Family Legacies | Telling the Truth

Living in a haze

Living in a haze
of trance-like ghosts
we move through life
reenacting scenes
from childhood
played by ear
with great skill
and small vision

I’ve been thinking about my father, and the strangle-hold of symbolic behaviors I adopted in order to survive with my will intact.

My father lived in a haze of his own trance-like ghosts and scripts. A small world in which he was determined to survive my grandfather’s brutality.

Almost invisible and automatic, his ghosts and scripts drove him to replay the roll he learned by heart as a child. He hoped to keep himself safe, and demonstrate his superiority without disrespecting his father.

When he was in his 80s, Dad shared with me a recurrent dream. It troubled him greatly. So much that he sometimes began crying as he talked about it. The dream returned from time to time right up to his death at age 96.

In the dream, he’s in a physical fight with his father. Fighting for his life. No one else is in the room. It seems they’re in a barn. Both my grandfather and my father were tall, strong men shaped by years of hard physical labor on family farms.

Eventually, Dad wrestles his father to the floor, wins the match, and wakes up, caught in a nightmare of guilt and self-judgment. He disrespected his father. A cardinal sin, according to Dad. According to him, just having the dream proved his guilt.

Taking the measure of my father’s struggle against his guilt and self-judgment, along with his early, harsh judgment of me, helps me understand him. It doesn’t take away any blame for what he did.

It does, however, invite me to pray to our Creator, “Forgive him, for he knew not what he did.” Dad lived in the haze of his own trance-like ghosts and scripts. Unable to see beyond his own survival.

This also invites me to face my trance-like ghosts. Scenes from childhood played by ear with great skill and small vision of myself and others.

It’s Good Friday. A good day for self-examination and forgiveness.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 14 April 2017
Response to WordPress Daily Prompt: Measure

11 Comments

March 22, 2016

rugged road signs

Dad on the right with his older brother, farming in the Midwest, 1920s or 30s.

they journeyed
by rugged road signs
each with its distinct
look and character
weather-beaten
numbered and lettered
pointing the way
luring them on
from here to there
over miles of unexplored
wilderness and wasteland Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments

January 26, 2016

Going to Seminary | Part 13

Summer 1972 – Columbia, South Carolina, 1 year before we began seminary

It’s early spring 1973. My father’s response is unexpected and disheartening. I’ve just told him I’m going to go to seminary to earn a degree in Bible and Theology. I’m not sure how he’ll take this news. I’m nearly 30 years old, and have been married to D for over 7 years. We have two young children not yet in school.

My father looks at me without saying anything right away. Then he tells me it doesn’t matter what he thinks. I’m now married to D. If D thinks my going to seminary is appropriate, that’s all that matters. It’s none of his business.

No congratulations. No sign of being proud of his eldest daughter. No interest in why I would do such a thing as this. Not even a raised eyebrow. Just an emotionally flat inability to engage with me about this.

My mind returns often to his response. He seems finished with me. Especially when it comes to decisions I make about my future. From my side, I have a closet full of unfinished business to which I now add another item.

Every time I visited him while I was in seminary he wanted to know what I was studying. Sometimes he asked me what I was learning, or what was new in this or that area of theology.

Yet even then, he didn’t seem interested in my responses or my opinions. Sometimes he let me know he already knew all about that. Sometimes he listened long enough to find a hook, a way of changing the subject to what he already knew or had done or thought about something.

I often wondered how he would relate to me if I were his first-born son. Would he feel ambivalent about his son going to seminary? Of course not. But that wasn’t reality. I was.

And then there was D. My father was overtly happy and excited about D going to seminary. It was painful to watch him interacting with D. He was always full of questions about what D was studying, theological issues, and what D’s plans were for the future. In many ways, D functioned as his surrogate eldest son.

It was even more painful listening to him talk about D with others. When it came to me, he didn’t seem to know what to say. Was I disgracing him in some way? He never said so. But his silence spoke volumes. I assumed it was about his comfort level with what I was or was not doing.

Today I know it wasn’t about me. It was about my father. Perhaps I triggered shame in him. Especially shame about his unfulfilled dream of getting a seminary degree.

A few years later, before I’d finished seminary studies, my father admitted he felt jealous of me. I was doing what he always wanted to do. I was studying theology at a seminary. For a degree.

My father never gave me his blessing, before or after I married. The pattern continued throughout my seminary studies, even though he enjoyed the way my studies gave him a way to talk about his studies and what he already knew and often assumed I did not. Always in teaching mode, of course. I was still his little girl ‘student.’

Back then I didn’t know how to interrupt my father or ask him tough questions. I didn’t know my own voice. It was years before I was ready to have an adult conversation with him.

