Oftentimes, life seems a matter of pure chance, or pure luck, depending upon how you look at it. What shapes and forms us begins so early in our life that it is truly beyond our control, and too late to undo by the time we have developed complex reasoning abilities. Do we get the opportunity to redeem the mistakes of our youth if we get the chance to live long enough? Are we destined to spend our adulthoods undoing the damages of childhood, re-making ourselves into better or worse versions of the children we were?
In this reflective season, as fall fades into winter and the earth takes a pause, before turning around and re-embracing the light following the winter solstice, I have had a rare window into the measure of one man's life....
My husband Glenn and I attended a wake for his birth father on Sunday afternoon, accompanied by my stepson Rex, who grew up with me and my kiddos in our "blender family" as we used to call it, from the age of fifteen onwards. Glenn's parents divorced when he was about 2 1/2, a rare thing for a family in the mid-1950s, and he spent his childhood torn between trying to please a stepfather resentful for how difficult a child he was, and trying to win back the affections of a father lost... his birth father had departed for the Korean war around the time of his birth and though his parents were high school sweethearts, shining stars, Homecoming King and Queen, but they did not survive the effects of separation and Glenn's mom contracting polio, and dad returning to college after the war and meeting someone new, more exciting, without any burdens from the past.
In the intervening years of his childhood, Glenn's birth dad became more and more distant, working long hours and falling into the traditional male role of success defining your life. He was a powerful man in the Bay Area during those years, though I have decided to keep him anonymous in this story. Glenn had stronger ties with his step-mother, who I met for the first time Sunday, and with his two younger half-siblings, also new acquaintances to me, than he did to his father. He would often ride his bicycle over to their house to visit and to play with his younger siblings, and they would all spend time with their dad's parents at their family's summer home in the coastal mountains. His step-mother cared for his grandfather during the last part of his life, refusing to see him put into a care facility.
After eighteen years of marriage, Dad repeated the same pattern, leaving the old and no-longer exciting wife for a new flame, and Glenn's stepmother, educated but with no work experience, was forced to move away and make a new life in reduced circumstances at the same time that he was finishing up high school living in another family's home as his disagreements with his stepfather had come to a head.... they lost touch with each other, and only his father's recent illness brought all of them back into contact.
My husband was able to build a strong and warm and trustful adult relationship over the years with his stepfather, who is a stand-in for my own father, lost to me to Alzheimers' disease when he was 62 and I barely past 30, but was never able to do the same with his birth father. His birth father remarried a woman who chastised his wife for nursing Rex as a baby, leading to a large family row, and as we learned when all four siblings gathered together, managed to alienate each of his four children from them in the three or four years she was married to their father. When his father learned that he had cancer a few years ago, he had not made any contact with my husband in over a decade. My husband had grown used to this distance over the years, and had felt for most of his life that his father didn't have time or concern for him; in some ways he has healed from this deep emotional wound, and in other ways it will always be with him.
When we learned a week ago that Glenn's dad, who had learned a month ago would not be able to tolerate further chemotherapy, had passed away, we both were thankful that his pain was over.... but when we began to discuss attending his wake, many questions rose to the surface for me. Why had I never met this man, in over twelve years of marriage? Why had he shown so little interest in his son's life that only impending death had led him to re-contact my husband? Was my husband as much to blame for this rift? I could only think how I would have given anything to have back the nine years that my own father was lost in the fog of mindlessness, not even recognizing me, before his death in 1998.
Many of the answers to these questions began to take shape as I watched the crowd at the bar where the wake took place. So many people came up to Glenn and my BIL Dave to tell them what a good man their father was, that finally Rex and I fell into a discussion about how it could be possible that they were talking about the same person. Rex was puzzling over the fact that his dad's youngest stepbrother, the son of the fourth wife, was only five years older than him, yet technically his uncle. I was trying to figure out how this person, who was considered so good, could have abandoned first one family of wife and two children, then another, how he could have been so enlightened, yet not stood up for his own children, or tried to establish relationships with them as adults.
I had a lengthy conversation with Glenn's stepmother, who he had told me about during the past few weeks, and about what an important influence she had been, giving him Walden to read as a teen, supporting him in exploring philosophy and considering a career in public service, while the rest of his parents were urging business. She has such a beautiful heart, yet this "good" man had wounded her deeply, left his other children to fend for themselves as they entered adolescence. Glenn's half-sister was a lovely, delicate woman with a will of steel, having hung in there and maintained a relationship of sorts with her father through all the ups and downs. His half-brother had gone through years of trials, losing one wife to a drug overdose and allowing his sister to raise his son.
It was not until I approached my husband, in conversation with his stepbrother's mother-in-law, telling her how Rob had benefitted from the older and wiser person his father finally became that I realized that, yes, these people were talking about the same person, but a person who had changed over the decades, who had taken a strong interest in his fourth wife's son that he had never had the time to show to his own four children, who had served as a mentor for those under his employ, who had dearly loved that fourth wife, now a widow.
My husband had shown great compassion and insight to realize that he wasn't to blame for his father finally seeing the good that can come from parenting, when given the chance to be an influence in his stepson's life, and that young man's mother-in-law, having raised a beautiful and compassionate daughter herself, had the wisdom to understand what Glenn was trying to convey - that he had no animosity towards the younger stepbrother, only happiness that his father finally had the chance to become a good parent and that this young man had benefitted. I was in awe of this man I married, and who I have known to be a wonderful man, but never realized before the cost of that compassion, born of suffering and loss in his own childhood.
Later, while he and his siblings were comparing notes about the wife who had pushed them all away, they were each amazed to realize that, somehow, each had felt like it was they alone that she did not like... yet, each had the same experience and carried the same scars. Now, no longer children, they have been re-connected, with the chance to offer support to each other.
It is not possible to cure the hurts this man caused in bringing up his children, or the damage that he wrought in the lives of the 21-year old mother of my husband, or the 38-year old second wife he abandoned, yet it does not undo the good that he did in others' lives... it has taken me constant pondering, in my waking and my dreaming lives, over the past two days to come to peace with this realization. Each woman, each of these four children, has found their own way out of those hurts, some with greater success and less bitterness than others. I told my husband on our long drive home what a blessing it was for him that he, somewhere along the line, chose not to be bitter, but to be positive and to make the most of the other people and blessings that his life brought to him. It didn't have to end up that way, but he chose wisely, somehow.
At this time of thanksgiving, I can only think about how little it takes to give inspiration, provide support, offer kindness, and yet, how much of that is needed to counteract even one act of negligence, indifference or loss of trust. As families gather, in hopes of drawing sustenance from each other to face the coming darkness of winter, I hope that somehow this tale can serve as a reminder. When given the chance, offer a hand to those you love, give a word of kindness or encouragement, find the time to keep in touch, let them know how much they mean to you. Before it is too late.
Maybe it's the snow on the mountains.. adding to their immense beauty.
Maybe it's all the fun I have had over the years, playing in the snow... yes, I am recycling this photo of DD and her cute lil' snowfriend from a previous post, but I do so love the sun shining on the snow and the chance to be out playing in it!
But this is how happy playing in the winter snow makes me feel.
Maybe it is that SNOW DAY means getting to stay home, with an unexpected day off and no way to get out and address the world's responsibilities. Instead, I can play outside till I'm all wet, then come in and sit and knit.
