For My Father
Only through persistent love and forgiveness did I learn to be weak
I see my dad sitting on the edge of the footpath, on the outskirts of John’s Park. He’s about nine years old in this picture, wearing short pants and funny half-falling woolen socks with scuffed knees. It’s 1967. Actual photographs I have seen of him and his family at this time confirm the implausibly perfect snub-nosed Irishness of the look I’m envisioning, but this particular scene is imagined. He’s staring with furrowed concentration out into the dusty skyline beyond the suburb, where his own father will arrive home from work any minute now. At least he thinks he will — he will, won’t he? And with that thought a low pitched hum of worry begins to leak out, the sudden black awareness of an endless number of things which could already have taken place. He sits there, gnawing on a bleeding thumb and hoping so hard his heart stings, making deals with God and renouncing treats, until at last the big man emerges triumphantly from the horizon and scoops my dad up under his arm.
In my head it’s all happening in black and white. It’s got an air of that old cowboy film Shane to it. The street is still and meaningfully insidious, instead of filled with squawking toddlers and smoking mams. Truthfully, I don’t remember if my grandfather was particularly tall because he died when I was a small child, at a time when everyone still seemed particularly tall. The picture is made up and it’s also true; it happened and I also invented it.
It comes from a conversation we had when I was fifteen, enduring the bleaker period of my adolescence with all the stoicism and dignity of a trapped animal. We were in the kitchen in my mother’s house, and I was trying to explain how afraid I was of everything. I was afraid of being ugly, afraid of being stupid, afraid of not being successful, but more than anything else I was afraid of people I loved dying. If one of my parents was five minutes late to meet me, I had already imagined the entire trajectory of the car crash — the sickening thud of skull against plastic, the white arm flung at a terrible, unnatural angle through shattered glass, the mobile phone ringing uselessly underneath debris as I gasped to hear it answered. It felt like living with a curse, these persistent visual punishments seizing me at inopportune moments. I could try to think myself out of them, rationalize that they were probably not dead, but it didn’t work, because they could have been. They really could have been — and if they weren’t, then they certainly would be one day.
I was telling this to my dad one day. (By the way, who’d be a parent? Watching some weepy starving paranoid mess tell you that they can’t stop imagining your impending death? No thanks. Not to mention enduring their ponderous essays about you ten years later.) That’s when he told me about sitting at the end of his road, peering out desperately, convinced that his father wasn’t ever coming home from work.
“My God, he really is just like me,” I thought.
Both us have hands half-bitten away with anxiety and an instinct to fear the worst. These days my boyfriend marvels at my catastrophic reactions to minor, almost imperceptible setbacks or projected, possible disasters. I saw that same impulse in my dad as I grew up, just more contained, less hysterical. I still feel guilty about a time years ago when I was not in a very healthy place, a place in which a person might reasonably worry about me, when I accidentally called him at 3 AM. He answered from sleep, his immediate response “Is she dead?” At the time I assumed he was referring to his mother — only later did I consider it could have been me.
It must be hell to have that nature and be forced to watch someone you love careening around the earth in chaos, as I did for so long. In my memory, self awareness and every bad thing that it can imply happened almost overnight: I remember being a studious, plump thirteen-year-old who felt smart and had fun. Then I remember very suddenly realizing that I was awful, and that everyone could see how awful I was. It was so shocking and definite that it felt like waking up and realizing I had actually been a boy all that time, and everybody had known it but me. It was who I was, who I had always been — I went from just living as a person to identifying as a bad person. Every other bit of identity I tried to claim after that just felt like a thin layer coated over the essential truth of my Badness.
I made my life into a strategy to feel cleaner, lighter, better. I ate nothing from morning to evening for a year, arriving home each day on a lightheaded buzz of self congratulation and with a metallic sickness spreading in my mouth. For dinner I would eat a little bowl of whole wheat pasta and some sweet corn, feeling calmly virtuous, lost in my martyred piety. Then I would retreat to my room and become shaky with frustration that all my efforts and deprival had not worked; I was still big, still embarrassing, still bad. I carved myself down but even when it worked, it didn’t work. One day in the school bathroom I pulled up my jumper to check my stomach as usual, and noted with delirious surprise that it was no longer there. But there was no size small enough, no bone protrusive enough, to stop the white-noise rage in my head. Even when I was physically small I was still wrong in some indescribable way — I would catch a deceptively unflattering reflection of myself in a window and have to go home. I was haunted and humiliated by the idea that a passing stranger could see through my ostensible thinness and know that I remained fundamentally ugly.