Though I didn’t realize it then, my seminary studies began growing me up as a theologian and as an adult woman. One course at a time, one distressing or exhilarating experience at a time, one risk at a time, one discovery at a time.

To be continued….

8 Comments

January 23, 2016

Secrets

Secrets of my body
pause, linger, bleed slow
through veins
barely alive, gasping—
for Air.

The cost of keeping family and personal secrets Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments

January 6, 2016

Going to Seminary | Part 9

~~~Zaida Pannell Swift (1894-1988)

California 1974. I’m in my second year of seminary. The telephone rings. It’s my mother, calling from Savannah, Georgia. Her voice sounds hesitant. She isn’t sure whether to tell me this or not. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 29, 2015

das Gift

Gift

My family legacy
If not my inheritance
deposited in me a great Gift
The kind that kept on giving
Long after I drained the last drop
And tried to transform it
into a candlestick holder
now coated with hardened
layers of waxy tears
trickling down the
curve of my face Read the rest of this entry »

8 Comments

December 9, 2015

Going to Seminary | Part 6

Maya Angelou quote, tumblr_mhan4eWS1o1rv1fi2o1_500

Why write about this now? Because the issue raised by my professor didn’t go away. To his credit, he raised an important issue. Pornography. Yet even if there had been only men Read the rest of this entry »

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November 28, 2015

What I never wrote to my father

Dear Dad, thenextfamily.com

When it came to disciplining his daughters, my father often referred to several verses in the King James Version of the Bible.

I love the King James Version (KJV). All my scripture memory work was in its now unfamiliar language. To my ears it’s still beautiful, though somewhat dated, and evokes awe in its choice of pronouns and verbs (thee, thou, goest, comest). Once memorized, it flows easily by heart.

Yet it has limitations. In addition, the language chosen by the 54+ men who translated it between 1604 and 1611 is often stark.

When it came to dealing with me, one of my father’s key verses was Proverbs 16:18 (KJV):

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

My father believed he was responsible for beating pride out of me. From his perspective, my anger proved I was a prideful little girl intent on getting my superior way. According to him I thought I knew better than he when it came to punishment, rules or decisions.

If I didn’t comply with his will, another proverb told him what to do. I’ve changed the personal pronouns. Proverbs 23:13-14 (KJV) says,

Withhold not correction from the child:
for if thou beatest her with the rod, she shall not die.
Thou shalt beat her with the rod, and shalt deliver her soul from hell.

Before you get angry with my father, think about this: Like many other parents, he passed on what his father did to him. I can’t exonerate him. He did what he did. He was responsible for what he did; I was not. I do, however, have compassion for him. I know from experience how difficult it is to raise children.

Last week I was reading the Good News Version (TEV) of the same verses in Proverbs 23:13-14:

Don’t hesitate to discipline children.
A good spanking won’t kill them.
As a matter of fact, it may save their lives.

I would still suggest that even a “good spanking” can kill a child’s spirit. Do you or I know a child’s inner spirit? Do you know the spirit this child may be too terrified to show because right now because the main agenda is to grit her teeth and get through whatever you or I decide to do to her vulnerable body?

What is a “good spanking” anyway? Sometimes I needed discipline. Yet I never needed the kind of corporal punishment I received. Corporal humiliation is never a “good spanking.” It’s humiliation of the weak by the powerful. An abuse of power.

Whatever this “good spanking” is about, it isn’t about humiliating a child’s body or spirit. If the point of the proverb is to say parents mustn’t hold back when it comes to disciplining their children, that can be done in other ways.

Here’s how I see it. As an adult, I’m responsible for welcoming children and young teenagers into my life. They’re strangers I’m privileged to get to know and learn to discipline appropriately. It isn’t always easy. Yet hospitality offers me another way to relate to them and to myself.

Hospitality welcomes children and young people God sends into my life.
Hospitality isn’t overbearing and doesn’t make quick assumptions.
Hospitality asks questions and listens.
Hospitality gets interested in what children and young people think and feel.
Hospitality doesn’t pry or spy on others.
Hospitality listens, affirms, and collaborates to solve problems.
Hospitality isn’t rude, bossy, impatient or quick to take offense.
Hospitality creates and maintains reasonable, healthy boundaries.

I think hospitality is a form of love. I love my father.

Here’s what I never wrote to my father:

Dear Dad,
Please treat me as a human being created in the image of God. That’s all I want. I don’t want to fight with you or disappoint you. I want to be myself and count on you to help me without humiliating me. I want to be proud of myself and proud of you.
Your first-born daughter,
Elouise