I have a classic approach-avoidance relationship with my father. He ignores me for months and I am grateful; then I feel guilty for feeling grateful. He ignores me for months and I wonder why he seems to value my brother more than he values me; then I am glad not to be on the receiving end of his attention for a while. He ignores me for months and I am hurt that my dad has so little interest in me. And then I see him and I am reminded of all of the reasons I have such a tangled relationship with him.
In another century, my father would be a holy man, a mystic, perhaps even a prophet. In this time and place, he is simply a crazy man struggling to make his way in a world in which he does not fit. His mania, his obsession, is religion. He’s primarily focused on Christianity, although he is interested in all religions to one degree or another. His world is filled with symbols and portents, and he genuinely and truly believes that God speaks to him. That he has discovered a truth that other people can’t see. And he tries – he tries so hard to explain it all to me – this legacy of truth that he wants to pass on to me, but he can’t. Because it only makes sense to him. It is like he is speaking a language that only he can understand. The words are English (most of the time) but they aren’t strung together in the proper order. I’ve heard the same things time after time, but they never get any more comprehensible. The math problem that he got wrong in college that has something to do with sine and cosine and that can be tied to Hebrew and the character Shin. The fact that 4’s can be turned into Apollo sun signs and 7’s into Nazi swastikas. Fucking photos of a stained glass window from the chapel in Sibley Hospital over and over and over and over again. Seriously, if you ever hear of some bizarre act of vandalism where someone breaks into a hospital chapel and spray paints or steals the stained glass windows, well, that will probably mean I’ve finally snapped and gone on a rampage.
The irony in all of this is that my father’s life-long efforts to proselytize me have left me completely unable to believe in the God he so desperately wants me to worship. I resent my father’s craziness, his inability to relate to me in any way other than as the vessel to receive his wisdom, his general disinterest in me on many levels until I got to be an adult and it’s all tied in to the particular Christian view he espouses. So instead, I believe in karma and rebirth, in the possibility of other life in the universe, in the potential for all sorts of happenings under the sun that can’t be explained by science, but I can’t accept that God reached out to touch my father. He speaks of “carrying the light of Jesus Christ inside” himself, and I wonder if he went crossed over from bipolar to schizophrenia.
It makes me sad, and beyond sad, to reject everything he holds so dear and beliefs he has spent decades weaving together. He’s my dad, and I love him. But I can’t believe what he wants me to believe. I don’t even understand what he wants me to believe.
Just love him as best you can. That's all anyone can do. And cut yourself some slack, ok? :)
As a parent, now, I'm trying to remember something - the further a parent pushes something, the farther away from it a kid will want to be in some cases. I think that something I'm always going to have to keep in the back of my mind.