oh, father

Yesterday I received some unsettling news about my dad, which led to a lot of confusion and difficult emotion on my part, and inspired yesterday's post. My sister visited me, and said that she thought I should know that my dad is having exploratory surgery and might have cancer. She knows that even though my parents continue to send evites to holiday gatherings and postcards from vacation locations and random anniversary cards to me, they would not give me this information. (I checked my spam filter - she is correct, they have not attempted to contact me about it.)

This sent me into a loop. My dad is not a bad guy. He's a broken guy. He's a guy with a mean person for a wife. (Although for that matter, my mom is not a "bad" person, just a very broken one more deserving of pity than hatred.) What he has experienced, without going into his personal medical details, is scary. At a bare minimum, his body is betraying him and he has experienced discomfort and embarrassment and possibly other blows to his self-esteem. He is facing surgery, which is never a pleasant prospect. Even with the most benign outcomes, his physical health will never be the same again. On the more extreme end, he may be facing his own mortality. He might have to have more surgeries, radiation treatments, chemotherapy, and possibly other treatments. Even with all this, even if it's a very treatable cancer, there will be no going back to 100% normal pre-problem health.

This sucks for him. I want to hug him. I want to tell him that I hope everything turns out ok. I don't want him to hurt or be scared.

Do I contact him? I want to, but I don't want to. I want to say kind things to him. I'm not sure how he would receive it. Would it be perceived as me trying to draw attention toward myself? Would it be an "oh, sure, when you're sick she comes out of the woodwork, she just doesn't want to feel guilty if something happens"? (Is there any truth to that?) Would he respond positively, angrily, neutrally, not at all? Would it be helpful to him to say kind things or would it just remind him of the interpersonal crap and bring him down even more in a time when he doesn't need more stress?

My husband wisely asked, "how does this change anything? They have still not owned responsibility for how they treat you or shown any desire to change. If it's not ok for them to treat you badly when they're healthy, it's not ok for them to treat you badly when they're sick."

He has a point. But can you be kind to somebody despite all of that crap? If you know to be prepared for a variety of possible reactions and ready to defend boundaries? IS it kind to pop back in (by email, or sending flowers?) when he's sick?

This is also making me confront a stupid fantasy that I had been harboring. My mom had some health problems a decade ago, and I had hoped that with time, the problems would come back and (quickly, painlessly) kill her. With her gone, I could approach my dad, and if he weren't too angry with me to ever speak to me again, we could go to therapy together and possibly rebuild a relationship. I feel like the only way to have a relationship with him ever again is if a) she has a miraculous epiphany and becomes a nice person or b) she's totally out of the picture.

But the thing is, women usually outlive men. The women in my family usually outlive their men. My father's mother outlived her husband. Most of the women on my mother's side of the family hang on freaking forever as tight-fisted matriarchs. There is not going to be any mending of fences with a widowered father.

I have no way of drawing this post to a conclusion because my thoughts about it are just too sad and scattered. I feel like the world's worst daughter, yet at the same time totally stand behind my decisions.

DOES this change anything? I don't know.

cold

Sometimes, while watching a movie or reading a book, the situations strike too close to home, and I can feel my body tensing, my throat stiffening, a sense of cold dread coming over me. The child inside me cowers, helpless, as I recognize and sympathize with the voice of a writer who experienced the same childhood invalidation and oppression that I experienced. The mother-daughter scenes in Disney's Tangled (between Mother Gothel and Rapunzel) did this to me - I think I spent half the movie holding my breath and while I think it was an excellent movie, I can't say that I really enjoyed it. Many scenes in Jonathan Franzen's book The Corrections held the same sense of recognition and dread for me. Again, marvelous work of fiction, but I don't think I'll be reading any more Franzen.

I'm currently reading The Golden Compass (known as Northern Lights in the UK), the first book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I expected anti-Catholic / anti-religious sentiment; I did not expect a scene from my childhood, and it took me by surprise:

"Lyra, if you behave in this course and vulgar way, we shall have a confrontation, which I will win. Take off that bag this instant. Control that unpleasant frown. Never slam a door again in my hearing or out of it. Now, the first guests will be arriving in a few minutes, and they are going to find you perfectly behaved, sweet, charming, innocent, attentive, delightful in every way. I particularly wish for that, Lyra, do you understand me?"

"Yes, Mrs. Coulter."

"Then kiss me."

She bent a little and offered her cheek. Lyra had to stand on tiptoe to kiss it...she drew away and laid the shoulder bag on her dressing table before following Mrs. Coulter back to the drawing room.

"What do you think about the flowers, dear?" said Mrs. Coulter as sweetly as if nothing had happened. "I suppose one can't go wrong with roses, but you can have too much of a good thing..Have the caterers brought enough ice? Be a dear and go and ask. Warm drinks are horrid..."

Lyra found it was quite easy to pretend to be lighthearted and charming, though she was conscious every second of Pantalaimon's disgust, and of his hatred for the golden monkey...she felt like a universal pet, and the second she voiced that thought to herself, Pantalaimon stretched his goldfinch wings and chirruped loudly.

Pantalaimon is Lyra's daemon, which is a kind of familiar. I'm not yet entirely sure what the daemons are, but so far they seem to be a reflection of the person's subconscious - like their inner, more wise, more honest voice. The monkey is Mrs. Coulter's daemon. I can remember having that sense of going along with my mother's tyranny with relative ease - or at least what must have looked like ease to those on the outside - while still having a part of myself that recognized how wrong the situation was. My mother, likewise, had a smooth, aren't-the-roses-nice exterior that she showed to others, while I knew that the authentic, imperious golden monkey version of her was there. I cannot think how many times she said - explicitly or implicitly - "we shall have a confrontation, which I will win." There was no room for my personhood. I hated her even while loving her, and the combination of the two made an icy lump inside of me.

What's funny is that she accused me of being cold-hearted or hard-hearted on many occasions. Those occasions were always times in which I was showing myself to be engaged, perspicacious, and above all, my own person.

I've been thawing for years now, and yet she thinks that I'm the coldest I have ever been.

While reading this book, I'm whispering, Run, Lyra! Trust your instincts!