A couple of minutes ago I wrote a post about visiting my parents yesterday. Originally I meant to make it a post about dealing with difficult emotions. But ironically, the difficult emotions I had in mind weren't any of the ones you might have expected. They weren't related to my father's impending mortality, nor to our having to plan what to do when they both die, nor yet to my father's current sickness, nor even to my frustration at my father's damned foolishness in (more or less) inviting his current condition by his reckless disregard for his own health.
No, the difficult emotions I had in mind are the kinds of emotions that my dad often triggers in me, feelings of shame and anxiety that are so basic to my experience of him that in all frankness I will feel relieved when he dies. Sometimes it feels as if I have lived my life in the shadow of two bullies, or at any rate figures I have allowed to bully me: Wife and my father. I'm getting rid of one of them (sorry, "separating" from her) and so I can start looking forward to the time when I'll be rid of the other as well. The only question after that is whether they are really the problem, or whether it is just that I have learned to live in such a timid, cowering way that I will simply replace them with others when they are gone. After my affair with D (another just like them) I began to worry that this pattern looked pretty solid. Being with Debbie helped relax my fears a bit, because she was nothing like the three of them, but even there I think I carried over some bad habits.
But what am I talking about in particular?
I feel anxious when I'm around him, particularly if nobody else is around. He always wants to talk to me, he clings, he comes at me wherever I am. Sometimes I can hold off the anxiety by drinking, the same way I used to do with Wife. Once drunk, I can feel confident enough to shove the conversation over onto some neutral topic, like politics or history. We can argue long and loud about dead English kings, or about movies. My dad loves these conversations (he's always drinking too, during them, generally a good bit more than I am) and will get nostalgic about them if I come visit some time and stay sober ... because when sober, I generally avoid him or am at best diffident. "Why can't we just sit down and talk, like we used to?" or "like the last time you were here?" I don't try to say "Because I don't enjoy it" ... because how can I claim that when my actions appear to contradict me? Wasn't I having a good time the last time we talked for hours? Well, maybe not but I probably appeared to be ... and my father is perfectly willing to tell me (in effect) that he knows better than I how I feel, if he thinks he has a shred of evidence to prove him "right".
I feel more anxious if the conversation swerves back to the personal. In the middle of a vague discussion about how to dispose of my parents' stuff after they both die, my father suddenly asked, "If it's not too personal a question, are you and Debbie going to move in together?" Of course he doesn't know that we're not even seeing each other, because I have told no-one except my therapist and you. But why the hell does it matter? I pooh-poohed the idea with, "You seem to think I lead a much more interesting life than I really do," and added that I'm happy to live in an apartment because it is so much less work to take care of than a house. This time, that was enough to save me – Brother chimed in, thank God!, with a joke about my leading a boring life (it's a running joke in our family) and we moved on. But there have been times when Father starts pressing me with questions that are more personal than that, and then when I don't answer or try to change the subject he has the nerve to get offended! "Well what's the god-damned secret, anyway? I'm just trying to be friendly, just trying to share your life. What the hell's wrong with you that you have to be so god-damned hostile to me all the time?" Gosh, Dad. I don't know what to say.
We didn't have one of those confrontations yesterday. As I say, Brother – bless him! – intervened with a joke and got us back on track. But later in the day Father told a story about me than always makes me squirm with shame. Now fortunately it was just the four of us there, so everyone had heard the story a hundred times before. It's not like it was anything new to anybody. But the story itself is very difficult for me.
What happened is this: back when I was in sixth grade, my father and I were in a play together. We drove to the theater in the evenings for performances, and then we drove back in the night when it was over. And we talked quite a lot during these drives. I was ten, and I still trusted him and thought the world of him. Now this play was running concurrently with another one, so the backstage was jammed with props for both. And one of the props for the other play was a cheap pornographic paperback "with all the dirty parts underlined in red." (That's in quotes because it was a line from the play; but in fact someone had done exactly that because at one point one of the characters picks it up and starts reading out loud at random ... and this way he could look for the red underlining and know where to start reading.) My part was a small one so I had a lot of time on my hands backstage and I didn't usually have homework from school. So naturally I picked the book up and started reading it. I was only ten, so I hadn't hit puberty yet. It's not like I could have masturbated successfully if I had wanted to. But I know I got hard reading it ... sometimes I was late changing into my costume because I had to wait for my dick to relax before I dared go into the dressing room to undress.
On at least one occasion – I forget if it happened more than once – I described the inane plot to my father on our drive home. Of course the plot was inane: it was a porno, for God's sake, and the only point of what passed for a plot was to give the characters an excuse for disporting their body parts in as many different ways as possible. I remember we both laughed over how stupid it was. What I don't remember is whether I said anything else. I don't remember if I admitted getting hard. I don't remember if I admitted that I got hard enough it was a problem for me to change into my costume. I don't remember any of that, and of course I fear that I might have.
So late yesterday afternoon my dad started telling this story. I keep hoping he will forget large chunks of it, but no such luck: he remembered details of the inane plot that I didn't remember before he started telling the story again. He told it as if this were a recurring conversation: "you used to tell me all about this book." And as he went on I just got quiet and drank my coffee. Actually my coffee cup was long since empty, but I stared at it and tried to drain it some more anyway. And I waited through until he was done. He seems really to enjoy this story. I can't tell whether he can tell how very uncomfortable it always makes me (in which case I would have to conclude that he tells it on purpose to make me squirm), or whether he is completely oblivious to that part and just sees it as more evidence that we "used to be really close" ... so what the hell is wrong with me that I won't confide in him any more? I have no idea what goes through his head.
Incidentally, he has never (in my hearing) told the story in such a way as to say clearly out loud that I got hard at this stupid book. Maybe I never told him that part. Or maybe he gets a thrill from seeing how close he can skate to the edge without quite going there. I don't know which it is.
So that's the difficult emotion I found myself having to deal with. I tried to sit with it on the drive home. I sat with it some more during my meditation this morning. I don't know if sitting with it did any good, or indeed what "doing any good" would look like in this case. I don't suppose I will ever stop squirming with shame at the story, although objectively spoken I suppose that it's pretty mild as shameful stories go. (I see now that I write it down – and I have left nothing out.) I did realize this morning that when I tried to asses what the emotion felt like physically it came out feeling not very different from any other kind of anxiety that I ever feel. So maybe it's just the story that makes it so intense for me. Probably it is. But I wish it didn't have such power over me. I wish I could just yawn and write it off, like so many of Father's other stories that he repeats hundreds of times.
Oh well. Some day he'll die.
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