The crazy things my father does
Is it okay to say, my father drives me crazy?
My Australian colleague and I often talk about our fathers. Maybe it’s an Antipodean thing but we both laugh at their similarities and the crazy things they did when we were growing up. We also talk about their hardness and lack of any emotional insight which marked their parenting, or more to the point, marked their lack of parenting skills. My father seemed not to show any insight into how to parent other than he was a good provider and worked hard to give us what we needed. For that I am grateful.
If my mother was still alive I would ask her, what were you thinking, he wasn’t great father material?
Like many of my generation with parents who were war babies, missing the baby boomers and falling into Gen X, I was blessed, or not, with an emotionally crippled, often angry and never accepting father. At least I didn’t end up with his tyrannical, alcoholic father so I’m thankful for small mercies.
My father told my sister not so long ago, what he said about me, “well she’s always been difficult”. Funny that’s what I think about him. The reality is I’m so far removed from anyone he understands. He is a white, redneck male with a daughter who is a feminist and left wing, his only child to go to university. We have world views that a polar opposites. I often wonder how I…
