Know Thyself 🌈

My father. Coming out. Staring at monsters. Monsters staring back.

 Coming Out

After she died, my father told me that I’d made my mother choose. He told me this right on the heels of telling me that when she found out she was pregnant with me, she cried. He made both comments casually, as if he'd had nothing to do with any of it. He was like that. You have to understand, this was my father trying.
 
You made her choose, you know. You made her choose between you and her God.
 
I know, I said. I couldn’t look at him. There was so much shame. I’m amazed I didn’t spontaneously combust right there in the living room. 
 
You know she chose you, right?  he said, softer now. 
 
I didn’t say anything. I did know, but I wasn’t sure he knew what it took from me— those days waiting for her to decide. The anguish of being a decision my mother had to make.   She loves me, she loves me not. 

I watched tears fall on my shoes. We were standing in the living room, having this crazy conversation. The standing lent to its craziness. Both of us on our toes, poised for quick escape. I still couldn’t look him in the eye. 
 
Then he did the thing that surprised me. He came toward me— he came close to me. Close enough to put his hand on my shoulder. Well, his forearm really. His hand was past my shoulder, bobbing awkwardly up and down. My father— a foreigner in the land of touch. More tears on my shoes. His. Mine. A confluence of us. His being so tender was a terrifying current.
 
He said more:
 
When I was a kid in Catholic school, there was a Latin saying carved in the arch of every doorway. It said 'nosce te ipsum'. It means 'know thyself'. 
 
I stole a quick glance at his eyes. Blue blur behind his tears. His inabilities, his unknowing, being cried out in this insane moment of his lesbian daughter’s cataclysmic shame. 

He kept talking:
 
I never knew who I was. His voice caught. You do. It’s something. It’s everything. I’m so proud of you. 

It was a feeble, croaking whisper, but it landed on my heart like a rock from outer space. Burrowed miles deep, the way space rocks with that much velocity do. 

We never talked about it again. We went back to what was familiar. His eternal disappointment. My infinite shame. But we had that moment. I’d forgotten it until now. Sometimes it takes more than half a life to understand what it is you were handed. Sometimes your heart has to be cracked open just right.

In therapy the other day, I was talking about this. About how I’d forgotten this moment of tender-father, and how it had returned on this trade wind of compassion that’s been shifting things around lately. Good God, we’re all so hurt. We’ve all had too many seasons below the skin. Sometimes it’s like we’re just passing around the same broken heart. Here, your turn. 
 
This memory of my father bubbled up out of the lava, and at 56 years of age, peeled me back to child. Pulled sword from stone with the irony that the one thing I tried to keep from him, was the one thing he was most proud of. Not the millions of other things I tried to do to make him love me. It was this thing— this shame.  
 
My father. The man whose approval I chased all my life and never caught. The steam vent of a man who made 95% of my existence unbearable. Who’d smithed me into not-enoughness on his unforgiving anvil of impossible expectations. He was the one who maybe, in that moment at least, saw me clearest of all. And loved me, just for showing up real. 


Some Background


My father’s house:  Privilege and wealth. We went to good schools, lived in good neighborhoods, had food, toys and bikes, heat, light, big holidays, a summer home, beds in every room, for a while, even maids. 

All brought to us by a 5-year-old boy who held his pregnant mother’s hand aboard the good ship Cedric for 10 weeks, Ireland to Ellis Island, but then never a boy in America. Always a man with a job. Cleaning floors, washing chemicals off surfaces that reflected his despair, his loneliness. Then off to school, day after day, straight A’s and end-of-week paychecks straight to Mother. 

My father

He lost his Irish brogue somewhere between being called a mick by kids on the playground and Harvard graduate school. At 45, he’s vice president where he once cleaned chemicals, has the corner office with the good view, wears a suit and tie, takes trips to Europe on planes not boats, no more paychecks to Mother. He got the Cadillac, the big house, the girl, and nine kids later, sees his loneliness reflected in their scrubbed, scared faces. 

I held the tension of that privileged emotional neglect for as long as I can remember. My father’s disapproval was the container I poured the melt of me into when I was a wax child, always flying too close to the sun. My edges were cut from the blade of his emotional limitations, his lack of connectivity to anything soft, the fear of his presence and disappointment. The outline of me was the reverse image of him. There was no other way it could be. 
 
It is interesting to me now, as a grown woman whose scary father has been dead for more than 17 years, how long it took me to realize what I thought was my voice, was his. Inner critic, my therapist calls it. Took me even longer to realize the critic lived in his head, too. Took me a literal lifetime to realize this lying, fucked up voice was our connective tissue. By the time I'd figured it out, he was long dead. 


My father was the liminal space of me, the part of me I was always on the verge of leaving. He was the earth I was buried under for eons. So too was he the pressure that turned me from carbon to shine. He was my desperation to be loved. The wound that sent me looking for something, anything, godly. The first and final frontier of my brokenness. 

I crossed a desert on my knees to find him, only to discover myself in a burning salvation I was forced to take into my arms. I found my shadow. In shadow, I was real.  Real, I was shameless.  Shameless, I was free to love. 
 
The story of my wholeness is largely the story of my father. This gathering of parts. The broken containers. The medicine in the disease. The monsters we're courageous enough to stare at, and the love that lives in the underbelly of everything— even and especially in the monsters that stare back.   

I’d love to have one more conversation with him. Now that I could look him in the eye. Now that I understand so much more about who and why I am. I’d ask him to come sit with me. I’d put a steady, intentional hand on his shoulder and ask him to tell me where it hurts. 

Then I’d put my other hand there— over his heart— and tell him we’re good. We’re good now. 
 
Nosce te ipsum. 

I finally know, Dad.