Oh no! I thought to myself. He’s not going to get away with it this time.
I looked at the back of his head as he sat in his recliner, but I just couldn’t bring myself to speak to him about it then. He was sick. I wasn’t going to argue with a sick man. Instead, I said, “Okay, Dad. I’ll stop bothering you about this. We can talk about it later. I’m just worried about you.”
I’d made a commitment to myself to address this with Dad, so for the next week I thought about best times to bring it up as well as what I should say. One afternoon, when he was feeling better and after we returned from a wonderful drive to Assateague Island National Seashore, I found him watching television while he played the “fake slot machines” on his iPad.
“Dad, may I talk to you about something?”
“Of course,” he said as I sat on the couch and leaned forward.
“Would you please not tell me to shut up? I don’t know what it is about that phrase, but it upsets me. I will stop if you say ‘hush’ or ‘please stop’ or ‘that’s enough’ or ‘I’ve told you how I feel and I don’t want to discuss it any further,’ but I cannot handle ‘shut up.’ It makes me feel like a child. And most of all I feel disrespected. You are the one who taught me no one should tell me to shut up. I mean, if I had told you any of my boyfriends or husbands had told me to shut up …”
He looked at me, “Oh. Okay. I’m sorry.”
That was it. And since then, rather than “shut up” he has used different ways to tell me to back off.
“That’s enough, Nancie, I heard you.”
“Nancie. Okay. I get the message.”
“Nancie, not now.”
Sometimes he just stops and looks at me with an expression that reminds me far too much of my own when I don’t want to listen to someone. These glimpses of myself made me decide that it was only fair that I start thinking more about the things I said to him as well. I asked myself when he was most likely to want me to be quiet or to give him time.
It was easy to see the pattern. If it was about his health, what he’s eating or drinking, or when I thought he needed to see the doctor he resisted me. It happened when I was trying to take care of him. He was not ready for that.
I am sure that Dad, like me, expected times that we would hit patches of rough terrain, bumpy albeit not impassable. I noticed that when we discovered ourselves in a difficult stretch it tended to be related to incorrect assumptions or a lack of information. If we relied on what we thought we knew about each other we got stuck, tires spinning.
I soon realized that despite a lifelong belief that my father and I had a close relationship, we did not. How could we? This did not mean that we didn’t love one another, that we didn’t enjoy a lot of the same things or share many of the same values and our sense of humor. We just really did not know each other well at all.
This resulted in huge gaps in my base of knowledge about him and he seemed genuinely puzzled by me. I believe we were both confused about how this could happen in such a close and caring family.
Once during one of our Sunday drives, Dad and I made a list of all his assignments from the time he enlisted in the Army. We calculated that from my birth until I was eighteen, we had lived apart fifty percent of the time. Despite what we knew about one another and the experiences we’d shared while living together, there was a great deal we didn’t know about what life had been like for each of us during times we’d lived apart.
When Dad was away, the role of intermediary and reporter fell to my Mother. She and Dad wrote letters or spoke on the phone if possible. While he was in Vietnam, they stayed connected through once-a-month ham radio calls and little reels of tape, recorded, and played back on tiny tape recorders. Time was limited on calls. There is only so much you can put in a letter and who knew who the ham operator was or if the tapes might fall into the wrong hands. Depending on where Dad was and what was going on, there had to have been things she either forgot or chose not to tell him. Unlike today’s military men and women who can communicate through video chat on a regular basis and see how their children grow and change as it happens, when my father returned home, he came back to the future.
In addition, what my mother knew depended on what we told her, and though I cannot speak for my brothers, I know that I did not tell my mother everything. I was selective in what I shared. I controlled my own narrative, often the only thing I thought I could control in my life.
Though I always thought it was hardest on the spouse and kids when Dad was away, my experience as a parent leads me to wonder what it must be like to come home to children who have changed and who are not the people they were when you last saw them.
Significant changes occur during the time a three-month-old baby grows into a toddler. And the differences between the fifteen-year-old me and the almost seventeen-year-old self my father met when he returned from Vietnam were as stark as day is to night. I know now from what my father has shared that for him, a daughter was a mystery, and I’m sure it was easier to let Mom take the lead. In many cases I found it easier too.
Dad and I did not discuss Mom except in the most detached way. I’d bring her up from time to time and so would he, but after a few sentences we’d stop. More than a decade had passed since her death and it was still too difficult for the two of us to talk about her. I knew he missed her, and I certainly did. But I also knew I still had feelings about the family dynamics that played out throughout my life and during the time between her diagnosis and the day she died that I had not worked out for myself, let alone with him. I wasn’t convinced I needed to discuss that with him, though I suspected it would be a good thing. But I also knew that until he and I talked about Mom, what life was like when he was away from us, and my feelings about when she died, we would never really know one another.
CHAPTER 13
You and Your Mother
WE’D BEEN HAVING TEA, taking drives, and sharing memories for almost three years when Dad said, shaking his head, “You’re just like your mother. You two had problems.”
