The other day I was wondering why it has been so difficult for me to empathize with and understand my dad over the years. He and I didn’t have the best relationship when I was an adolescent, and I experienced great pain because of it. Then it hit me — I didn’t really know anything about him that was worth empathizing with! And not to say that there isn’t anything in his life worthy of understanding, it’s simply that I did not know what it was.
I didn’t know much about my dad before my own lifetime — what he was like as a kid, what his relationships with his parents and brother were like, his school experience, birthdays, etc. My dad was never incredibly open about those things. He would share a few anecdotes about his life once in a while, but for the most part it was a big unknown to me.
So I called him up and just started asking him questions. He was surprised, but went along with it. I found out that his parents never wanted to play with him, and that he didn’t have a good relationship with his older brother. Those facts alone made so many different things click — he became a narcissistic parent because he was starved for attention and affection as a child; he can’t ever be at fault or be the one to blame because that might mean he isn’t valuable. After his dad died, he dropped out of high school and worked 70-80 hours per week to support his mom. Then he eventually worked to support my mom. And on to his next wife. And his next wife. He never had the opportunity to do anything for himself because of how much he’d work, so it was hard for him to make time for me when I was a kid, and that left me feeling neglected.
But then I started thinking about why his parents didn’t want to play with him… and they passed away when I was pretty young and I won’t have a chance to hear their stories. My dad didn’t have a good enough relationship with them to know that information, either. But I bet each parenting defect could be traced causally back farther than I’d like to imagine.
And that just reminds me that this place is so broken. This life I am so lucky to live is beautiful and terrible all at the same time. I will only ever be able to grow in completeness without ever fully experiencing it in this life. My heart feels like it was tethered to a ball and chain, tossed into the ocean and sinking to the bottom. What am I to do?
I can’t fix my dad’s relationship with his parents, or their relationships with their parents, etc. But my dad is still here and I’m still here, and by continuing to try to understand him and get to know myself better, I can break patterns that have long since been established. I think I have already begun breaking old patterns, and parts of me are coming alive that I didn’t know existed.
But my heart is still heavy, and I’m still broken, and this place is still not what it could be. All I can cling to are the glimmers of hope that I’ve seen strewn across my life, hinting that there might be Something worth continuing to grow for. I think empathy is worth digging for, and hope is worth holding onto, and God be with me as I keep reaching for those. I can’t do it alone.
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