A Love Song for My Father

Though he was a Violent Man.

Photo by Richard R on Unsplash

If you read my last post, A Man’s Home is NOT his Castle, you know my father dominated my mother, beat the crap out of her and terrorized the rest of us for years. But that’s not all he was, so I didn’t want to leave you with that impression. It did not make my dad powerful or happy to live up to our patriarchal myth of male dominance. Taking dominion ruined him and led directly to his death, probably by suicide, at the age of 45.

In the end, he was a sniveling husk, sitting in a yellow wingback chair with the black spot on the arm where he had balanced a thousand sweating glasses. Unable to work, he’d fabricated business trips, sales call reports, expense reports, and otherwise phoned it in to the big insurance company he’d worked for for 23 years. When this fraud finally unraveled, his man-of-the-house illusion shattered. Next, he would be fired or worse. The Big Man couldn’t stop crying. He was so depressed that my mother insisted he go into therapy, which, of course, he refused to do.

So, at this juncture, he either ended his own life or had an accident. Fifty years later, the jury is still out. The big insurance company, the same one he’d worked for, paid the claim without investigation. I think they were taking care of their own. Either way, he was dead man walking for two years; it just took time for circumstances to catch up to reality.

When I was 17, in the 1970s, my father’s house was a fishbowl, and the water coursing in and out of our gills was so tinged with his shame that a single drop turned everything blue. I just wanted someone to clean the damn bowl and change the water. But the only water available was just as dirty. None of us stood a chance.

My mother sacrificed her secret escape money, which she had surreptitiously skimmed from her grocery allowance for ten years, to rescue him with the boat of his dreams, a beautiful Novi Hull lobster boat. He longed to move to Maine and do honest work, man’s work, which was somehow more dignified than selling insurance. He wanted to become a lobsterman. None of his high school-aged children wanted to move, but my mother was willing to make us.

At this point, Dad was trying to swap out one strong male myth for another. AI is probably not hallucinating when it says that the suicide rate for lobstermen is twice the national average, but my dad didn’t know that. He was desperate for any solution except the one requiring him to accept his feelings, make amends to his family, and heal. He’d rather die.

In April 1975, he slipped from that boat into the frigid Merrimack River, which still had small ice chunks making their way out to sea at that time of year.

As I write about my father’s death, I hear Joe Cocker singing in my audio cortex, “You are so Beautiful, to me.”

He visited me about 15 years after he died, at Christmas time, while I was home for the holidays after moving as far away from New England as I could get without leaving the country. I was backing out of the driveway to do some last-minute shopping, and was overwhelmed when I reached the curve between the two big pine trees. Destroyed. Flooded. Broken in half by an explosion of love so potent, it hurt. I put the car in park and placed my forehead against the steering wheel and sobbed. With no other choice, I let resistance go. “Daddy?” When the sobbing eased, Joe Cocker came over the radio, “You are so beautiful. To me.” I lifted my head.

My father’s presence filled the car. He surrounded me, holding me and loving me while Joe Cocker sang. And love burst from me in response. That little Saab was brimming.

He’d been a tender, wounded man and a terrifying, violent one. He did the best he could, and he indulged his baser nature like a dog rolling in something putrid. He was at choice and a victim. He was at both ends of the spectrum and in the gooey middle. Raised in a culture that uses shame as a weapon to separate the men from the boys, he was thoroughly shamed while insisting he was dominant, alpha, and strong.

My dad with his mother just before she remarried

His father, the biological grandfather I never met, was a captain in the Merchant Marines, a great drinker and carouser who had to be shut out of his stepfather’s house when his wife, with a small boy under each arm, sought refuge. When my father was old enough to wonder who his father was, his mother told him she had caught the bastard holding a pillow over his face as he lay crying in his crib. Now, that’s taking “just you shut up” to a whole new level.

Thanks for the bedtime story, Mom.

You’d think she never heard of boundaries, but she had. Her generation’s Dr. Spock, the male authority on child rearing, Dr. Holt, demonized soothing and warned a generation of mothers that they would spoil the future man if they gave in and soothed the baby. Do not pick up that child.

When my mother had her first squalling infant, my paternal grandmother told her of the strength it took to sit on the floor on the other side of a bedroom door, in tears, listening to my father wail. But, Dr. Holt had said, ”Even if it takes 2 - 3 hours, or more.” Every cell in her body clamored for her to rush in there and scoop him up. Her mind overrode her heart. She toughed it out, refusing to do irreparable harm to her future man by showing weakness. This disdain for feminine weakness knows no gender.

My dad’s mom married her second alpha male a few years later. Perceiving squishy weakness in my dad, he set about dominating him. At every turn, he confronted him with a test of manhood, and because he was a boy, his stepdad always won. Here’s the thing about the dominance game. The winner gets to be the Big Man because the loser becomes the shameful female. In New England’s form of this culture the loser might be called, “you little pussy,” or (forgive me), “you stupid cunt.” His stepdad thought shame would make him run to the opposite end of the spectrum and want to be a Big Man more than anything. It did.

