Daddy Dearest
“People need truth the way they need air. They’re desperate for it. Even when you risk rejection, telling your truth clears the field for others to tell theirs.”
There’s a harsh inevitability with life that we often feel like we are impervious to—until it happens. We are going to lose the people we love, but we wear a cloak of protection from loss. We remove ourselves from it, keep it separate. It’s seemingly far removed, and it won’t happen for a very long time. Why worry about it now? It’s a common story. It keeps us disconnected, but deep down we know it’s unavoidable. Most of us will lose our parents in our lifetimes. It’s a stern reminder of our impermanence. We are given one short and sweet life-- and an ending where the book is closed, slowly or all at once. It can be the chapter we fear the most. As the years tick on and I get older, I’ve tried to prepare myself for it—the loss of a parent.
My Dad hasn’t taken care of himself in the last few years the way he used to, and I knew the time would come sooner than I’d want it to. I was aware that there would be a day when my Dad would have one foot on his grave and the other on his lifeforce, his breath, legs stretched between the two where he might have a choice to make. I prepared, but there’s never enough preparation I could count on to protect myself when it came to getting the call. Wincing before the impact won’t protect you from anything; it will just give you wrinkles. I was still wincing, I knew it was coming.
“It’s your Dad,” my Mom texted me, early morning. I happened to glance at my phone when I was at work. “I took him to the hospital this morning. Call me when you can.”
As a little girl, I found it funny to sneak up on Dad while he was napping in the middle of a summer afternoon, in his big blue Dad chair, so I could blow on the top of his head. My Dad and my brother used to gang up on me, with one pinning me down as the other one would blow on my tummy sending me into a frenzy of ticklish resistance until I was blue in the face. I needed payback, and I knew to attack when my Dad was vulnerable and asleep.
A baseball game would be playing, the volume low in the background, and the soothing, lullaby-like tone of the announcer quietly filled the room, giving the perfect buffer. The voice disguised the sound of the fibers in the carpet as they gave way under my feet, and I’d tip-toe across the floor of the den where my Dad slept. I’d take each step, with careful precision and balance that I had learned through years of ballet, and approached the center of the room where his chair lived. He’d be lying there, hunched over, his chin drooping close to his chest and his heavy, audible breathing became louder as it oscillated between snores. Sometimes he’d snore so aggressively it would shake him half awake, where he’d immediately fall back into his afternoon comatose. I’d hold my breath, standing there paralyzed in my tracks, frozen and still from the threat of being caught. I’d be on my toes, peering out of the corner of my eye with my hand covering my mouth to quiet the giggles as they wanted to escape from my belly. As soon as I knew I was safe, I’d continue my ninja-like prowess to the chair in the middle of the room.
I’d find the perfect moment to make my way from the ground, behind his big blue chair and blow on the top of his bald, glowing head.
“Amanda!!” He’d scream after me from being startled awake, as I scampered out of the den as fast as I could. He’d shake his head and mutter “Dog gone it!” A weird thing to say, but it was a repeated phrase, the thing he said when his kids were annoying him or his favorite football team fumbled the ball. “Dog gone it!” was a staple in his phrase vocabulary. I imagine his Dad said the same thing, when he was up to no good, just like me as a rambunctious kid. He’d continue to shake his head as he takes off his glasses, examining them by turning them on both sides, then wiping the lenses on his shirt. He probably laughed to himself as he rubbed the tops on the rough cotton, between his index finger and thumb, because a little girl with mischief in her bones is something you just have to shake your head at.
It was payback for all the times he tickled me until I was blue in the face. All my mischief was always a disguise for wanting his attention. For wanting his love.
In the beginning of all of this, I had a reoccurring dream where I kept blowing on the top of his head and he wouldn’t wake up. My subconscious was hanging onto the last words in dream world, and I’d be screaming, “Wake up, Dad!” I’d be startled awake, in a puddle of sweat from my anxiety and sticky Hawaiian air, only hearing the symphony of my pounding heart and the buzzing ceiling fan.
Today, I’m one of the luckiest girls alive to have my Dad still breathing. It’s a privilege I may have taken for granted, because it’s something we all eventually lose. Some leave us too soon. I’m one of the lucky ones who still has a Dad.
But on a Friday smack dab in the middle of summertime, I thought I’d have to prepare to lose him.
The ICU nurses kept telling my Mom how much they loved my Dad as a patient, and part of me wants to laugh because it’s probably the only time Mike Blackwell will ever listen to anyone. I guess the prospect of death has its way of humbling people and making his hard head a little softer. They tell him they need to take blood, and he says “okay” with a half smile, even though he hates needles, in the same tone that he uses when we hang up the phone.
Before he got sick, I’d call him every once in a while, which is probably not often enough. “Okay” he says, in his Dad voice, after overexaggerating a big tale of his fishing adventures where he catches fish that are bigger than me. Because according to Mike Blackwell, the fish are always bigger than me. He laughs when I throw in a jab about the time we went bass fishing, and I caught more fish than him. “I was too busy untangling your line!” he says, half laughing and half talking.