“Yes, at times we did,” I responded, handing him a napkin with a cookie, and placing his tea on the table beside him. I sat down on the couch.
“It seemed like you always did,” he said, muting the television and taking a sip from his mug.
“You know, Dad, all girls have problems and periods of time when they don’t get along with their mothers. Rachel and her two girls have them, too. It’s the way things are.”
“If you say so,” he said.
I bristled—not at being compared to my mother, but at what I saw as criticism of how I “handled Mom.” While I didn’t like what my father said, I blamed his being absent at critical times and his having only heard Mom’s side of the story most of the time, so I gave him some slack as I always had about this topic. But when from time to time one of my brothers said it, I wanted to shriek, “Are you kidding? You were there. You lived with us. I am nothing like her.” Of course, I did not.
I remembered feeling as though the spats between my mother and me were an inconvenience to the men in our family. They acted as though our arguments were frivolous, stirred up the waters and rocked the family boat. Frankly, what went on between Mom and me was far more of an inconvenience to us.
Frustrated at Dad’s lack of understanding, I remained silent. I’d told him all the things I loved about Mom and explained the reasons behind some of our arguments during afternoon tea and rides in the country. I just sipped my tea or looked out the window and changed the subject.
My mother would have said I was just like my father in that.
Growing up, I thought of her as restrictive, overly protective, and tougher on me than my brothers, especially during my teenage years. I was convinced that as my mother she had to love me, but that in reality she didn’t like me at all.
My mother was a contradiction to me. Sometimes she would blow up for what I considered insignificant reasons having nothing to do with me. Yet, when I had to tell her about a ser
ious matter, she would listen intently and then question me thoughtfully. After studying me calmly, she would formulate a strategic and reasonable way we would deal with the crisis “together.”
She would coach me to keep things to myself while sharing too much with me about her personal feelings or emotions. At times she would share things and say, “Never tell your father.” Sometimes she wouldn’t talk to me. I knew at those times she was sad or angry about something that had nothing to do with me, but felt she was taking it out on us.
As a child I kept track of all of Mom’s sins as a list of promises made to my future children. I would never make a scene at the post exchange where everyone knew us and knew who my father was. I would never purposefully embarrass my child in front of her friends just to demonstrate that I could. I would let my children decide how long their hair should be and how to wear it. I would let them choose their own clothes. I wouldn’t refuse to drive my child somewhere at the last minute, so that eventually she had to quit an activity or give up going out, just to keep her at home. I would not search through my children’s closets or dressers, read their diaries, or intercept their mail, read it, and not give it to them.
My issues with my mother were a big ball of wax, while my father and I dealt with one thing at a time. No big deal. But Mom’s and my issues had been more complicated than my father could ever have known because she was a complicated woman, and I grew into one.
I would never think of sharing that litany of transgressions with my father, who I imagined would look at me and say, “For Chrissake. You’re over sixty. Your poor mother’s dead. Get over it. No one is perfect.”
But I did want him to know the wonderful things I knew about my mother, like knowing that no matter how angry or upset something she did made me, it was almost always when she was alone with three children in a strange new place while he was away. And yet, somehow, I knew what she did had nothing to do with her not loving us. She loved us. Powerfully. Even when I thought it was far too much.
My brothers and I benefited from a woman who, no matter where we were in the world, read, researched, and explored every new place we lived and its surroundings until she knew every nook and cranny, its history, why it was important, and how it always, somehow, related to our life in some way. I have memories and the photograph of sitting close to my mother, who held my brother on her lap, on a hill in Germany after a picnic as she pointed to a hamlet below, hugged me tight against her, and said, “Look, see that town? That’s Bremen. Remember the Bremen Town Musicians? Name the animals in that band, Nancie.”
I cherish the memory of her showing up one afternoon at my high school in Texas, my two brothers in the car, and whisking us away as a surprise.
“Where are we going?”
“Wait! You’ll love it. I promise!” she said. And soon, we sat together under a makeshift tent in the Texas desert at a long wooden table with strangers and shared authentic Tex-Mex food. There we smeared freshly made, warm tortillas with the salsa and guacamole that sat in large bowls on the table we shared and talked with people we didn’t know and would never see again. I could never do that on my own, even now. But she could. And she did.
If my mother determined that a teacher had treated one of her children unfairly, she’d charge into the school with the force of the 4th Armored Division, guns blazing. One summer evening as my family visited my father’s parents out on Long Island along with some other relatives, my grandfather’s cousin—an English professor at a New England university—responded to something I said with, “The last thing I need to hear is some young snit’s opinion about some subject she knows nothing about.”
My mouth dropped open. I looked down and continued eating. I said nothing for the rest of the meal. No one said anything at the time, but later in the kitchen as I was scraping plates in the sink, my mother came over to me and said, without lowering or raising her voice, without worry about who might overhear her, “Nancie. You are not a snit, but that woman is a cranky, unkind bitch. I’m surprised that as an English professor at a fine institution whose life’s work is teaching young people, she is not more careful with her choice of words and knowing the real meaning of them.”
