Mission Accepted
But I realized that this hard fact was not what he had resisted. It was not what he had feared.
The truth settled upon me like fresh rain on a parched landscape: my father had methodically and stubbornly tried to prepare us for an exploitative and ruthless world that would not love us as he did.
I understood then — and wished I could have told him so.
The precise and unrelenting gaze of a marine informed my father's life, and it was this vision that shaped my childhood. Never since have I seen such a sincere mix of simultaneous desires in one man: a fierce commitment to sacrifice without limits for his family's comfort and a sharp determination not to accidentally produce a slew of wimps that would have made him wish he had died in combat.
Pop believed that the victims in life are those who are unprepared and hesitant. The victors, on the other hand, are those who continually update their intelligence information to assure the most reliable conditions possible. The radar is always on. It is a positive, healthy vigilance that is enthusiastic and thorough. To be taken unaware is the height of foolishness because it is usually completely avoidable.
I have never seen anything that has come close to proving him wrong.
I know that my father’s own character flaws weighed heavily on him. If anything, his lapses into exhausted and uncontrolled anger were occasions of penance: painful reminders of the ideal he had failed to achieve, humbling exercises that served to wed him even more closely to the difficult mission he had willingly accepted.
Harboring Hurt in My Heart
For a long time I believed my father detested me, as the shadowy haze of early childhood gave way to the confused searching of young womanhood. I learned I could navigate my steps according to time and event to avoid seeing him altogether for days on end. The home of my childhood seemed ponderous: high, echoing ceilings and vast, wood floors announced his heavy step long before his actual arrival and helped to facilitate a hasty exit.
In addition to my mother, there were more than enough people around — up to eleven siblings and two domestic helpers at a time — so that it was easy to simply evaporate. And I did.
I desperately wanted his love, but felt unworthy of it. As a defense mechanism, I pushed him away. As a result, he became more and more hesitant to approach. Over time, my own raging sensitivities — real as they were — blinded me to the love he had for me. And, as usually happens when legitimate personal awareness is seduced by narrow self-interest, I lost sight of what was being done for me, for all of us.
Silently but conclusively, I decided that because my father couldn't meet my mercurial needs in precisely the way I required, he was just no damn good. And I let him know it.
It is a regret that I will carry until my last breath of life.
My father forgave me my insolence before his death, as I forgave him. The gap was bridged, the circle complete. Or at least I thought. But something was irretrievably lost when I chose to wait until my thirties to absolve the man who did everything he knew to do for me, but for whom I had nothing but criticism.
Mission Accomplished
Late forgiveness is better than no forgiveness, I realize. But in the broken hours between dusk and dawn I have wept and pleaded for one more minute, one more chance to prove to my father that I am a grateful daughter. That chance will not be given to me in this life. But I believe he has heard me, when peace washes over me like a gentle river under a bright moon. I believe.
I have grown to understand that adulthood brings with it an enlarged responsibility, a new imperative. It is that those who have been the recipients of faulty but sincere devotion re-evaluate that gift in light of new information. It requires that a fresh assessment be made of the sins — and of the sinner — in the context of the difficult conditions and unique limitations that prevailed at the time.
It is a choice to remember the love, and to honor it.
True adulthood also requires a generous recognition that somewhere, long ago, under cover of darkness, the people who became our parents mourned their own losses in their own private hell, the losses that shaped their own imperfect lives, the losses they may still mourn, when no one is looking.
Finally, authentic adulthood requires the skill and grace of positive recall: the ability to extract the purest and best and noblest intention that existed within even the most egregious error.
Perhaps, in the end, that is the real definition of memory. I know it is the only one that heals.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Leslie Alexander is an English teacher and free-lance writer in Lafayette, LA. She worked for the first Bush administration 1990-1992 in the correspondence office. Her father, A.G. “Ladd” Alexander, converted to the Catholicism of his wife and 12 children near the end of his life. He died in 1996.
