Can you go home again? is such a cliche I am reluctant to admit that I am pondering it. But, it is a difficult notion to avoid when I am in Dallas, where I was born and raised. Ontogeny indeed follows phylogeny and I find myself conflicted. I recognize that I am simultaneously disconnected from and inextricably interwound with the place I grew up.
Today I visited my father’s grave in the DFW National Cemetery on a hillside overlooking a pastoral man-made lake in southeast Dallas County. It’s one or two miles west of the Dallas neighborhood of my childhood, Oak Cliff. I used to ride my bike nearby, and the nearest dive-in movie theater was adjacent to it.
When my father was alive our relationship was difficult. I was a difficult child: defiant, angry and rebellious. He was a troubled parent: unprepared, haunted by his own childhood abuse, and addicted to alcohol. My mother was a better parent, mostly because that wasn’t a very high bar, but his alcoholism combined with her largely untreated bi-polar disorder rendered them unable to navigate the challenges of their lives and give their only child, me, enough of what I needed consistently.
I coped as best I could. I turned out to be an angry, insecure and judgmental young man; I was what would be called an incel today. Perhaps because I was closer to my mother, we conspired together to turn my father into a demon worthy of illustration on a Tibetan Thangka. If he did not feel rejected and disapproved of by his only son he wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t close enough to him to know.
Sadly for me, my own masculine identity was spiritually indistinguishable from my opinion of him and that’s what rendered me largely disabled emotionally in my masculine roles as a boyfriend and/or lover for much of my adult life. In my late 50’s, I have only recently turned the corner on that, ending a thirty-year period of celibacy earlier this year. I do not call it “involuntary” because I do realize I chose it even though I believed for nearly 28 of those 30 years that it chose me.
In April of 2017 I spent an hour in the company of Byron Katie (I wrote about that here) and found closure with my father, just two weeks short of the tenth anniversary of his death. Katie helped me to question my thoughts and pry the bars of my mental prison open wide enough to see that the door wasn’t locked. I could leave.
Now my father is one of my most highly valued and trusted internal confidants. If that sounds impossible to you I want to completely affirm that. It is impossible. All I know is that it happened.
I have been through a couple of life-changing experiences. In 2010 I lost more than one-hundred pounds of excess weight (I write about that here). In 2017 I introduced myself to the remarkable man that my father was and got to know him for the first time in my life. More importantly, I allowed him to get to know me.
Before you go back and re-read all this because you’re sure you missed something, yes, he was dead, cold in the ground, for almost ten years when all this happened.
To tread into yet another cliche, I really don’t have the words to adequately express how much my life has changed since I lived in Dallas. There, I wrote it. I don’t have any other words for this.
So, when I visit Dallas I am caught between a deep familiarity and a jarring alienation. My parent both died and left what wealth they had to people not related to their only child. I got nothing but responsibility for seeing to their final arrangements. My father left all his money to his third wife. My mother left everything to her third husband.
I have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, if this happened to a friend of mine, I would be angry, perhaps even outraged. On the other hand, the man I am now sees the logic which brought them to their decisions. If I was my own child I’m not sure I would leave myself any money either. Both of their spouses provided vital support to them at the end of their lives. Both of them made it possible for each of my respective parents to age in place and die at home (or almost at home in one case).
I wasn’t a bad adult child. I visited each of them regularly and participated in their health-care decisions at the appropriate time in the degree to which I was asked. I think it took a lot for my father to be willing to talk to me at all after the way I behaved as a child. We had an uneasy, if comfortably distant, relationship in the last ten years of his life.
But, right up until his death, I still harbored my demonization of him internally, I just kept it under wraps. I can’t believe that he didn’t pick up on it. I regret this. I was wrong.
This all comes echoing back to me now because I am in Dallas for the first time for a visit doesn’t really doesn’t have much to do with either of my parents. I am here for the wedding of a family member of my mother’s widower. I have no responsibilities as their child for the first time in my life in Dallas. I am seeing it with new eyes.
Things aren’t quite in focus yet.
