The Child Within

I've always had a complicated relationship with my father. When I was quite young, he used to play chess with me in the evenings sometimes, and I would cry when he would somehow always beat me ruthlessly, even when I thought I'd won myself some small advantage. Then, there was a certain point where it felt that he just gave up on me, and no longer had any time for me - he was too busy for me, that's all I knew. The worst thing was, I had three siblings, and he still seemed to have plenty of time for them... so maybe there was something wrong with me? As I grew older, I registered on some level his lack of interest in me, but I didn't really consciously recognize it for what it was, much less understand how I felt about it or the impact those feelings would have on my life.

Recently when I was watching a scene in the fresh prince of bel-air where Will's deadbeat-dad bails on a trip they had planned, I found myself breaking down in tears, and just crying and crying, when Will asks his uncle, "Why don't he want me man?". That is how I felt - unwanted, and I didn't understand why he didn't want me, why he didn't want to spend time with me or invest himself in my life and my interests. We had a lot of conflict during the time I was growing up, my dad and I, and my behaviour became progressively more rebellious the older I got. For a time, I felt that I didn't really have a father after all, which on some level was ridiculous - after all, he was obviously physically there for me, right? Yet I felt he had been so emotionally absent, and for so long now, that his presence in my life was no more than a sham, lip service paid to avoid the potentially painful contact with the reality of other people. While I had this mindset, my relationship with my dad was sick, and I was contributing to making it sicker.

Yet I found it hard to fight against thinking of my dad this way, as I felt myself constantly filling and refilling with resentment over the fact that I had been abandoned in this existential predicament without any semblance of guidance to help me figure out where I ought to be going with my life. I had to work everything out for myself, and I had to define myself completely in the absence of the kind of positive productive feedback that young men need, and so it took me a long time to even develop the desire to sort my life out. I couldn't understand the meaning of my life, and I felt that my father had no interest in helping me to understand the solution he'd come to for that problem; the solution, it seemed, amounted to simply not thinking about it! So, naturally, when I pushed him to help me address the problem it only widened the rift between us, because he had settled for an answer which was simply unsatisfactory to me, and to confront that would be to confront how unsatisfactory he should find it too. But, of course, he had already learnt to live with it.

I inherited from my father a number of things, including a nice smile, blue eyes and a complete lack of any feeling for punctuality. I mean it, this man will ring you up on the phone and tell you that he's two minutes away, only to arrive after another thirty minutes or more have passed! Suffice to say, therefore, that my sense of time is a little warped; those who love me have learnt to make allowances around my estimations regarding time, so that they are not continually disappointed by my inability to turn up on time for anything. I also inherited from my father a volcanic temper, although ever since I was about ten years old I've been able to avoid violent outbursts by channelling all the emotional energy into my voice. Consequently, I can be very loud - another trait I happen to share with my dear father.

Sometimes, however, when I am feeling too angry even to adequately vent this feeling by yelling and screaming, throwing a tantrum like a child, as it were, I will do something even more childish: I will find something to destroy. Usually I will search for something that I can destroy without hurting myself and without damaging anything valuable, but every now and then that malicious impulse appears to destroy something precious precisely because it is precious. Thus it was that I found myself one day standing over a bridge my dad had helped me build (in truth, he did the majority of the work) for an assignment for high school physics. It was a magnificent little bridge, and I was really proud of it and really happy that my dad had made it with me, but one day - I can't even remember what he'd done to upset me - I was so angry with him, that I decided to smash that bridge to pieces.

So I did, and let me tell you, I didn't feel better afterwards. I felt horrible and empty, partly because I had crushed a part of me at the same time, I had crushed one of the only tangible manifestations of the truth I had so much trouble seeing when I was growing up: that my dad was there for me, and that my dad did in fact care about me. I took a powerful symbolic testament to that love he had for me and I smashed it in a temper tantrum, which is exactly the sort of thing a child would have done. In a big way, I had grown up not really understanding how to manage my emotions, especially the negative ones, because my main male role model was a man who typically deals with his emotions by ignoring them or projecting them onto the environment and getting really angry at everything and everyone else. Because my dad didn't model a healthy way to manage his own emotions, I never learnt one, and it was never a topic that my dad was capable of discussing like an adult - he just didn't have the mind for articulating social dynamics, it seemed to make his head hurt.

