Where Have All The Fathers Gone?

It's Fathers Day - a day that holds a very different meaning for many of us than it did in the past.  For those of us in the Boomer generation, many of us have lost our fathers.  They have either passed away or are feeble of body and / or mind.  Now, celebrating Fathers Day centers on our husbands or others in our lives who have become fathers.  Despite that, for us there is a hole where a father should be.


My father, died on July 7, 1996 at the age of 81 which was the age at which his own father died.  While my Grandfather Vincent died suddenly after having been hit by a car; my father died after having broken a hip and an 8-day hospital stay during which nothing could be done but discuss how quickly he could be moved from ICU into a nursing home.  Since that was not an option he wished to explore, he basically shut his eyes, drifted into a coma, and let death take him.  It was a kind death after an unkind life.  


My father and I never had a close relationship.  He was not a snuggle buddy or game companion.  He didn't enjoy our television watching, and he hated whatever music I listened to.  He was a tightwad and didn't tolerate finicky appetites.  He didn't believe in fads, and, instead, was willing (although sometimes begrudgingly) to invest in things that would last.  For a teen-ager of the 1960's, buying a skirt that would last 20 years was not a top priority for me.  I'd have rather had the cheap item in one of the many discount department stores and thrown it out when the next fad hit.  We never went out to eat, didn't waste food, and were constantly reminded of all our father did for us.  For a number of years, I shared a room (and bed) with my 8-year younger sister (which proved to be the start of yet another rocky relationship) until my mother talked my father into letting me sleep on the hide-a-bed in the den.  The den then became my bedroom, so, in a real sense, I didn't have a place of my own at all.


My father was all about education, and I had no trouble getting him to pay for and transport me to private German, elocution, singing, and piano lessons.  However, that, too, came with a price. Anything below an A was a punishable offense, and piano lessons came with a minimum 3-hour practice session daily (along with an additional hour of voice practice.)  Nothing less than a fever of 104 would excuse me from this requirement which included my birthday and all major holidays.  My father worked a shift that brought him home by 2:30PM, so he would check the clock to see what time I went in to practice.  That didn't bother me as much as the fact that he always tacked on extra time.  If I went in at 3PM and finished at 6PM, he would march me back and tell me I had cheated him of 15 minutes.  It was maddening for me, but if I complained, he'd tack on more time.


At 17, I quit piano lessons and my father gave the Steinway Grand that had been my 16th birthday gift to my sister.  At 18, I went away to college for a year, but returned home to commute because my father insisted that I was just too far away.  At 20, I packed everything else in.  I'd had enough.  I turned in my car keys, packed only the few things I was allowed to take, moved out of the house and was married less than six weeks later to someone I'd met less than six months previously - my husband now of 42 years.  


My father, in an effort, to provide a better life for his daughters than he had had, just pushed too much.  He'd spent the entire period of World War II as a Polish prisoner of war and had been housed in various camps through the Nazi occupied area.  An American citizen by birth, he found his way back to this country where he quickly found a job in the woolen mills of Lawrence, MA, and married my mother, a first generation Polish-American who had served as a nurse in the Pacific during WWII.  


The discipline he brought into his father-daughter relationship was too strict, and I soon saw him as a tyrannical and emotionally abusive individual.  I still do.  But now, I understand why he was so.  He never talked about his life during the war years; we never knew that he was a closet alcoholic (until my sister went off to college) who made my mother's life miserable.  During his last years, he deteriorated from alcoholism, rheumatoid arthritis, and such severe bone loss that he lost nearly a foot in height and became barrel chested - his skeleton pressing on and moving his vital organs about.  But it was during his last year that I found the father that was inside this man - the father who'd never made himself available to me.  


