Remembering another time when Christmas was a competition

My title is clearly an allusion to this post here. But last week I was reminded of another time that the same thing happened, kind of, in a different way.

What happened last week is that my coffee maker broke. After several years of reliable service, I had it making espresso one morning when there was a loud BANG! and steam started shooting out of the seal where the lid fits on. It was about done so I turned it off; but the next time I tried to use it, there was no seal left. It no longer forced the boiling water through the ground coffee, which means that it is now useless. Time to get a new one, I suppose. And as I was musing about this, I thought back to when and how I got it.

It was a Christmas present from Wife, back ... oh, I'm not sure when. It couldn't have been any later than 2012 (the year of the post I linked above) but it was probably a couple of years earlier. I doubt it could have been any earlier than, say, 2008. Maybe we can compromise and call in 2010, until I remember some other detail that pins it down more exactly.

Anyway, somehow I had gotten the idea that I wanted a coffee set in my office at work: a coffee maker, and a set of little espresso cups. Of course it would be handy when I actually wanted a cup of coffee, instead of having to walk all the way down the hall. (Which wasn't far, of course.) But I also thought it would look really cool, and maybe I could offer coffee to other people if we were having a meeting in my office or something. (I think that happened once.) So contrary to my usual diffidence around Christmas gifts, I asked Wife for exactly what I wanted. She responded by buying me this perfectly serviceable coffee maker and four really cute little espresso cups with matching saucers, wrapping it all up festively, and putting it under our tree with a big bow for Christmas morning. I was delighted.

Only, ... as we were unwrapping presents that morning she said something that I didn't really understand. She said she had talked with Father on the phone in the days before Christmas -- planning and coordinating, as usual -- and had mentioned this. And she went on to say she was afraid he was going to try to get me a bigger and fancier one, to compete with it.

I wasn't sure I understood her too well, or that she was telling me what really happened. I knew that frequently Wife would talk about something she was doing in a self-deprecating way that could make my dad misunderstand her: maybe he thought she wasn't really going to do it, or maybe he thought she hoped he would take the burden off her, or something like that. (Only part of their chronic miscommunications resulted from Wife saying things obliquely, or in a manner that you had to get used to before you understood it. The other part is that my dad really didn't listen very well, most of the time.) Or perhaps he had said something that she'd misunderstood -- maybe he hadn't bought me any such thing at all. It seemed altogether possible to me that the miscommunication could have gone in either direction.

Anyway, after we were dressed and breakfasted, and after we had opened our stockings and all our presents to each other, the four of us piled into the car and drove the two hours "over the hills and through the woods" to the home of Mother and Father, where we also met up with Brother and SIL. And of course there was more food, and more presents, and lots of hubbub to be enjoyed by all.

When it came time to open the presents at my parents' house, Son2 took on the role of "Santa": he would pull an item from under the tree, check the label, and deliver it to the intended recipient. And, as always, we started out doing these pretty much one at a time, with all attention focused on each recipient in turn: "Oh, what is it?" But after a while -- as always -- everyone's attention began to wander. Side conversations sprang up, people wandered out to the kitchen for more coffee, and there was less intense focus on each new person in turn opening exactly this present here.

Somewhere during this latter phase of the process, Son2 informed me that there was a large box over against the wall with my name on it. There was enough side conversation at the time that I think the discussion was pretty much just between us. I asked him to drag it over to me, but quietly, and then not to wait but go right ahead and deliver the next person their next present. So while the next person was noisily opening his next present and everyone was exclaiming over "Gosh, what did you get?" I quietly sliced open the wrapping paper at the very top and peeled it back.

Sure enough, it was some kind of high-tech super-duper coffee maker from my dad, with lots of switches and controls and settings. I don't know what all it made, honestly, because I didn't look at it that closely. I just quietly replaced the wrapping paper and slid it back to its former place by the wall.

