I was caught in my father’s hold in the same way a fly gets caught in the sticky threads of a spider’s web, struggling to escape the suffocation. He was one of the most brilliant people I have known, and also one of the most tortured. He was a professor in art history with a Harvard PhD; his intellect was his armour, his safe place.
He was also a private, almost mysterious, person. I rarely ever heard him talk about his own childhood except for how much he both admired and feared his own father, a medical scientist, also brilliant, also critical. According to my mother, my dad couldn’t remember a time seeing his own parents happy together, and after brutal sessions of criticizing my mother, inevitably leaving her in tears and confusion over what she’d done, my dad would tell her that this was how marriages were. It was how his parents had been with each other, and this was the way of all adult relationships.
My mother left him when I was four. Over the next 10 years he married three more women and dated others in between. There was always an abundance of thrashing fights throughout our house as I grew older, and loud tears from various stepmothers. I remember having to seek safety and protection—often behind furniture—with my older brother and sister to avoid the shouting and hurling objects. For some reason, behind that couch, I always wondered why he didn’t want or notice me.
I once said to him, “Why don’t you just marry me, Papa?”
An ache in my chest that I didn’t understand only grew with his years of silence. I have never, to this day, wanted someone’s love so much. It was only natural I would become a terrible teenager, dropping out of school at 16, running away from home, and losing myself to a downpour of substance use, sexual misconduct, and shame. This is a long story, and almost impossible to condense, but let’s push through some storm clouds and report that at 35 I went back to college without asking my father for any advice or financial help. There I discovered I was smart, capable, and eager to learn. Thoughts and ideas came alive to me, ideas that were fresh, varied, curious, and new.
Over the last five years I was also able to establish a relationship with my father. As I watched his brilliant mind crumble and diminish with Parkinson’s, I was able to see his barriers open, and a purity show through, as if some sort of private demon was finally releasing him.
November 2020, four months before he died: I sat swathed in sanitized plastic across the table at the care home, and held his hands in mine while he struggled to remember who I was. I remember how his eyes crinkled with recognition as he suddenly exclaimed, “It’s you!!”
I grinned back at him, able to love him, because he was right.