I shared that story with my father.
“I remember that,” he said. “I nearly said something, but your mother looked at me, so I didn’t. She knew it would not end well.”
I also told him about how, when she’d come home from Korea to bury her father, I took her with me (at her insistence) to a follow-up appointment when an ob-gyn told me I’d need to have an ovary removed and while they were in there they might as well take the other one as well. She said nothing until we walked outside.
“I’ll never have children,” I said.
“He’s a drunk, Nancie,” she responded. “You’re fine.” And she made an appointment for me to see a specialist at Hershey Medical Center, drove with me over two hours for my appointment, and said, “I knew it,” when the specialist there said, “I don’t know what your doctor saw, but there’s nothing there now. It’s a miracle.”
Later that day I walked into his den and said, “Dad, I need to talk to you.”
I sat on the couch and looked at him. He muted his ball game.
“When you say that Mom and I had problems, it bothers me. You and my brothers act as though Mom and I never got along at all. We did have problems, but you all act like I didn’t love her or appreciate her. You may have witnessed some arguments and those are easy to remember, but you weren’t there when I was growing up. You don’t know the things that took place—the good things and the bad things.
“My mother and I had secrets even you don’t know. Things she knew I’d never tell you and won’t. We may have fought, but that’s not unusual between mothers and daughters. Sometimes it’s the only way a daughter can detach and come into her own.
“When I had my babies, it wasn’t you I thought about or wanted with me. It was Mom. You don’t know how much I miss her or how hard her death was for me.”
By this time, I was crying and, I’m sure, wearing my ugly crying face. I couldn’t look at him. He was quiet and when I looked up, he was sitting in his chair looking at me. Paying attention.
“I really loved Mom, Dad. And I knew she loved me.”
Dad nodded. I got up to leave, just as he started to say, “Your mom’s death …” Then he stopped. I stood by his chair looking down. He didn’t go on. I was afraid he’d cry.
“Want some tea?” I asked. “I think I’ll get some tea.”
“If you’re having some,” he said. “That would be great.”
CHAPTER 14
Don’t Ask, Won’t Tell
AFTER LIVING WITH DAD for a while, it finally occurred to me that what I knew about him had been learned from my grandmother, my mother, his brothers, my aunts, soldiers he’d commanded or served with and, of course, what I picked up during those times I’d lived with him growing up. I found his sharing of personal history entertaining and enlightening. I explained away what I didn’t know. After all, we hadn’t always lived together, we certainly had not for the past forty years. He was not someone who talked about himself much, until recently, and we couldn’t know everything about everyone, could we? What did surprise me were the things I thought he knew about me and did not.
In the evenings after dinner, I would join him while he watched television. Some nights I worked on projects I had not been able to get to during the day because of phone calls or meetings.
“What are you doing over there?” my father asked from his recliner one night while watching his beloved New York Yankees play.
“Spreadsheets.” I answered. “It’s regional strategy time at work. We hold them each quarter.”
“Where did you learn about spreadsheets?” he asked.
I ignored the surprised tone in his voice. Math had not ever been my strong subject. By the time I was in third grade, I became aware of my parents’ unspoken expectation about my math capabilities after my fath
er spent about an hour trying to explain fractions to me. That homework session with him ended in a question that I internalized as a statement about my intelligence. My exasperated father raised a frustrated voice we seldom heard and asked, “What are you? “What are you? A mental pygmy?”
I knew what a pygmy was, I’d read about them in National Geographic. I’d seen them in movies. They were small people. I understood at that moment that in my father’s view, at least where math was concerned, maybe other things, too, I was a small, dumb person. Still, I benefited from that exchange because from that day on, if I did my “best” and earned As and Bs in all other subjects involving words (English, history, German and Mandarin, for instance) then a C in math-related subjects was acceptable. C minus, no; C, yes.
“Well,” I answered. “When I was the comptroller for the Consortium of Universities …”
I saw his expression and held up my hand, “Don’t say it, Dad,” I warned.
“Why would they have hired you for that job?” He said it. I ignored its sting by laughing and saying, “I am really good at job interviews. But as I was saying, I computerized their accounting system when I worked there, plus I discovered Lotus spreadsheets. But I really learned to do analysis and other fancy things with them in graduate school when I worked on my MBA.”
My father looked at me like a psychiatrist evaluating which ward in the asylum he should admit me to, because I was most certainly delusional, if not a pathological liar.
“You did not work on your MBA,” he said, gently. He might as well have said, “Honey, listen to me, your name is Nancie, not Joan of Arc. You live in Maryland. Not France.” He thought I was yanking his chain.
I wondered whether it was better he believed me insane or a liar. I opted for insane. I took a breath.
Tea With Dad Page 9