My father was short, dark, and too damn handsome for his own good. He had a cleft in his chin and a sense of entitlement. My mother is tall, long legged, with dimples and hazel eyes that look mostly green to me. She has a martyr complex along with an overly nurtured sense of faithfulness and a rather bizarre ideology developed around the “you made your bed now you must lie in it philosophy.” Her response to all of life’s pitfalls and conundrums are the direct result of ill-conceived religious notions. My dad’s ways of dealing were also centered on pleasing god, only in his religion he was the deity. They were truly a match made in heaven or perhaps some place warmer.
I have my mother’s hazel eyes although mine are more changeable. I have my father’s cleft chin although on me it is less pronounced, but I’m told I look like him. And since my mother’s favorite sentence when addressing me as a child, after “little girls don’t do that” was “you’re just like your father,” I imagine the similarities were beyond just the physical.
My father had a rather dark vision (although he wouldn’t see it that way) and his expectations of human beings were quite low. People can’t help being who they are he would say. But he wasn’t being judgmental; he believed he was spouting a universal reality not a negative trait to be judged. He taught me love was selfish but still a wonderful thing to give. We give love to get love. We act in ways that are good and kind because we need to be accepted by others. He believed everything we do we do for selfish reasons. He taught me this wasn’t a good thing or a bad thing, it just was. Altruism does not exist. Not true altruism. We do for others because we want something in return. Whether it is recognition, eternal salvation, to make us feel good about ourselves or some other reason, we are incapable of leaving ourselves out of the equation. We act in ways that are socially acceptable not because we are those things but because we want to be accepted and not shunned by society. And this is perfectly fine and nothing to feel guilty about. Conversely it is also perfectly fine to act in ways that go against the societal grain so to speak. Just expect resistance. I don’t know if this was information a kid really needed to have, but he did teach me critical thinking at a young age.
I’m not sure who I ended up being the most like, I guess I have some of both my parents in me. My father was a most interesting and very intelligent person and certainly had the most dynamic personality in my family. I looked up to him and wanted to emulate him. I learned to think around corners and not to be judgmental from my father. I also learned to fish, hunt, shoot a gun and a bow, throw a baseball, and box from him. He treated me like a person, not like a boy or a girl. He let me do the things that I enjoyed doing and did not feel it necessary to push me in socially acceptable directions. He had his demons that’s for sure. He struggled with a bipolar disorder as well as drug addiction and led a tormented existence at times. He could be challenging as a human being and as a parent. But he loved me and did the best he could and given the choice I wouldn’t have wanted any other dad. From him I learned to be me and not give a damn what anyone else thought about that.
As I have gotten older, I have been able to move past my mother’s rigidity and religiously induced judgmental outlook and see that she gave me more than I imagined. She had her own demons as well and was not able to do the loving mother thing when I was a child. But she has grown. I think my kindness and compassion comes from her. My ability to put myself in the place of others and imagine what that must feel like comes from her. She never would have wanted one queer kid never mind two but she never turned her back on me or mine. She is devoutly religious but she doesn’t preach to me. She just loves me. I am not the child she hoped for but she doesn’t allow that to stop her from showing me love. It's easy to show love when someone is exactly who you wished they would be. It’s a little more difficult when they are nothing you hoped for and your love is tempered by disappointment and confusion. If I could learn to do that even half as well as my mother then I would have accomplished something impressive.
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