Touché, Dad. We sure do have a lot to untangle, though, don’t we?
“Okay” he says, and it brings me comfort because I call him to talk about fishing because it always gets him talking. Really, all I want is to hear is his voice.
“Okay,” he says to the nurse one morning as she checks on my weak, but tough as nails Dad, who came in with his insides bursting thinking it was “just a stomach thing” and he would be okay. He’s now missing his spleen in the same way you throw away a shattered wine glass from dropping it. It’s in pieces after bursting and you can’t put it back together—best to just throw it away. I picture the surgeon going into his body, much like that game “Operation” I’d play as a kid, removing organs, slowly and carefully as to not sound the buzzer. But his body has been buzzing, for probably far too long. Part of his colon he once had is now gone, too, and this little hole in his bladder is repaired. His kidneys weren’t functioning very well post-op, and he was having a lot of trouble breathing. He was, and still is, a mess. His incision runs from the top of his breast bone down to the bottom of his navel, some battle scars from not opening the hood of the car often enough for a tune up.
His soon-to-be scar is proof that sometimes you need to be cut open in order to be sewn back together.
It’s funny when we are shaken awake by the sleeping monster, the reality and the realization that our parents are human, and one day they will ultimately be gone. Tears can easily start to well when we prepare ourselves to accept the idea that our Dads might not be there with us for the milestones. For the aisle walking, the grandkids, the fishing trips and new memories that have yet to be created. Thinking that he would never have been able to meet his granddaughter and hear a little voice screech “Grandpa!!”, as he blows on her belly, just as he did to me—can feel nothing short of jarring. These visions came to me the second I called the ICU nurse so I could talk to my Dad before he went into surgery.
“I’m sorry, sweetie.” she said. “We had to take him to surgery. His kidneys were failing and your Dad is very sick. But he can get through this, and I’ll tell him you called when he wakes up.”
“But what if he didn’t wake up?” I thought.
My “trauma brain” tends to reach for the worst-case scenario on first instinct. My trauma brain is here to protect me.
I’ve done a lot of work around my Dad. He’s usually the topic that comes up when I’m being forced to “go deeper” and find the root of some suffering, the root of the things that trigger me. The root of what makes me human. The reality of my Dad, though, is he’s a human too. Humans are fragile but resilient creatures, and my Dad is no exception.
The older I get, the more space and time goes by between visits and time spent together. I see him less and less. When I do get to see him, it always hits me hard. Time has begun to wear heavy on Mike Blackwell. Every chance I get to I face him, I look into his bright blue eyes and search for something, anything, to give me hope that he still has something to give. My Dads eyes have lost life each and every time we reunite.
Mike Blackwell has layers. He’s always been somewhat of a mystery. The answers to the mystery are covered beneath a firm wall of armor. The kind that blocks out tough feelings and expression. Underneath his armor is likely stuffed to the brim with shame and depression and low self worth and it has caused a ruckus in his body. His armor kept everything trapped with nowhere to go.I don’t know this as a fact, but I know trauma. I know how it works. I know how it manifests. I understand how it shows up in relationships with ourselves and those around us. My Dad is a perfect example of what misunderstood trauma looks like, but if he ever read this, he’d tell me it was bullshit. To each his own.
Whenever I’m home and doing the dishes in my parents’ house, I watch him from the kitchen window that overlooks the backyard. He sits in his chair with his shoulders slumped and he stares into nothingness. “Oh, there Dad is! Watching the grass grow!” We joke that he is watching the grass grow, but I see a storm brewing inside of his head. I always wonder what goes on in there. I’m sure in those moments, his body is screaming at him. Help me, it says. I’m hurting. But he never asked for help. I imagine his thoughts as he sits there, with his pain, and continues his staring contest with nothingness.
I am not healthy and I can’t commit to healing. I am also not sick enough to ask for help. I am not strong enough to heal. I am fearful, so I’ll just ignore it. I’m not worth fighting for. I am not worth healing for. I can’t endure the pain of facing my pain because it will mean I will have to face my life. I do not love myself enough to live comfortably. I do not deserve wellness. I must deserve my suffering.
My Dad has a subconscious contract with himself in that he doesn’t deserve to feel healthy, if this wasn’t the case then he would have never bargained with his mortality. This is a product of years of neglect. This is a product of his own wounded inner child. We neglect ourselves when we don’t feel worthy, and there’s a shadow buried deep inside that kept him from asking for help when he needed it. I’ve wanted to shake him awake from his own suffering so many years, and part of my work is to learn how to let go. I can’t control my Dad, and I can’t control his behaviors. I can’t fix him. I can’t convince him that his mental health has been the thing that has run his life and that healing is the hardest and most beautiful thing he will ever do. “What’s healing anyway? Sounds like some hippie crap?” He’s never said this, but if I started the conversation with him, it would likely be somewhere along these lines. Baby boomers man, they sure are hard headed.
