Saturday 16 June 2012

Fathers Day Part IV

We are born I think,thinking our parents are invincible,able to do anything.Mostly it's because we are small and there are very few things we have learned to do.We depend upon parents for everything in our early years.

And in my early years it seemed my father could do everything.Read a newspaper or a bedtime story.Write things in letters that were still a mystery to me.He could teach us to write too:words like cat and hat,or even cow and dog.He could drive a car,a machine that was impossibly big and dangerous,yet he could take us anywhere we wanted to go safely.It was truly a miracle,for it resulted in us being able to see others,such as our grandparents,or in us being able to bring food home from the store.And he knew all about the places we were passing and told us all about them,be they an old building or a barn or a road.He could even fly a plane too,though I only saw him do it once.But he knew all about any sort of car or plane.Moreover,he was tall,good looking,fast and strong.He could run or push a swing or carry my sister or myself if we tired of walking.He was powerful enough to protect us from whatever dangers might come to the point that we were never aware that there were dangers.He knew,too that we needed to learn to be good people,to do right rather than wrong.He read us all the Bible stories about Adam and Eve,Noah,David,Jonah and Moses.He told us about Heaven and Hell.Heaven,to him was a place good people go and we should want to go there.So we needed to tell the truth,and not steal or swear and to honor our parents.And he made the flames of Hell seem so real that I wanted very much to do only what was good,though I didn't know if I could ever be good enough to avoid burning.But I knew that my father was there to teach me,and,being small I placed my confidence in him.His discipline could be swift and harsh or very subtle.

But we grow,and eventually discover that our parents have feet of clay.We start to see that our parents may not always tell all of the truth all of the time,that they may take things that don't strictly speaking belong to them,or that they don't always talk kindly about their own parents.And sometime they tell us"don't do as I do,do as I say."Then they fall back on that commandment about honoring your parents, and God,and Hell with it's burning fires is a very big stick.But if my father were so invincible,why the need such a powerful weapon.The truth is,and we soon start to see it, is that there are thing happening that have command over our parents too.They are very powerful things and in many instances they are so powerful that they cannot be resisted.

Such was the way my fathers life was.He had his weaknesses,while trying hard to do well and to move his family forward.One of the first things I noticed regarding his fallibility was that he never went to church with us,and so I never knew what he believed,or why.For a few Sundays when I was perhaps ten,he came to church and I believe it must have been at my mothers urging,as I was getting to be of an age where I didn't want to go to church either.My reasoning consisted solely of"if Dad doesn't go,why do I have to?"At home he never spoke of God and for that matter,neither did my mother to any great degree.Church belonged mostly to Sunday morning and we were not a greatly religious family aside from that.I came to know in later years that the Father should be the spiritual head of the household,and my father simply wasn't.For one reason or another he simply wasn't able.I don't hold this against him in any way,though I do believe that I was not subject to the parental example I needed to have at the time.

As I grew older,my father began to be more obvious in some of his weaknesses.He seemed angry much of the time,for reasons unknown to me.He didn't seem to associate much with men his own age,and it may well have had to do with his having only a grade eight education and being perhaps self conscious of that reality.Because of this he seemed subject,more than he should be to the influence of others.When a neighbor began spending more time around our house and making political pronouncements to the effect that the French people in our midst were trying to take over our country and cause us English people disadvantage socially,my father bought in to the idea.And so did I.And it's always been a matter in which I wished I'd had more of the right kind of guidance so that I would not have had to unlearn a lot of bigotry.My father could be civil to anyone,and was far from being hate filled like our neighbor.I think he truly believed in the goodness of people.But he allowed our neighbor to be a greater force in his home than he was himself.At those time he just seemed to swing in the wind,though I saw a different side to him when we were alone.I wasn't necessarily able to define what that side of him was though.

Throughout all of my childhood my father liked to drink beer.I never really though much about it until I reached my teens.I knew beer could make you drunk,but I'd never seen my father drunk,and wasn't sure what the significance of drunkenness was in any event.I'd never viewed my father as an alcoholic,and in fact still don't.But I may be wrong about that.When I was a teenager my father and I would make many short trips away from home,usually to the cottage,or Springhill or some such place.Almost all of those trips involved a trip to the liquor store for a six pack of beer.Six didn't seem very many and hence the idea in my head that because he didn't drink much,he couldn't be an alcoholic.The problem was that it didn't take much to make my father quite silly,though he never became mean when drinking.But still,nothing functioned normally after he had had six beers.No conversation seemed to make sense and whatever we had come to do never seemed to get done.If we were putting a new roof on the cottage,it would remain unfinished.Sometimes we would go to town and I would end up driving home when I was just learning to drive.I still trusted my father at these times but cognitive dissonance could take up a big space in my life then too.

My father I think was having a hard time hanging on.He still went to work everyday,and still provided for us,but his life must have been uncommonly difficult.But as always he sheltered us from all that,believing,I suppose that it was a good thing to do.But as I entered my last year or two of high school I realized the my father was in decline.When I moved to Alberta it became more noticeable every time I returned for a visit,or every time my parents would visit me.At some point he began having strokes and his decline was long and difficult to watch.Because we did not see each other everyday I could see how far he had slipped every time I did see him.It was very obvious when viewing it that way. 

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