Dad

 

My dad. Yes, we have the same eyes.

Last week during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, her father, an attorney, was mentioned several times. Judge Jackson said she learned to love the law as a little girl, sitting at the kitchen table, doing her homework while her father, a law school student, studied along with her.

That could almost have been the case for me, except I didn’t come to truly love the law until I was in law school myself. (Reading courtroom dramas like Presumed Innocent and Snow Falling on Cedars or watching every episode of L.A. Law, notwithstanding.) And I had no idea—until I started law school—that my father accomplished his own study of the law when I was a little girl in school, but he didn’t do his studying at the kitchen table.

Let me backtrack just a bit.

My father was born in Wisconsin on the land his great-grandparents homesteaded after immigrating from Ireland. They were farmers. They were poor. But they had come to the Land of Opportunity. When my dad was still a boy, his parents moved with their seven children to Illinois, where they lived in a small house that boasted one indoor bathroom. Dad’s mother died when he was sixteen, and in order to help support his family, he left high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corp. After a stint there, he joined the Army. When he returned home at the end of WWII, he got a job first as a taxi driver, then as a cop in Highland Park, Illinois, the same suburb he’d settled in after he married my mother.

Mom and Dad moved to California the same year that I was born, bringing with them a few belongings in a U-Haul trailer and, oh yeah, my three sibs. Dad took a job as a security guard for what was then Douglas Aircraft Company, an aerospace manufacturer in Long Beach. He worked swing and sometimes graveyard shifts. When I returned home from kindergarten in the afternoon, he would be in his uniform, ready for work, but eating whatever hot meal Mom had prepared for him, since he had to take his “lunch” to work in one of those cool metal lunch boxes that are rectangular in shape but have a domed lid for storing a thermos. Dad carried a big thermos separately, though, a small fact that made complete sense when my mother explained how my father managed to work full time and attend law school. She didn’t volunteer that information. I had to ask her. The question was no doubt posed sounding something like this: How the hell did Dad work full time for Douglas and still go to law school and do all the reading?

Reason I asked: I graduated from UC Riverside in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in English and went straight from there to Western State College of Law the following August. I was thirty-six years old and a single parent with sole custody of my four children. I carried sixteen units the first and only semester I attended, and it nearly killed me—literally. I ended up in the ER with pleurisy, and if that hadn’t brought me down, I would have been crushed by the weight of guilt anyway for spending zero quality time with my kids from August to December that year. So I withdrew.

I loved my classes. I loved the law library. I loved the process of studying what the law says and applying it to cases. I loved everything about law school—except having to read pages and pages of case law every single day in order to be ready in case I was called upon in class. To be honest, with four kids and two dogs and no second parent helping, I don’t know how I managed to get through that one semester. I know I didn’t sleep much.

So you understand, then, my question to my mother.

What she said in response gave me a whole new respect for my daddy. There was no room for a thermos in that old black lunchbox because that’s where my father carried his books. It was against company policy for the guards to bring reading materials with them to work. So Dad very carefully cut up his outrageously expensive law books (decades later, in speaking of it, my mother was still pitching fits about how “those books cost a small fortune” and “he cut them all to pieces”) and took them to work in sections, reading on his breaks and his lunch and, I have no doubt, in the still of the night when he was sure no saboteurs or spies or bosses were about. Way to go, Dad.

Here was a man who earned his high school diploma by taking a GED exam, never went to college but had the determination to apply to law school, then slowly and methodically work his way along until he finished—and passed the bar. He was immediately hired by the IRS to do tax law.

This could have been such a Cinderella story…. Except that not long after starting his new job, he began to have some serious medical issues. Within a few months, he was diagnosed with primary amyloidosis, a disease that would have him in and out of the hospital for the next two years until he passed away from its devastation. Damn it.