“Pretty good” was a common phrase my Dad used along with “dog gone it”. The year I won Nationals, my Mom came with me to Cape Cod-- she served as my back-bone to my skating while my Dad on the sidelines, the silent observer. The kind of support where he would come to the local events if they didn’t require extensive travel. Nothing to go out of his way.
I just won. After hugging friends, my coach and my Mom in the stands, I kept saying “I’m National Champion!” because saying it out loud made it real. I still had my skates on as I climbed to the top of the bleachers, and my Mom hands me her phone and says,
“Do you want to call Dad?”
“Sure.” I said with hesitation. I knew to have low expectations, a survival strategy for all the years of his own high expectations and my feelings of inadequacy.
“Ah Hello?” he says, just as he always does.
“Hi Dad, it’s your daughter.”
“Hello.”
Pause.
“Well, I won?”
Instead of punctuating an amazing, hard-work-filled destiny I created for myself with the likes of an exclamation point, the 9-year-old inside of me cowered behind a question mark. That 3-word sentence held such weight, such power, such accomplishment, and I was playing small. A powerful sentence framed into a question all because I knew what I was going to hear.
“That’s pretty good,” he said.
Pretty good. Winning nationals was pretty good.
I hung up the phone and walked down the hallway to be interviewed by IceNetwork, casting my head downward as my eyes catch the sparkle on my dress as it hits the fluorescent arena lighting. “Will it ever be enough?” I thought. It was a dream come true-- my face would later be smack dab in the center of US Figure Skating’s homepage with a headline saying “Balletic Blackwell Wins Gold Ladies”. It was still only pretty good.
It turns out that my Dad doesn’t know how to express himself. No kidding, right? The truth was, pretty good meant I’m proud of you. Look what you did. I know how hard you worked. I wish I could have been there. You’re amazing. I love you.
A few months ago, years after the day I won Nationals, I found out that he was on the internet the day I skated for most of the afternoon. He sat there refreshing the results page until he saw my name at the top. I can imagine his heart swell and his eyes beam when he saw:
1. Amanda Blackwell – Channel Islands Figure Skating Club
…but clamoring up when he heard my voice over the phone because no one taught him how to express himself. No one taught him how he needed to show love to his daughter. How his daughter needed him to show how he loves her.
But knowing that my Dad was staring at the computer screen that afternoon tells me everything I need to know. He’s doing the best he can.
Part of my own healing, with my own experiences with my Dad, means that I have (try to have) the awareness to understand and empathize for this man-- and how his behaviors, lack of emotional availability, abandonment, alcoholism—really had nothing to do with me. He was just a little boy at one time, and he had his own programming and ways his mind adapted and molded so he could receive love. His parents had high expectations too, and he had likely parented me in a similar way. It’s a vicious cycle.
There’s a wrench, a tool, I’ve used in my adulthood when I dig under the hood and zoom in. I zoom into my Dad’s experience, not just my own. Getting closer surprisingly enables me to see the big picture. Gaining new perspective gives the chance for understanding, for compassion. It’s difficult to hold a microscope to someone else’s experience and not feel compassion. To get closer. To go deeper. To quiet the incessant seeking and blaming I’ve placed onto someone who he has simply done the best he can. That phrase, “hurt people hurt people” is the thing that helps me understand that people will usually only meet you where they can meet themselves.
And my Dad met himself at a tipping point.
My Mom tells a story about me as a baby, and how I always made a lot of noise. A baby usually doesn’t have anything significant to say, since our language hasn’t been developed, but I think I was brought to this planet to make some noise. I came out of the womb loud and noisy, like my brother says, “Amanda was born a mouth, then grew around it.” The loudness and jibber jabber has eventually turned to words, a gift I believe Dad has passed onto me, but as a baby I was constantly jabbering. Mom lights up when she describes one night when my Dad got home from work, as he worked the swing shift and was the wee hours of the morning—a typical schedule for a sportswriter to meet next day deadlines. She woke up to find him hovered over my crib, watching me. I was making noise, nothing of substance, but making noise nonetheless. She describes the streetlights from the window giving just enough light to see the outlines of his features, and he had a dead pan stare at his little girl with a huge smile on his face. She says he sat there for quite a while, since he thought no one was watching. He likely thought I was the most beautiful, loud, jabbering baby he’d ever seen.
Sometimes I forget the fact that the baby he was enamored with was in fact me, because I have no memory of it and the things I remember tend to fall under the same category of “that’s pretty good.” But somehow there’s undercurrents in my mind that knows the jabbering baby, the one who was loved unconditionally, was me. The story shifts. The gap lessens. My Dad’s mortality has earthquake my brain to allow the story, the not-good-enoughs, the traumas, all of it-- to shift. There’s still the same love there. He’s still my Dad.
I promise I’ll call him more. I promise I’ll go home a little more, once this virus mess is over. I promise I won’t take a single day he’s around for granted.
If you still have family around-- tell them you love them, forgive them, and know that the love will always be unconditional regardless of a different, learned belief system. Healing your relationships is possible. Do it before it’s too late, dog gone it.