I hadn't spoken to my father for several years, but I ran into my mother at her sister's funeral, and she asked - basically begged - me to come and see him.  The next day, I did. For that year, we spent each holiday together.  I left my then grown children and husband to fend for themselves while I spent as much time with my father as I could.  Now unable to care for himself and to buy, hide, and drink Scotch, he turned to conversation and showed, for once, a sincere interest in me as a person.  He was proud I had gone back to college and that I had received my degree summa cum laude two months before he died.  I was headed to grad school in the fall.  I think we forgave each other many things during that time, and I came to realize that it was not that he didn't love me, but that he didn't know how.  


I have recently found that many Jewish people who survived the Holocaust never even told their children they were there.  The experience is one that was so horrific that it changed much of the internal mechanism of those people who (barely) made it through alive.  Just because my father was a Polish Catholic U.S. citizen doesn't make his story much sweeter, I'm sure.  


I would not trade that year of my life with my father for anything.  Fathers Day is bittersweet for me now, as I see my son and my husband in the same situation for different reasons.  My son doesn't speak to his father, has no respect for him, and has shut him out of his life.  I see the intense pain it has caused my husband - a pain his loving daughter cannot erase, no matter how hard she tries to.  I hope some day, my son will too discover just how much his father loved him.  I also hope he doesn't wait until his father's last year to find out.  

A Single Lady

Yesterday I read an essay by Kate Bolick which was entitled "All the Single Ladies."  It had originally been published in The Atlantic, and it caught my eye because even though I have been married for 42 years, my daughter is "a single lady" at age 38.  This has been a bit of a sore spot in an otherwise strong (at least I think) mother-daughter relationship.  Her single status has caused me angst and frustration, though she seems to be quite content and tells me that she enjoys her single life.  


Ms Bolick is a single lady about the age of my daughter who is not quite as content about her single status, always assuming it would be temporary until she found the right man.  But Bolick's curiosity got the better of her it seems, and she sought to do some research on single women and why there seems to be so many of them these days.  Her exhaustive article references many books, personal conversations, statistics, and personal experiences that provided me with the tools I needed to understand my daughter's point of view.  


It appears that the age in which I grew up was part of only a relatively short period when the nuclear family and marriage were considered to be the cornerstone of American society (if not that of the civilized world).  We watched television shows such as "Leave it to Beaver," "Father Knows Best," and "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" where two parents and several fairly well-behaved and lovable children shared a household where, despite a few bumps in the road of life, everything worked out in the end.  Even in "My Three Sons" and "Bachelor Father" in which a child /children were brought up without the traditional mother/father team, a mother-type figure was introduced to take her place.  And "Bachelor Father" soon added a step-mom to round out the family.  


Much has changed in our society since these days of sanitized television representations of the family.   The women's movement changed it all.  In many segments of our society, Bolick points out, men are now the minority.  These area include the workforce and college, and where the gender majority shift changes, sexual politics change as well.  Bolick goes into a lot of detail and explains it well, so please access her article if you wish.  I'll add the link below.  


I realized that my daughter is one of many women who may live a single life and do so quite happily and that my angst over her being "alone" and my frustration that there will be no grandchildren to buy cute little clothes for or take to the movies is a product of the times in which I grew up.  In other words, it's my problem, not hers. In the 50's and 60's, it was assumed and expected that you would get married, have children, have grandchildren, retire comfortably, perhaps travel, and pleasantly die in your bed while sleeping.  It wasn't quite a fairy tale, but it may well have been.  


Looking back at the 50's, I notice that in all of these family television shows, Father didn't always know best.  Mother basically solved the problems, letting father think he had done so.  Mother was a walking painting of perfection in her shirtwaist dress, heels, and jewelry, while keeping the house perfectly spotless in her equally spotless apron.  She was the magician who protected the family from the cruel realities of dirty toilets and bug infestations.  