After a while the whole potlatch glut wound down and people started to meander away, either to a more comfortable sofa, or back into the kitchen for some coffee or cookies or aquavit. But my dad looked around vaguely disconcerted and said, "I think there's a present missing somewhere that someone forgot to open."

I shrugged and said, "It doesn't look like it."

He nodded coyly over against the wall and said, "Over there? Did you miss that one?" (And he seemed a little disappointed that the audience was wandering away.)

I shook my head and said, as deadpan as possible, "I didn't miss that one. I have no use for something like that. Where would I put it? You know our kitchen has no counter space."

"Well maybe you could use it at the office, to entertain all the European VIP's that come through there so often."

I just repeated, "I have no use for it." And then got up and walked away, in case it wasn't clear that the conversation was over.

As an aside, maybe I should explain my dad's remark about "entertaining all those European VIP's." Of course my office was only a small part of a very large company. And the same company has offices in Europe as well as many other places around the world (including plenty more in the United States). From this slim collection of undeniable facts, Father spun a fantasy that seems to have included a lot more European visitors than we ever really got, many of them in exalted positions in the company (also a stretch) ... and this fantasy apparently also included seeing me in a position to entertain them (which has certainly never been part of my job description).  

This was one of the things he did that made conversations so frustrating: he would piece together fragments of what you said, especially if you said them carelessly or inexactly, and then extrapolate them into implications that were far removed from any reality. Then if you told him "That's preposterous" he would always reply, "Well that's just what you told me, back when you said ...." Whatever followed would be a fair imitation of what you actually said -- uncomfortably close, so that you couldn't pretend he'd made it up, with perhaps one or two words subtly adjusted to suggest his more grandiose interpretation. 

And then what? Most of the time -- until very, very late in the game (only his last few years, really) -- I let myself be sucked into the argument, insisting "No what I really said was this other thing," and generally going into far more detail than the original topic could ever possibly be worth. My dad loved this kind of correction, for at least two reasons: first, it gave him lots of my undivided attention, which he craved with a kind of unquenchable thirst; and second, it gave him far more information than I ever wanted to give him about subtle details in my life ... which he could then cook into more overheated fantasies. 

In his last few years I finally learned just to shake my head, feign bewilderment, and tell him, "Well that's not the way it is, so it can't be what I really said." When he'd ask, "So how is it really, then? What did you really say?" I learned to shrug and say, "It doesn't matter. Never mind." This made him disappointed and frustrated and (intermittently) fairly bitter, but it allowed me to protect my boundaries better. I wish I'd thought of it years earlier. So soon old, so late smart.  

Wow, that was a longer digression than I had planned on! Gosh, where was I?

I never called him out on having bought this big, shiny, whizzbang coffee maker, nor even asked him why he did it, but it bothered me. Of course there was always the possibility that he had simply misunderstood Wife (as I imagined, above). But it really seemed like he was trying to compete with her. And I kept thinking, "Dude, are you really trying to compete with my wife? You know I fuck her, right? So you know that's a competition you can't ever win. Do you have any idea how pathetic it makes you look? Unless you think you're going to fuck me too, which is not only pathetic but really creepy and not gonna happen. So ... what the hell?"

And of course if I had ever put it that way he would have denied everything.

But I think he did want to compete with Wife, at some level. I think he felt like Wife had come along and snatched me away from him, and that the two of them were in a regular struggle over me. It would fit better with our ideas of how this works if I had been a girl and Wife had been my husband, because God knows we've certainly got a cultural archetype to fit the creepy father that feels a rivalry with her husband for the affections of his daughter. But in that cultural archetype the rivalry is more obviously sexual. I have sometimes described the uncomfortable parts of my relationship with my dad using sexual imagery, but so far as I know it has only ever been a metaphor. I don't think -- really, I don't! -- that he actually physically craved my body. It's just that emotionally he desperately needed so much validation and had such poor boundary control (at least where I was concerned) that it felt very creepy just the same. 

Anyway, it looks like it's time for me to buy a new coffee maker.