I chose law school after my undergrad education for the same reason my father did; I wanted to move my family up economically. I wanted to do whatever it would take to make sure my children were provided for. But after my first semester, I had to come to terms with the truth that providing for my children meant giving them what they needed emotionally and psychologically as much as providing food, shelter, and clothing. In choosing a career in teaching, I not only had more time to spend with them, I also had the privilege of nurturing hundreds of other kids, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

Still. Check out my pops, y’all. He was a pretty fierce warrior daddy, wasn’t he?

Blessed

 

Yesterday was one of those very rare days in which I hear from all four of my kids in the same day. That usually only happens on Mother's Day and my birthday (and sometimes not even then). My kids are busy living their best lives, and I can appreciate that. I didn't call my mom very often when I was their age. Then again, my mother and I had an entirely different relationship than I do with these amazing people.

It was my youngest grandson's birthday yesterday. Jordan turned eight. Or, as he put it, "I'm becoming eight today." Yes, sweet boy, I hope we are all "becoming" our best selves. His mother (Younger Daughter) and I chatted for an hour about life and her plans for the future, near and far. When I walked out of my den and looked out the kitchen window, I saw a gigantic plume of smoke--another out-of-control wildfire is burning in the next town over. Here we go again....

An hour or so later, I received a text from Younger Son (who currently lives in Ohio): "Hey Mom, are you doing okay?" Checking in, because he heard about the fire. Then Older Daughter did the same, concerned about the air quality down here. She and Hubby live and teach in Lake Arrowhead. They were getting ash drifting down on their deck. Several hours after that, Older Son called from the Bay Area. "So, you have another fire down there?"

My kids will not know (unless they read this blog post, and they seldom read my blog posts, because they are busy living their best lives) that I went to sleep last night with a bit of a happy glow about me.

I am blessed. All of my children lived to adulthood. (Dang, tho, with my boys, it was dicey at times, I'm not gonna lie. You see that gray hair in the photo above? My girls didn't give me that. My boys did. Whew.) All four were employed--until the pandemic, when two were laid off, but Younger Daughter has just been offered a new job, so she'll be working soon, and Younger Son has a nice cushion of savings, and he will resume work after the pandemic--when he returns to California permanently. (Yay!)

Most important, though, they are good, kind people. No, we do not always agree on everything. (Boy howdy!) No, they do not parrot back my own belief systems. (If only!) But dang... in spite of the haphazard parenting I did at way, way too young an age, these guys turned out to be stellar human beings, and sometimes I'm just in awe of that. They are all ethical people of sound integrity who think for themselves and are not afraid to voice their opinions and stand up for what is right and justice. Damn, I am so proud of them. (Sorry, can't help it. Shameless Mom boast. Hang on--it gets worse.)

My happy glow rekindled this morning when my junior-in-college granddaughter sent me a text: "Hey Nana, how is it over there?? Are you doing okay?? Do you need anything??"

So yeah, my grandkids--all six of them--are also stellar human beings. Well, okay, Jordan is just now "becoming eight," so maybe he'll turn out to be a thief or a thug, but he's already an animal lover, and his best friend is his black cat, "Lucky," and he loves to read, so I think his mama is on the right track with him.

 All that is just to say this:

Parenting is hard. Damn hard. We struggle blindly, wishing for a crystal ball so we can really determine what is "best" for them through any given crisis or major decision or, lord help us, meting out of consequences, but there is no instruction book, and each one is absolutely different than his/her/their siblings. We just do the best we can, often throwing up Hail Mary passes, and we pray, we pray really hard, that they will "turn out all right." And when they do, we are amazed. And blessed. Really and truly blessed.

Sadness Can Kill Us

I love my friends who are close enough and kind enough and who understand me enough to warn me away from potential sadnesses. ("Avoid this book/movie/person/situation.") I do work hard these days to pursue warmth and light, but occasionally I take a foray into a dark zone to honor a friend or someone I respect, or just to continue the work of soul healing that seems endless and often requires comparison for the purposes of reflection.