The last thing you wanted to be was female. Most of us females didn’t even want to be female. I sure didn’t. And when my mother was fighting back, when she wanted to inflict the maximum retaliatory pain, she used shame, too. Why wouldn’t she? It’s the most potent weapon in the cultural arsenal - the nuclear option.

When Dad was old enough, he enlisted in the army to fight in Korea to prove he was a Big Man. His stepdad clapped his back and told him it would make a man of him. It did. He survived the ritualized hazing and shaming of boot camp and was deemed tough enough to enter a war zone. When he returned, he had a taste for scotch, too.

One night, after years of scotchy stories of the front lines, of men falling to his left and right, of crying for friends lost, my father bragged that he was so clever and skillful at playing the officers, he got himself assigned to the officer’s club as a bartender, the best job on the base. Obviously, those Big Men liked and respected him.

My mother pulled up. Wait, what?

After this, she called him “the big war hero.” This knife always went smoothly in, all the way to the heart. So, he pulled out his ultimate weapon, violence. She’d laugh at him through bloody teeth and spit, “Big Man.”

Did patriarchal shaming condition him at school, too? As a veteran high school teacher, I can tell you this is unavoidable. It’s in the blue water. Why would school be a haven from patriarchal shaming? Nowhere else is. So, every breath he drew from infancy onward was shaped by our patriarchal mythology. This conditioning into the prevailing myth started when the doctor held him upside down by his ankles and slapped his ass when he was born.

We all know, by now, that monotheistic patriarchal religion, specifically Christianity, is another myth, right? Christopher Dawkins and other atheists who claim to be “cultural Christians,” certainly know it. They just want to keep the parts that serve them.

Is it worse now that we have all these toxic forums pumping testosterone directly into the veins of the manosphere? Yesterday, I saw a clip of a popular influencer, all pumped up on false bravado claiming that no one can “fuck my wife like I can.” Seriously. If I were at the taping, I would have asked him to prove he has a wife. What woman would choose to be in a relationship with that? This is the root cause of the male loneliness epidemic, though women’s overachievement, since some constraints were removed fifty years ago, is often blamed. Looking at you, Scott Galloway, though you are right about almost everything else. Who wants these guys? They have work to do, which no one can do for them.

But the line about testosterone implies that this is men’s natural state, that they can’t help it because nature made them this way. But that’s B.S.. Patriarchy is a cultural state, not a natural one. It’s our mythology. These influencers are pumping undiluted shame and what they think is the antidote to shame, bravado, which unfortunately, is still shame.

There is also a potent online counterbalance to the manosphere. There have never been more people who can see the cultural myth for what it is and are actively working to counter it—men like Michael Mead at Mosaic Voices and Ian Mackenzie at the Mythic Masculine, to name a few.

But there were no countervailing voices when my mom and dad needed them. There was none of this leavening in the prevailing myth. My mother couldn’t even get a damn credit card on her own. But the myth of male dominance was never true. Before this, all three Abrahamic cultures were matrilineal and matrilocal. They were womb-forward and child-rearing forward. Women owned the land and had political power. Males displayed; females chose - like so many things, the opposite of how it is today. And unchosen males were cut loose unless they could find a female and live in her house. Incels became lone wolves because not every male has the right to mate.

But stories about reality are not reality. Myths merely propose a theory. My poor father and all his hapless family were made of love the whole time. They just didn’t know it. They couldn’t see their cultural conditioning and therefore never questioned it. They all suffered greatly from what I now think of as a cultural betrayal. Little boys aren’t born with horns, and little girls aren’t born with halos. That’s culture. Little boys are made of love.

I like to think my father knew this after he died, but I don’t want to sound like a woo-woo new age wingnut who sees ghosts everywhere. But the love that surrounded me that day in the car was like being inside a snow globe where the flakes were made of golden light. He was love; I was love. We mingled in the air for two and a half minutes while Joe Cocker sang. It felt like eternity. Then, he withdrew.

He was showing me that he understood, finally. Everything is love. His specific personality colored the love in the car golden. I knew it was him, though it was fifteen years after he died, and it was sort of an ambush. I didn’t doubt it; I still don’t.

He visited me like that one more time, at a Father’s Day Dance Home ritual, probably ten years later. I was dancing with a man I’d just met, and before he let me go, the next song came on. You Are So Beautiful. And just as years before, all the love was there. It was my dad, coming through that man’s eyes and heart, loving me through that man.

I whispered, “My dad is here.”

He nodded. “I know.” And that beautiful stranger surrendered himself further, and held me while I sobbed into his chest. He cried too. Who wouldn’t?

I tear up every time I hear that song, but it’s not the same thing as a visitation. When he was there those two times, it was active. Love as a verb. When he isn’t, it’s sentimental. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how it’s even possible, but it happened.

I just tell myself, “There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio,” and let it go with a wistful smile. I wish I could have known him without all that shame. I wish he’d had the courage to face the music, accept being fired, go into therapy, and make restitution. I wish he’d had the courage to heal. But I’ve gone through the process of emotional debridment, spent my years in the fetal position, and I know why he was afraid. Still, I wish I’d had a father capable of expressing that much love. Now that would have been a father.