My mother was like that.   She may have worn capri pants instead of a skirt and sneakers instead of heels, but she kept the wheels of the homestead turning.  In truth, she dealt with a domineering husband, the isolation of not driving, a dependence on prescription medications, my father's alcoholism, and panic disorder.  She pushed me and my sister to become strong independent women, probably because deep down she knew she could have been (She had served in the Army during WWII as a nurse) but gave it up to live the "American Dream" of marriage, home, and children.  She spent years taking care of my father who suffered from Rheumatoid Arthritis and for her hard work and dedication to husband and family, she was rewarded with a ten-year decline with Alzheimer's Disease before she died.  


For me, full independence and the single life were still considered to be for those women who could "find" a husband. I was encouraged to get an education, but most of the girls in my all-girls college were husband hunting. They saw their job as the "woman behind the man."  Most of them married; many worked.  Those whose marriages didn't last felt and probably still feel like failures.  


 My daughter has escaped that.  She lives in a world where marriage and children are choices, and a woman who chooses to live alone is not considered a spinster who has something wrong with her.  While women still do not make dollar for dollar what men earn in the job market, women are moving into all aspects of the job market, so this too will change.  The professional woman, the woman who is "boss" is not longer the anomaly.  And slowly, women are moving further and further into the political arena where their voices will make the biggest impact.  


So while I still worry that my daughter will be "alone" in her old age, I realize that most of us are. She has a career, is financially stable, and has a lovely group of friends who care about her.  And while I miss not having those grandchildren I dreamed about for decades, I do have some demanding, yet adorable, cats, and there are plenty more out there looking for some love and attention.  


The world changes.  It doesn't belong to us alone.  


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/5/

Memorial Day: How Different It Has Become

As a child going to school, Memorial Day meant three more weeks of school before the freedom of summer vacation and the freedom it brought to spend my time doing things I wanted rather than things I was required to do.  In the last decade or two, Memorial Day weekend (and, of course, now it is a weekend) is much more somber than it used to be.  Each year, more and more of the people I know have left us, and I find myself to be the matriarch of my family.  


I never knew my grandmothers.  One died in Poland during WWII; the other died here just before WWII and I grew up visiting her grave with my mother.  I lost my first grandfather at 16 and my second and most beloved grandfather ten days before my 18th birthday.  There were some great aunts and uncles left - most of them I knew only barely (We were not a close knit Polish family), but for me, the oldest generation was gone.


The second generation started to pass on when I was 24 and expecting my first child.  My uncle died of a heart attack at the age of 52.  Every few years after that, another relative would leave this earth.  Death and dying is part of everyone's family.  When my children were 8 and 5, we lost my father-in-law to cancer.  Losing the first parent is always hard.  It propels you into a different world of responsibility.  We realized that with him gone, my mother-in-law would have only us (My husband was her only child), and as she had few friends and didn't drive, we soon realized that the only way to properly look after her was to move her into our home, where she stayed for the next 22 years.  


My husband and I have now been married 42 years and the last of our relatives from the generation above us passed away in December.  She was a cousin of my father's whose daughter is approximately seven hours younger than I am.  Now, the generation above my husband and I is gone in our families.  Parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins of that generation have all bid farewell to their families and their lives.  Some have left generations to follow.  Others have not.  They are the ends of their respective lines.  


As my husband and I go around to grave sites tomorrow, we will be sadly reminded that we are the next generation departing.  We have already lost classmates and friends - all too young in this day and age of advanced medical care and early diagnosis.  We open the obituary page of our local newspaper gingerly each day wondering which familiar name we will see next.  As with more and more people of our generation, we see the end of the line.  While we have two children, we have no grandchildren, and we see none in the future.  We are starting to think we need to make some arrangements for family pictures, documents, and meaningful items, so that they don't end up in a landfill or yard sale somewhere.  


The world is changing.  Big families are harder to find.  Having children does not necessarily mean grandchildren will follow.  For some of us the mourners will be few or even none.  So on this Memorial Day weekend, the most important thing for us to remember is that while those love have gone from us and left our lives emptier, we need to fill those empty spaces with full days and new experiences to the level that our finances and bodies will allow.  Time passes and it is fleeting.  

