. Whatever bumps along the way, this time, I will not get distracted from creating the full and loving life I want to be living, to learn and grow and to create a legacy where this stuff comes naturally and automatically to my children and my children’s children.