For the past week I've been listening to the audio version of Sherman Alexie's recently released memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. Damn. This book is hard. It's sad and brilliant and tragic and evocative and I just want to hug him, or more truthfully, I just want to hug the child that I was, the child who was so often ignored and belittled.

I always say—blithely, to people who don't know me well—"I forgive my dad" or "I forgive my mom," but the real truth is, I'm still working on that. It still hurts. My father's ridicule of me at times was epic, and I'm not talking about the playful teasing of a father who loves his child. I'm talking about the blatant you-disgust-me level of resentment and rebuff that comes from a man who is unaware that even mediocre parents work hard to disguise their disappointment in a child who is not what they wanted, not what they expected.

In 1994, when I was diagnosed with skin cancer, my brother called to tell me that I was angry and that was why I got cancer. "You're angry about your childhood and our dad, and you're holding it all in, and you need to just let it go now or you're going to keep getting cancer because this anger and sadness can kill you." Hours later in the same conversation he admitted that he was still so angry and so hurt over things our father had said and done to him that he couldn't allow himself to cry in order to heal "because once I start crying," he said, "I'm afraid I will never stop." He later got cancer... and a decade later, it killed him. True story.

By the time I matured into a true adult, I had one question regarding my father: Why? Why were you loving and kind and playful with my sister, but cruel and derisive toward me? I'll never be able to ask him. Or at least, not for a very long time. My father died when he was 43. I was 8. He died of a very rare disease, one in which the body turns on itself... kind of like cancer, but not cancer.

Was he sad? Profoundly so. He married my mother because she was pregnant and he was doing "the right thing," but this was in spite of the reservations he and his family had about this woman who was not Irish, not Catholic, and not easy to get along with. And then, after they'd had three of their four children, and she had alienated many of his family members in Illinois, she decided she needed to separate him from the brothers and fellow law enforcement officers he drank with and confided in. So she packed up and moved to California, in essence telling him, "You can come along or not."

Of course he went. And he tried to make a good life here, be a good man, a good neighbor, a good father, taking his three beautiful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed children camping and to mass on Sundays.

But then I was born. And things took a turn. I was... different... from my siblings. Oh so different. Decades later, after my second divorce, my mother would finally tell me, "That wasn't right, the way your father treated you. I knew it wasn't right, but I couldn't say anything because I was his wife and wives weren't supposed to contradict their husbands back then." These are interesting words from a woman who always boasted that she was the one who "made" my father move to California; Dad had no say in the matter.

Was my father sad? I think so. I think he was deeply sad, separated from his brothers and sisters and friends with whom he had been very, very close, now having to create a new life, new friends, in this new place, working security instead of law enforcement as he did back east, asking for the graveyard shift so he could take classes in law during the day. He finished, too, and took the bar exam and passed it. And immediately after, he was diagnosed with this illness that would kill him. "You have time," they told him, "a year or two, maybe. But this disease is terminal. There is no cure."

Did he take his sadness out on me? I think so. No, I know he did. I know he needed a scapegoat. To be honest, I would have been really pissed off, too, if I were in his shoes, having moved far from his loved ones in the days when a "long distance" phone call could take a large chunk out of a man's weekly paycheck. And then to have the wife be shrewish to live with? And on top of all that, to get sick? To be dying so far from all that is loving and familiar? Yeah, I'd be really, really pissed, too.

Anger causes cancer, my brother said. Sadness, if it is deep enough, can kill us.

Unlike my brother, I do cry. I started crying on my nineteenth birthday, the same day my first child was born. Before that day, I had not cried since I was a very little girl. ("Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about" was the threat I grew up with.) But in some ways, I became child-like again with the birth of my daughter. And in some ways, I have been crying ever since. I wish I could have told my brother that. I did tell him, "Dan, trust me, I cry every single day." But I wish I would have said to him, "Dan, it's okay to start crying and not be able to stop. That pain is gonna hurt for a long time, so it's okay to keep crying and keep crying and keep crying. Because eventually there will be more things to not cry about than there are things to cry about."

