Guilty Daddy-Issues

That last post was not at all planned. I was free-writing on fiction and ended up poking about in places near where the events of that post are stored. Then, this whole post spilled out. Since it was the first thing with any shape that I had written, I posted it. I didn't even consider the proximity to Father's Day. A few hours later, I felt a little idiotic, and then a bit guilty. Then, people started to respond to it, and it started to seem oddly important.

Next thing I know, three blogs with large readerships have linked to it. First, Historiann, then Shakesville, then Salon's Broadsheet. Holy Cow! I've had more hits in the past week than the whole year and a half prior. Thank you.

The first two links weren't so frightening, because they are sympathetic audiences. The last, well, there are a lot of concern trolls and men who see it their mission to remind women just how wrong and hypocritical feminism is, in the process acting as object lessons in the continued need for feminism; and they like to hang out in the comments at Broadsheet. Fortunately, I seem to be too tiny for them to bother, they would rather attack the writers at Salon with their clueless bats. Thank you to all of the supportive commenters who found something of value in the post.

Anyway, between the posting and the linking, I kept wanting to write. That post had a focus on misogyny in regard to female sexuality as it appeared and is perpetuated in my specific family. I wanted to write about the ways that the misogyny crippled me, made me unable to protect myself when I went out in the world. I wanted to write about the ways that being unable to protect myself made me vulnerable to some horribly exploitative men. I wanted to write about the ways that, as in writing the post, I keep trying to get that scene, that relationship, to end right only to end up more angry and disappointed and hurt. I wanted to write about how I'm just learning that there is no right. I wanted to also write about the homophobia inherent in that sort of misogyny. I wanted to write about a lot of things, and they all wanted to come out at the same time.

And, of course, I had to grade.

Something else wanted to get out, too, and it has made itself clear even as I write this particular post, so this is what this post will be about, now.

As the last post was linked, especially when it was linked by Salon, my guilt grew with every SiteMeter hit. I didn't regret what I wrote, because it was honest. It was what happened; and clearly it resounded because in it, there was truth. Truth about the incident, truth about me, truth about my father, and the larger truth about the intimate ways in which hatred of women is perpetuated. I wrote from that place where personal and political met over my body.

Still, I felt guilt. Justified or not, never underestimate the power of guilt. I also felt a responsibility to tell the whole story, if a whole story is at all possible, or at least give a better picture of the truth, something more accurately honest.

In that post, the clear villain is my dad. He seems like a monster; and if that were a full account of his personality, then he would be a monster. I could write other posts, like the one on homophobia, or the ways that he would go berserk and beat me or threaten to beat me, or even the ways that his desire to protect me actually made me vulnerable to exploitation because he would never teach me how to protect myself. All of these would give a grotesque picture of my father. They would not be wrong. They would not be lies, just as the last post was not a lie. They are true; but they aren't the whole messy truth.

If you met my father, you would never guess these ugly things about him. You'd think he was a bit old fashioned, but you also might be struck by the ways that he is not old fashioned or the ways in which he has worked to be part of the modern world. You might also be struck by how friendly he is. Not friendly in that schmoozing politician way, but genuinely friendly and kind. He will be interested in you, ask you about yourself, demonstrate curiosity and generosity. You'd like him.

You wouldn't be seeing a facade. He actually is very generous, to the point that you worry someone will take advantage of him. I feel there have been points in my life in which I have taken advantage of him, or failed to show deserved levels of gratitude toward the ways that he did provide me with real protection or a safety net. He held off my mother's rages against me when I decided to work for a year after high school, rather than go to college. Although I didn't ask for it, he got me the interview for the job that gave me that choice in the first place. He let me live at home through college and beyond, when I was unemployed or marginally employed and aimless. He helped me make the jump from That Place to the Middle of Nowhere (which was a good move), when I didn't even have the money to make a move to a better life. He lets me pay him back when I can, and told me that I didn't need to pay him back at all. He has given me tons of advice on cars, on homes, on professional behavior, on the millions of little things on which dads give advice.

When I think of the good things about my dad, I see several different scenes. I see him listening to music. He loves all sorts of folk-types of music. Not hippie-folk, but polka, klezmer, bagpipe -- you name it, especially if it has horns. He loves horns. I see him repair horns, hammering out dents, cleaning out valves, refinishing the polish, buffing them, testing their sound. He can take a piece of junk and turn it into something beautiful to see and hear. I see him listen to music. He disappears into the sound the way I did at rock concerts in high school. I will always remember him playing "Amazing Grace" by Black Watch and weeping. He can be terribly sentimental that way.

I remember him at both of my grandfathers' funerals, crying louder than anyone there. I remember him wailing when his father's casket closed. I remember him saying about my mother's father that my mother's father had shown him that a man can love another man as a friend. I remember that he was more upset at that funeral than my mother was. I see him more concerned for the welfare of my mother's mother than my mother is.

I see him building my dollhouse for me, back when I was a kid and wanted one so badly. I see him take joy in creating this thing for me and making me happy. I remember him also making model airplanes when I was a child, painting one pink for me to hang from my ceiling (the pink was my request -- I was a girly-girl, which was more complicated than you might think). I see him populating my brothers' ceilings with whole squadrons of planes.

I could go on and on with little, almost insignificant snapshots of the ways that he wanted us, loved us, and wanted to protect us from everything bad in the world; and I am shocked that these stories don't come out of me with the passion, the intensity, and the cohesion that the bad ones do. They are just as true as the bad ones, and they make me feel like I've betrayed him by remembering the bad ones at all.

I try to explain the bad stories, the ones that left behind the worst pain. I want to understand and forgive him for them. He is not an inherently, actively evil person; but he grew up the favorite child in an extended family, in the south, in the 1950s. How could he not have those appalling ideas about women? He was a product of his time. He is a person simultaneously good and bad. He is complicated and those bad stories are a facet of the full person. Were he anyone but my father, this would be easy to understand and internalize. The hollow sound of rationalization would not ring so loudly.

Yet, he is my father. We are part of this perverse intimacy between parents and children that can make sympathy nearly impossible. He did perpetuate misogyny, and he had a daughter who felt it. There is that undeniable fact that the events in those bad stories fundamentally distorted me, which caused me to make unwise choices out in the world, which compounded the same misery that those bad stories produced in the first place. There is the undeniable fact that my brothers, and now my nephews, learned the same misogyny. I cannot disavow the bad stories, and I cannot disavow the good ones.

Our family was always one of extremes. The combustible alchemy of my parents' marriage produced moments of intense love and equally intense hate, of abuse and salvation, of explosive emotion and deafening silence, all with nothing in the middle. Love was never simple, never pure, never without limits, often without respect, and never without intense pain.

Thus, with my dad, there is this monstrous father and this loving one. To tell only one side or the other is to betray one of us or the other. I have no idea how to reconcile any two parts of any of this -- the monstrous father and the loving father, the ungrateful daughter and the wounded daughter, the person of the father and the person of the daughter, him and me. I have no idea how to reconcile these parts and remain honest. I have no idea how to be whole.