Well it sort of made my head hurt actually, the contradiction in terms my dad always was to me, never having the time for the things that really mattered to me, but always making time to help me in any tangible way that he could, if I were to do so much as to ask for his assistance. This created a great deal of confusion and conflict within me, because he simply didn't appear to want to make an attempt to relate to me emotionally, yet he actively sacrificed his time and money the moment I asked him if he could do something practical to help me in my life, be that giving me a small loan, driving the eight hour round trip to pick me up because I'd broken up with my ex-girlfriend (again), driving the same eight hour trip to help me hook up my internet better and to drop parcels off, sacrificing entire days to help me move whenever I need to do so, even spontaneously paying for my license renewal and other expenses when he can.

My dad, for all the understanding of me that he lacks, is so patient and understanding in dealing with me that I cannot ever show him how grateful I am. He is so unfailingly silently helpful, always uncomplainingly aiding me by compensating for all the ways in which I haven't learnt how to be an adult yet. My dad displays more nobly than anyone I've ever known the knowledge of his duty and responsibility as a father and as a wife, and he does everything in his power to live up to that sacred duty. Although he utterly fails in understand me and in crafting a mode of relationship with me that really works, he nonetheless never stops trying, in his own unique way, and in that I cannot ever fault him. One of the ways he unfailingly tries to connect with me, and with all his children, is through the more childish part of himself, the practical joker and the clever little kid who loves his gadgets and his toys. He is excellent at getting on the level of a child, and my mum says that this is because he still is one. She is usually not that impressed when she says this, but I've always thought it to be something that he should be proud of. It's admirable that he's managed to maintain that part of himself even to his old age.

This reminds me of a family friend who I know because he used to be friends with my dad, named Ryce. I think, more than anything else, this is what my dad and Ryce had in common: they were still both children at heart. Both of these men, although neither of them are the kind of man I myself would wish to be, are nonetheless men on their own terms and in their own ways, and this for me motivates the truth of the age-old adage "The child is father to the man." Watching my father interact with my niece reminds me of what a great father he must have been before I learnt to talk back, and he had to start trying to develop his psycholosocial skills. This is an area he's always struggled, and with my incessant and burning curiosity I think I pushed him to think about questions he didn't know how to answer. Or, maybe he just found my constant questioning annoying, and simply didn't have the time to answer all my questions or explain to me why he didn't have the time for me.

Whatever the explanation, what I've learnt at this point about my dad is that he does love me, and he is there for me, it's just that he does each of these things in his own unique way. This is an ongoing lesson in my life, and one I have had to learn time and time again - love means something different to other people than it means to me, and when other people love me, I may not necessarily understand or recognize that love until much time has passed and much distance created between myself and the events in question. My father is skilled with babies and toddlers, and he seems like he would have been a very encouraging father to a child with a less disagreeable personality. I am sure that he did his best with me, and I'm very grateful that he made the efforts that he has made all these many years.

And this, of course, is just one page in the book of my dad's life, and it is a myopic page at that, entirely framed around my own egocentric concerns and problems. But my father, apart from my own specific relationship with him, is a great man. He's represented Australia in the world triathlon championship three times, and has finished 11th. He's won the Australian championship before, in his youth. He carried the Olympic torch. He's a dedicated athlete, and a disciplined man - he's participated in 37 consecutive Noosa Triathlons. He worked twenty years for the national telecommunications company until they went private and he had to work as an accountant, among other things, for a number of years as he reskilled, and now he works as a high school teacher and part time university lecturer. In fact, I'd better finish this piece up because I promised him I'd do some copy-typing of the textbook he's using for his course so he can upload it to OneNote. Suffice to say, my dad is many things, but lazy is not one of them. This is perhaps one of his most impressive virtues and it's yet another one which I have yet to learn from him - but my time with him isn't up, and I'm not giving up. In that way, I guess I am just like him after all.