I wish I could say that to so many people....

So yeah, sadness can definitely kill us in the most complete and permanent way. But it can also deaden us while we are still living... each time we fail to return a smile or see the humor in a joke, each time we walk past something or someone beautiful and fail to acknowledge it or them, each time we are so preoccupied with what hurts us we cannot hear or see or feel the pain of others.

That's what I worry about. I'm not in the least afraid to die. I'm afraid I will go back to being dead while I am still alive. That's why I need to remind myself, day by day, that there is light and beauty out there... if I choose to seek it out.

Some thoughts on Mother's Day 2015

For the uninitiated: Mother's Day can never be the same again once you lose your mom.

For a multitude of reasons, mostly because we were hard-wired differently as individuals, my mother and I never had a close relationship. We just couldn't. But in her later years, we learned to be friends. I called her often just to tell her little things—stories about my cat or the wildlife outside or comments on my blog or what my kids were up to. While she was alive, our Mother's Day celebrations always centered around her. After she passed away, my children's focus became me, which is something I'm never comfortable with. I just don't think I did a good enough job to warrant all the praise and attention.

Still... I know I did do a couple of things right. My son was fifteen when he told me he was gay. He knew he could and that this would not be an issue for me because I never hesitated to let my kids know I have gay friends, and we talked openly about all things, including both gender and sexual orientation. We are also an integrated family, with several races combined, so that my kids grew up seeing people as people instead of people as colors. I have watched my adult kids now pass on this openness and tolerance to their own children, and it has made my heart nearly burst at times to see how comfortable my grandchildren are with people in all their shades and nuances. My oldest grandson will be twenty-one in October. (Yes, young Ben, whom I have blogged about in the past, is now a college student.) I swear this boy loves everyone in the world, regardless of shape, size, color, orientation or capacity to love back.

To celebrate Mother's Day, my son bought tickets to the Drag Queen World Series yesterday, hosted by Life Group LA, a charity which works hard to promote HIV/AIDS awareness, education, acceptance and support "for those infected and affected by HIV." The event itself was hilariously entertaining—drag queens playing softball with a tennis ball but taking the game very, very seriously (and no, no one was in heels; that's how serious this was), two drag queen announcers who composed a lovely combination of sweet but naughty impromptu commentary. (Admittedly, there was a lot of material here—gay guys, bats, balls, swinging, getting on base, etc., etc., etc.) The best part for me was just being there with my son, my daughter, her husband and the two teen granddaughters, laughing with them, realizing how much the world has changed in my lifetime... though apparently not enough. We saw one of my son's friends there. We'll call him Jason. Although drag isn't really his thing, as he explained, he had come because he believed in the work the group was doing, and he wanted to support that. He told us that last year he had worked the event as a volunteer, but this year he just wanted to watch so he could enjoy the fun. Later my son called to say that Jason had left a long post on Facebook about the event, mentioning that he had invited his mother... but his mom wouldn't come. It wasn't "her thing." "But I'm her son, and shouldn't I be her thing?" he went on to say. Yes, sweetheart, yes, you should be your mom's everything.

I made innumerable mistakes in raising my kids. But I tried to put them first in every decision I made about our future because I wanted them to have the chance to have something more than I had when I was a kid. And I wanted them to always feel loved, no matter what. Mamas, we can't give them everything. But one thing we can do is make damn sure they know we love them, just as they are. For all the "Jasons" out there whose mamas aren't equipped to offer you the love, support and acceptance you need, I wish I could just scoop you up and hug you. Be patient with your mom. She's trying to do her best with the resources she has. This is what I had to learn about my own mom. This is how we found our common ground in the last years of her life. I'm so glad we did. I'm really just so glad we did.