Why I Won't See My Father Today

I sometimes feel bad about not being in touch with my father.  He lives hundreds of miles from me.  His phone number changes often and he never notifies me.  Years go by with no contact, only wondering how he is and what he is up to.  I sometimes long to be in touch with him.  It hurts to not have him in my life.  Then I begin to think and the memories come flooding back and the need to stay in touch with him subsides.

I try to bring good memories into my mind but I struggle with it.  I remember how he got drunk on my birthday EVERY year.  He got drunk a lot but it hurt me that he did it on my birthday and ruined the specialness of it for me and everyone else.  My birthday is on Christmas day.  Year after year, he’d be drunk by noon.  One year he almost drowned in the tub when he passed out while going to the bathroom and fell into the tub where my mother had just given my sister her bath.  Had it not been for the fact that we were all sitting outside the bathroom, at the kitchen table, ready to have Christmas lunch, he would have drowned.  My brothers, each under ten years of age, had to go in and help my mother pull him out of the tub and get him to bed.

I remember him humiliating us in front of our friends.  He was nice and funny and interesting when he was sober but he’d drink when our friends were visiting and he’d get drunk.  I remember the one time I was allowed to go out on a date and when the boy picked me up, he said something about him being a telephone pole.  My date was over six feet tall.  My family is all short.  My dad is five feet five inches tall.  I never wanted to bring anyone home again.  And I didn’t.  That meant I couldn’t go out because the rule was that if I didn’t bring someone home to meet my parents, I couldn’t go out with them so I didn’t date.

The night that I was a contestant in the Junior Miss Pageant, he drove, drunk, to the event, making me late.  Then he said I looked like a whore all dressed up and with makeup on.  I got out of the car in tears and he drove away while I still had the door open, almost running me down.

I remember how, instead of being proud of me for winning a full academic scholarship to one of the most prestigious private universities in the country, he fought me and disowned me for going away to school (I went all of 20 miles from home).  I remember how he refused to be a part of my life at college.  He never set foot inside my dorm.  He never agreed to meet any of my college friends. 

I’m trying to remember something positive.  I loved my father when I was a little girl.  I rarely saw him because he worked many hours.  He drove a forklift at one of the canneries in town and so during the canning season, which was a long one, we rarely saw him.  He’d leave home before 8 AM and not return until after 10 PM.  He worked seven days a week from April until late November.  His work was nearby so in the summertime, he would sometimes come home for dinner long enough to barbecue for us then he’d have to rush back to work.  He was a wonderful provider.  We didn’t have a lot but he gave us everything he could.  I won’t deny that.  I knew it then and I know it now.  I admired him for that. He tried to give us what he had not had as a child.  He hadn’t had much.  He had no father.  He had no education.  He had no family.  He had very little but the drive to go on and survive.

When my father turned 37, he had an accident at the cannery and was never able to work again.  He still had six of his seven kids at home, although my brothers were in their late teens and working.  He spent years seeing doctors, trying to get his back in shape to return to work.  He spent years seeing lawyers and workers compensation people, but was not able to return to work or provide for us in the way he wanted to.  This led to more drinking and more fighting between him and my mother.  Eventually, my father abandoned us and my mother.  I was in high school when he moved out and moved hundreds of miles away.

The last time I spoke to my father, it was on Christmas Eve of 2004.  He called to wish me a happy birthday and kept me on the phone for over an hour.  I enjoyed the first part of the conversation and I began to feel that maybe now we could have a relationship and my kids could get to know him.  Then he blew it.  He began to criticize me again.  He ended the conversation by telling me about how he and my oldest and only remaining brother no longer speak because of me.  He told me the reasoning behind that and blamed me for something I didn’t even know about; something I had nothing to do with except that I was the topic of a drunken conversation between my father and brother (my brother is also an alcoholic).  He blamed me.  Then it went downhill from there, as the booze he had been drinking during the early part of our conversation took over.  He became belligerent and I ended up making an excuse to hang up.  I hung up and cried for a long time, realizing that I would never have the relationship with my father, that I had always wanted.

Last night, on Father’s Day Eve, I had a dream about my father.  I dreamt that I had gone to visit him.  I remember being happy and excited about seeing him.  He answered the door and began to berate me for gaining weight and for not dying my hair to cover the gray.  He criticized me because I looked old.  In the dream I began to cry, silently.  I woke up, my faced soaked in tears.

I still love my father.  I still hope he has a wonderful day today.  But I now know that the father I remember as being loving and funny, is gone forever. Except in the positive memories I choose to run through my mind.