MY FATHER, THE TYRANT 2023/06/23
I have a bump on my right forehead. I’ve had it for years and thought nothing much about it until I was in chiropractic school. There, every student gets a weekly treatment. My student intern was Dr. David Rosengren, who, in the exam, which took over an hour, felt my head and remarked on the bump. He asked me if I had a skull fracture. His question came, for me, out of the blue. What bump? It was so familiar that I would occasionally feel it, and play with the change in the bone structure when thinking, but no more than that.
Later that night I remembered that around age 7 or so, when staying with my aunt Edith, my father came to visit. We were having breakfast, porridge (not the instant kind, but the traditional sort, made in the old way, where the night before, the oats would be put in a pan to slowly cook on the back of the stove). I loved porridge. I would put a little golden syrup or brown sugar on it, and, before the syrup or sugar melted, would eat it, with the sugar and the porridge as separate tastes.
My dad insisted I use milk. I don’t like the taste of milk, especially warmed when it smells bad to me. Moreover, my father was allergic to milk products, so his insisting I have warm milk was both illogical and unreasonable. We argued and I stormed out, furious, slipping on a mat and slamming, head first, onto the opposite wall—blood everywhere, on the floor, on me, and on my aunt’s newly decorated hallway. I wasn’t taken to the doctor, nor did anyone look at me after the accident, so no-one knew I had a fracture. I certainly didn’t.
Years later, after I had moved to America and was in a relationship with Joyce, my dad, my brother David, Joyce, her 3 children (Eric, Gail and Jay) and I took a tubing trip down the Apple River in Wisconsin 1. David and I were behind Dad and Gail by about 50 feet or so, chatting and laughing, when Gail tipped my father off his tube. David and I gasped. Dad turned around, saw us looking scared, and said, “We were playing”. He loved it. He loved how she teased him, something David and I, even in our adulthood, would never do. He loved how she pushed him around, answered him back. Even thinking about that now gives me the willies.
My father, when I was a child, was terrifying, unpredictable, always right, always in charge, and always the one to make the decisions, regardless of anyone else’s wants or needs. After I moved to America he became more of a father, but it wasn’t until I became a doctor that our relationship really changed.
He wasn’t going to come to my graduation, saying he couldn’t afford it, so I sent him and David the fare money. At the graduation ceremony, the provost told the audience not to clap. I told my group (father, Zoe, Fiona, David and friends), to clap. I wanted that acknowledgement, the overt affirmation that I’d done good. I was now a doctor. My family clapped, loudly, and from then on, every graduate after me, had clapping. When I got onto the stage, exhilarated, I shook everyone’s hands, all the dignitaries on stage. The audience laughed, but I was so high on graduating, even that was an affirmation.
Afterwards, when talking with my dad, he got this strange look on his face. It was like his world had come apart, was unbalanced, unfamiliar. He started to say something to me and stopped. He, at that moment, changed his expectations of me that my only use was to bear children and do the washing-up, to me being a doctor and doctors, to my father’s generation and upbringing, had status, and now, at that point, I also had that status.
Six months before he died, he came to visit for three weeks by himself, no David. After work, I’d go over to where he was staying with a friend of mine, drink a beer, sit on the upstairs verandah, and talk. During that time, that three weeks of talking and chatting, gossiping, laughing and remembering he was not this tyrant of a father, but transformed into an old codger who loved me, treated me respectfully, listened to me.
We mended our fences for eternity. He apologized. I accepted. We ended up, sitting quietly, looking at the trees, appreciating being alive, being together, knowing each other deeply.
1 https://www.appleriver.com/tubing-tanking/