I Wish I Knew My Father Even Though I “Knew” Him.

[Trigger Warning – Domestic Violence, Abuse, Death]

7:00pm, or later. The door slammed shut. Dad was home. Home from his long daily commute to New York City. From his taxi ride to the train station and one hour train ride under the Hudson into the city where he’d cross under a tunnel and go up an escalator to one penn plaza where he worked from the first day of his career to his last analyzing the risk of pension plans and pitching his firm’s services to companies in need of guidance.

I hid in my room, knowing what followed would likely be my mother complaining to him about how I failed to do something that day and request my much-anticipated punishment. They would fight for a bit, because that’s what they always did, and if I was lucky the fight topic would shift away from me and I could continue feeling bad about what I failed to do anyway. Or I’d be called downstairs, my name screamed loudly, and I’d walk down prepared for my punishment.

This only during my early years. It all must have stopped by the time I was 7. But the memories of those many nights are strong. I’m not sure what I as an under 7 year old could have done that merited those disciplinary beatings, though it sounds like I didn’t clean my room or do my homework. I didn’t listen to my mother. Not that he did either. But that wasn’t the point. It seemed particularly enjoyable for him to have control and slip his belt off around his morbidly obese waist to crack it against my behind, occasionally missing and hitting my back as I squirmed in pain.

My behavior never actually changed. All this did was make me more committed to not listening to him. I recall crying in pain but never willing to say I’m sorry or admit to any wrong. So I just let him beat me until he was done with it. Most times it probably wasn’t that long. A few times, I assume now he had a rough day, and it went on for a while. Once my shirt slipped up and he happened to be using his belt backwards with the buckle end hitting my bare flesh. I spent the next hour studying the welt on my back in my closet’s mirrored doors, crying, and telling myself over and over again how awful of a person I must be to deserve this.

It was difficult to ever get to know my father, and I feel I knew my father best bent over his bed, being beaten by him. I remember once I turned around and saw the rage in his eyes. It wasn’t just about my not having cleaned my room. Though that was the inciting incident. It was clearly his disappointment in me not being the perfect child. Perhaps also his belief in me that I could be so much better. The disappointment hurt far worse than the lashings ever would. But also in that rage, in the burning snap of belt against my back, there was belief that I was so much better than I was. Belief from the man who I respected without question. Who knew everything. And I felt horrible for disappointing him but quickly addicted to this method of telling me that he thought I could be so much more than I was. While I was a failure, he beat me because I had the potential to be a success.

Many years later, as my father lie dying in the hospital, as he lost his mind and the worst of him came out while he was strapped to a gurney and lashing at the nurses, I saw that rage again. It wasn’t exactly dormant through the years, as he frequently would shove my mother across the room and call her names. Once, when I arranged a surprise party for his 60th birthday, he got so enraged as my mother took photos of him arriving that he grabbed the $700 camera I had purchased for her as a gift and hurled it to the floor.

He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Many new him for his generosity, his sharp intellect and passion for learning, his warm-hearted laugh. But he was always the victim of his environment. Always looking for a scapegoat to lay the blame on when things didn’t go his way, or god forbid anyone criticize him.

As the oldest of six–five boys and one girl–in a working class household, he seemed to be left to his own devices as he was not only the first born but also the most introverted and the least of a trouble maker. While his Italian-Slovakian father–who grew up without a father and with a strict Slovakian Catholic mother–was beating his brothers into submission, it sounds like he was typically sitting quietly in his room reading a book.

School came easy to him. Valedictorian of his high school with acceptance and scholarship to MIT, but he went to a state school instead, which he always said he regretted. And then, not too far into his masters study in theoretical physics at Cornell, he dropped out. It just went from being too easy to too hard overnight, it sounds like. He only knew how to handle life when it was easy. When everyone admired his intellect. When he didn’t have to try. So it seems.

And he met my mother while in college, so she was there by his side through all of that. When cleaning out the house recently we found love letters she wrote him that were sweeter than cotton candy. I couldn’t imagine my parents having this kind of relationship. My father never respected my mother. But perhaps early on he enjoyed her admiration. Though I’m told he knocked her glasses off her face on their honeymoon, so that clearly didn’t last long. She called the police a few times years later, but never left him. Once or twice, in my preteen years, I rushed down the stairs to separate them to try to protect her, even though it’s likely they were fighting about me in the first place.

It is difficult to both admire my father, be sad for his failed dreams, and angry at his inability to care for others outside of how their existence would feed into his idealistic self image. Clearly he was depressed, no man who weighs that much is a happy man. But he seemed to find contentment listening to classical music or watching his movies or baseball games or working out physics equations to try to keep his mind sharp through old age. He had a few friends from his early years that stuck with him, who maybe knew him before he got so bitter.

I’ll never be able to unsee the comic strip of the last months of his life. When his mind lost itself. When for a solid month he didn’t remember who I was. Then, somehow, his memory came back. I don’t want to relive that in words right now. But it was all very traumatizing. If there was one constant in my life it was this man who was at least consistent in his stubborn ways, always with an answer, highly anxious but not showing it, ready to debate any point and gaslight you into oblivion. But all that was gone and what was left was the child he long lost, afraid, confused, and again left alone for his final breaths.

Despite all of this I miss him more than the world and I’d give anything to bring him back. I wish I asked him a thousand more questions, but it is unlikely he would answer them anyway. He could talk about anything at all except himself. I don’t know if he knew himself, if he ever spent a moment ruminating on how he could be better. Certainly he worried about paying the bills and likely the loss or addition of a client. But as he so harshly judged everyone around him, did he ever once question his own ways, outside of maybe the failure in graduate school and the acceptance of an ordinary life?

I’ll never know. Because it seems no one really knew him. And I only knew him in those moments of rage, his eyes widened and flesh red, taking out his disappointment on all of us. Because we weren’t grateful or grateful enough. Because we weren’t perfect. Maybe because he wasn’t perfect. But of course he would never admit that.