Watching Too Closely

Watching too closely 

In the early 1980's, Beth Gutcheon published the only novel I've ever read that made me cry.  It was "Still Missing," the story of Alex Selky, a boy of nearly 7, who lived with this divorced mother, a professor at a New York University.  Alex walked to school one day and never returned.  His mother, looking more and more like a lunatic as the book progressed, hounded the detective on the case, begged people to put up posters, and did just about anything you were I would have done if our children had been missing.  I cried because at the end of the book, because of a stray lead and the input of a questionably credible psychic, Alex is located by the intrepid detective who bring Alex home to his mother amid a convoy of police cruisers.  I left tear drops on the last pages of my library's copy of my book.  


The crying wasn't over.  In 1982, Kate Nelligan and Judd Hirsh played mother and detective to life in a move closely mirroring the book,although titled "Still Missing."  Nelligan's angry and determined mother and Hirsh's frustrated but sympathetic detective (He's a father himself of a boy the same age), play off each other beautifully It is Hirsh who finds the missing boy and brings him home, accompanied by and passing an array of police cars driven by dedicated men who all want to be part of something happy for a change.  I have seen this movie at least a dozen times, and I cry shamelessly each time. 


Thirty-three years ago today, Etan Patz, the model for Gutcheon's novel is not coming home.  He will never come home.  Thirty-three years ago, it is reported that he was lured with candy into a convenience store where he was brutally murdered and his body dumped.  Apparently, recent cold-case efforts to find Patz's remains led to some retrieved "memories" about a man who admitted to killing a child in 1979.  Where this case goes from here, time will tell, and while we are all considered innocent until proven guilty, it appears that this case will soon be stamped "closed."  


The disappearance of Etan Patz rocked the world of parents and changed the world of children forever.  My children were both pre-school aged when Etan Patz was abducted.  We lived in a suburban area where all the children on the street played together and no one worried about the children being outside alone.  "Come home when the streets lights come on" was still the rallying cry of moms in the neighborhood.  Most of the children had two-parent families; mothers were often home, and if your child wasn't in the yard, s/he was a house of two down the street.  I was lucky in that my in-laws lived in the third house down, and so often my kids were over there eating grilled cheese sandwiches and watching TV with Grandpa.  


But over the years, as people became more aware of children missing, abducted, molested, and otherwise harmed, the freedom of children was squashed as the efforts to keep children safe were expanded, almost to a point of idiocy.  Parent started watching their children closely, driving them everyone and picking them up.  Children were no longer able to bicycle to the park or run around with their friends.  Obesity levels in children are not solely because of fast food.  We don't let kids walk or bicycle, or roller skate, skateboard anywhere.  Parents who don't glue themselves to their children are considered neglectful.  I can only imagine how often Child and Family Service people would have knocked on my door or my mother's door when I was young after finding my daughter (or me at the age of 8, 9, or 10) over a half mile from home.  


I'm reading more and more stories of children who have to be picked up from school, walked by a parent, or take the bus because the child lives three houses away from school.  It's ridiculous  We need to teach children how to be safe, not create a world where they are sheltered from one evil but exposed to another.  We keep them under our roofs on sunny days when they should be playing outside, and while we're not looking over their shoulders, they are playing violent video games, or being preyed upon on the internet.  We've only traded one ill for another one, while still providing few tools these children can use as they grow older.  


Etan Patz is never coming home escorted by blue lights, sirens and the joyful faces of law enforcement people.  Many other children are never coming home either.  I'm not foolish enough to think that no child will ever again be harmed.  When I was twelve, my school chum Cheryl Laird, was abducted, assaulted, and brutally murdered - her body having been dumped less than a mile from my house.  Violence is not new. I do think, however, we have pushed the pendulum too far in the other direction.  We need to teach children, not watchdog them.  I hope the parents of Etan Patz do not hold themselves responsible for letting him walk to the bus stop unescorted that day.  They did nothing wrong.