There is a country song I like to sing at karaoke sometimes because it reminds me of my father, deceased now for 30 years. It’s called “Daddy’s Hands” by Holly Dunn. “Daddy’s hands weren’t always gentle, but I’ve come to understand, there was always love in Daddy’s hands.”
My Dad was a gruff and gritty child of the Depression. Born in 1931, he grew up on a farm in the hills of southern Missouri in the upper Ozark Mountains. After serving in the Army, in Korea, he studied Agriculture at the University of Missouri. He met my mother there, a Steven’s College girl from a well-to-do, high society, Indianapolis family. Much to her father’s dismay, they married.
I was born slightly less than 9 months later, followed by my next sister 11-1/2 months after that, another girl a year and half later, and then my brother 10 years in. For all intents and purposes, we appeared to be the classic American family. Dad was a General Contractor and Real Estate Broker and my Mom was a housewife. That’s the way it was done in the sixties, for the most part.
But, there were dark corners in that perfect family. Times, when we all had to cover our bruises before facing the world and the statement “What goes on in this family, stays in this family” was drilled in at an early age. I knew what the word ‘discretion’ meant when I was 3. I’ve seen things I try not to remember now. I watched my Dad beat my mother mercilessly on too many occasions. My mother was a wonderful, loving spirit, which made it even harder to witness. None of us was spared. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” God forbid, any of us be spoiled.
It was a tense childhood. We were often clueless as to what we had done to deserve the punishment he wrought. I walked on eggshells, tried to remain invisible, and spent a great deal of time hiding in the closet, where I would read whatever was available. Usually the dictionary, the phone book, and later on, a very old set of encyclopedias. I remember being a nervous and insecure child. I started secretly smoking cigarettes at 14. No one knew. It helped me to relax.
We learned later on that Dad suffered from something called Manic Depression. A person suffering from this affliction experiences periods of great highs, high energy, high clarity, motivation and drive followed by periods of deep, dark, debilitating depression. As you can imagine, having a parent with this affliction can be extremely confusing and traumatizing for a child. One day, your father is a lovable, fun person and the next, he’s yelling and beating the crap out of everyone in the family.
Learning of his ailment was a relief, for me anyway. It was proof that he wasn’t a horrible person. He simply suffered from a horrible condition. It showed me that I wasn’t crazy for loving the man.
The doctor put him on a drug called Lithium which transformed him. I’m not saying he never yelled after that, but the extremes were leveled out greatly. I believe the beatings stopped then, too, although I was about 16 at the time and had a car, so I was, understandably, rarely home.
A few years after graduating from high school, I took a job on the other side of the country. One day, my co-worker answered the telephone, got a strange look on her face, blushed, and then handed me the phone. It was my Dad. I asked him what he had said to my co-worker to make her blush. He said he thought it was me and so he had said “I love you.” That was the first and only time he ever said that to me.
A few months after that, he died in a scuba diving accident.
The Joy and Pain of Being 50 Something 