No Christmas Phone Call For Dad

Another Christmas, and another one where I won’t be phoning my father. I used to for his birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas — just to try and keep the whole family thing going to some degree. But I gave that up about 10 years ago.

My father wasn’t a very nice man. Well, he was nice to those who knew him — plenty of friends, people enjoyed his company. They just didn’t have to live with him. An alcoholic, he’d go through these rages every three or four months, taking his anger at the world (I assume he was angry at the world) out on his family. Yelling, hitting and lots of breaking of things. He drove his car into a house once. A two-story clubhouse my mother had built for me got reduced to one-story courtesy of a sledgehammer.

He shot up our house twice. The first time, I heard the shots from outside, knowing my mother was in there arguing with him. I assumed they were both dead and recall having a strange calmness about the entire thing. Of course, the shooting made for cool souvenirs to show your friends — here are the holes where the bullets passed through my wall, still unpatched. This dent in my window frame? A bullet bounced off that.

I’m fortunate not to have inherited his alcohol problem. The tendency to break things, I struggled with that for years. When the main male role model in your life routinely destroys things when angry, I guess it kind of rubs off as acceptable behavior. In the past, if I was really upset, I’d break things too. Windows. Foot through a door. Broken staircase banister. Eventually, thankfully, my wife said enough. Stop doing that. So I bought some books on anger management, and maybe I got a few tips from them. Mainly, I just focused on not doing the bad behavior and got past it.

Despite only being a kid, I had a pretty long-term view of the situation. I knew I’d be leaving home at some point, so I just carried on trying to stay out of the way as best I could whenever he was gripped by his anger. Sometimes you couldn’t. Out one night with some friends at an arcade, he showed up there looking for my step-sister. Not finding her, I instead became the target. I never knew when he might show up and for years, one of my biggest fears was that out of the blue, he’d arrive at some public event.

In college, away from him, we’d mainly have contact any time my car broke down. He’d come out to fix it. He was an amazing mechanic, and perhaps I should have paid attention more on all those long cold nights, holding a flashlight for him. I picked up some things, but drop an entire new engine into a car? Forget it — that would be like magic to me.

Once I had a new car, we had less contact — it not breaking down at all. Still, I’d call — even when I moved an entire continent away, I’d make the effort. We didn’t say anything particularly much, but family, you know — there’s that obligation you can feel to make an effort despite all the many negative things.

That came to a stop after my oldest son was born. I called for that, too — left a message and never got a call back. And when his first birthday came around, no call then, either. Not that my son could speak then. But I decided it was one thing to be a bad father in so many ways to me; it was quite another to be a bad grandfather. I guess that’s where I drew the line with feeling the family obligation and realizing I had no need to make that effort. To this day, my boys have no idea he exists. Oddly, they’ve never even asked about “Daddy’s dad.” I’m sure they will at some point; I’ll probably say he wasn’t a very nice man, so I don’t really talk to him.

He’s still out there. My sister continues to talk to him. I confess, there is a small part of me that would like to say proudly these are my boys, these are your grandkids. A very small, very tiny part. It’s not something I think about often; my life has continued without him as a part of it just fine. I’m sure there are some who would say everyone needs to resolve family issues. For many, I’m sure that’s true. But the “they’re family” thing in his case doesn’t work with me and hasn’t for years.

Note: I’ve closed comments for this entry. Appreciate the first ones that came in, but the post wasn’t really looking for sympathy (seriously, I totally am not looking for that nor do I need it). I like to write, and sometimes you want to try writing about personal things as part of the writing, that’s all.