When I think of myself then, all I can see is an enormous anger, but I don’t remember ever feeling angry at the time. For whatever reason I could not let myself feel it, I refused until it was boiling away undercover like an ulcer waiting to burst. I wreaked havoc on myself because I was afraid to externalize it anywhere else — white wormy scars spawning daily along my arms and thighs. I was angry at having a body, angry at having it represent me in the world. I wanted to be clever and happy and good and I felt that I could not get on with the business of being those things until my body was redeemed. I was angry at having to be seen all the time, in the way that you are forced to as a female in public, and I felt that whittling myself down to the least offensive version of a body would make me less visible. When that didn’t work I felt the unnamable poison inherent in me become even more real. And of course, in the infuriating way of teenagers, I was angry that nobody was noticing the pain I was hamfistedly expressing — even as I plotted daily how best to conceal the evidence. I was so adept at suppressing troubling events and feelings that they barely seemed real, even to me. A quick portrait of the way my mind worked: when I was fifteen I started suffering from regular acute stomach pains (caused by, I’m guessing in retrospect, my erratic eating habits and anxiety). With the help of Google and a brain running a million miles a minute, I convinced myself I had stomach cancer or an unknown but equally terrible illness. And so what did I do? Nothing, naturally. I ignored the pain and didn’t tell anybody about it. When it got particularly bad I considered going to a doctor, but immediately rejected the idea because I was afraid to be told that I had cancer. Because I was the kind of person who would have preferred to die of cancer than to be told that I had it.
On one of my early teenage birthdays, amidst one of his typically lovely and eloquent cards, my dad wrote, “You’ve never caused me a moment of trouble since you were born” and I took this to heart as something to pride myself in. I wanted to protect him from the disarray of my internal life, but eventually there was no hiding the shellshocked panic which hung around me in thick clouds.
When you are filled with violent hatred for yourself as I was then, it does not feel comfortable to be loved. It especially does not feel comfortable to be loved unconditionally with the fierce forthcomingness with which my dad loves me. The binds of that sort of love and the good faith it implies felt unbearable to a person like me. The worse I became, the less in control of my madness, the more I willed everyone to leave me alone to derail in peace. But my dad never left me alone, although it must have been excruciating to watch the cracks appear and threaten to swallow my life. As I left my teenage years and moved out, the idea that I was capable of being a person became more and more laughable. The effort of being competent and normal and sociable seemed impossible and slowly, I picked apart the seams of my life. I wept in his car one day and said “I’m scared.” He said “I’m scared too.” That was the most I could have asked for at the time. I couldn’t accept the rest of it yet- it still sat prickling on top of my skin, I could not yet feel it. But I could take comfort in him being scared beside me.
Only through persistent love and forgiveness did I learn to be weak. My dad didn’t get angry with me for keeping things from him and twisting myself up in knots. He just kept loving me and telling me with increasing urgency that I was going to make myself sick if I didn’t learn to let go of my secrets. I was always sharp enough in my head, but my heart was frail and unreachable. It took years of hammering home the same simple lesson before I started to absorb it — trust people, trust him. He taught me to be candid, not least with myself, about my more troubling parts. I was always afraid of that, of troubling people with the mess of my insides, and eventually he made me aware that part of being a human and of loving is to be burdened by another person. He taught me that being trusted to do so is part of what makes love profound.
At my age, many of my friends speak to me about an increased feeling of separation from their parents, a seemingly inevitable gulf as their adulthood really begins. The exact opposite has proved true for me. As well as being the kind, beloved man I’ve always looked up to (you should see my dad walk around our hometown — people flock to him in delight as they would have a particularly popular bishop in the bad old days), he’s also my pal. He’s in my corner. There is no greater gift you can give a child than the unshakable knowledge that they are loved and liked. I’ll always be grateful that he gave me that — it will last me the rest of my life. He always made it clear that he thinks I am great, and singular, and worthwhile. That was painful when I vehemently believed the opposite. Now the great weight of accumulated decades of faith sits beneath the flux of my everyday life. In some ways I desperately want to make him proud and write great things and be spectacular, but the sweetness of our relationship is that I know that if I never write another word or achieve anything in particular, he will still be happy that I’m his.
Ah, dad — I see you there at the bottom of the road, staring out with such concentration in wait of your father. I know that feeling so well. When you love someone that much, their very freedom can be frightening — their ability to be out in the world and subject to the whims of fortune, fragile as a leaf. But you’re there, every time I rid myself of a secret, every day I love without reservation, every time I give myself a break; there you are, coming over the horizon.
Megan Nolan writes essays, poetry and comedy. She lives in Dublin and tweets @megaroooo.
