I’m terrified of becoming my father. No hyperbole.
The one piece of advice that my mother gave me more than any other was “Don’t become your father.” It was actually more than just advice. It was a plea.
I never was like him; never have been like him. I really didn’t need any prompting. Other than being very intelligent and having high thresholds of pain, there were very little similarities between us. I saw to it. He was a living, breathing example of how I didn't want to turn out. Unfortunately, role models didn't get a lot better with my mom, or either side of my extended family. Lack of empathy with others, wallowing in self-pity, and sunken into a family lifestyle that was destructive and dysfunctional – they were everything I didn’t want to be.
It wasn’t hard to jettison the extended family when I was still a kid because my family began moving around the country as my dad changed jobs. I also made virtually all of them angry when a letter I’d written to a cousin made the rounds while we were still in high school. Basically, I’d told her I was worried that she was going to get sucked into the family’s ways, and maybe never find a happy, stable life for herself. I was a teenage pariah the next time our family went to visit, but that suited me just fine.
My mom died about a year and a half ago, and I honestly expected my dad to crumble. She was our conduit to him, and his conduit to the outside world. I figured he’d hidden himself away for so long and so deeply that he wouldn’t be able to function. I was wrong. I knew that their relationship was terribly toxic, but had always thought that my mother was the one drinking most of the poison. Clearly, it was being shared more equally than I imagined. As he came out from under the shock of her passing and the burden of their relationship - as he went through his own detox - I met a man I’d never seen before, and really a man I still don’t quite recognize.
He can still be irascible at times, but in a year and a half, I haven’t seen any indication of the level of cruelty and self-pity that had defined him for as long as I’d known him. It’s not that he’s been trying hard to be a better person, struggling with his darkness and occasionally falling back on it. It’s like all that darkness was lifted.
He’s reasonably personable, interested in other people, able to converse on things of interest to both, and even capable of reaching out in kindness. I wouldn’t call him warm, at least not particularly. He’s not some jubilant, transformed Ebenezer Scrooge. He’s just suddenly a relatively decent - or at least innocuous - guy.
It doesn’t erase things I know he did years ago, things I’d have confronted him with had I not promised his victim I wouldn’t. He’s different. He’s a man I don’t recognize, yet do recognize. He lives in his own Uncanny Valley and I visit him there.
In that valley, I'm seeing more of him in me and me in him. Not a lot. I’m not saying I’m looking in a mirror or feeling a great kinship, but I’m sensing a shared humanity for maybe the first time, certainly the first time in decades. That “more like me” however, is a hook that sinks deep into my skin and tugs and tugs.
When I first found out two years about a horrible thing he had done decades ago, I’ll be honest, I wanted to kill him. I wanted to crush him into dust and ash and blow him into history. But I had promised his victim to not even bring it up with him.
If I couldn’t do that, I wanted to find a way to absolve him, but that was also outside my powers.
I thought maybe time would take care of things. After all, he’d been diagnosed with slow-growth lymphoma years earlier, and had succeeded in stopping its growth, albeit not vanquishing it. I figured the clock would tick down, he would make his peace with the world and I, his only son and chosen legal executor, would make peace with him, and the day would be over.
And now it’s been seven years. It could come back any day, racing through him like a fire in dry grass, or it could be kept at bay for another decade.
We talk more and we have better conversations than I can ever remember. They’re not fantastic conversations, but they’re also not like pulling a rusty, salt-crusted chain across a wound. Still, I watch for the wolf to peek around.
Worse than that, I listen for the rustling of seed pods: those pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There’s very definitely a part of me that fears, as we develop a kinship, that I’ll morph into something horribly similar to him. Or maybe I’ve already done it and it’s gradually starting to show through the veneer of my social persona?
It terrifies me and leaves me wary in interacting with my own son and daughter, both of whom are now adults. I know I wasn't him, and was never similar to him, but through their growing up, and even since, I was probably hampered by my struggle to avoid him-ness. The more I've struggled, the more I've kept a lowered profile with them. I don't have the plague, but I don't want my children to catch it from me, regardless.
To be fair to myself, I know I’m a better person than that. Everyone tells me I’m a better person than that.
The knowing and the feeling have always been two different things, though.
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