You are such a sweet, soulful, gentle man and I am so very sorry that you have experienced similar pain to my own. Let the defences drop when you can and feel it and let it go. Hanging onto to it serves you no purposes, but the letting go will bring huge reward.
Mu it took me some time to understand the man my father was. Out of my sisters I actually have the best understanding and relationship with him (that must sound odd given he is dead, but nonetheless true). I did the work.
I have been reading Melodie Beatties book The New Co-dependency and she has a chapter in there called A New Legacy from Our Family of Origin. It makes for interesting reading. She says "each of ancestors plays an important part in shaping who we are ...if we can't honour our ancestors, we can't love ourselves".
I actually know very little about him. But I do know my father was physically and emotionally abused as a child. He was the second son in a family of five children. An older brother and then sisters. As the second son he had no status, but had status over his female siblings. He was by all accounts his father's whipping boy. And I mean literally. He was the chosen child to be scapegoated.
He grew up in wartorn country and somehow through some internal drive and resilence made is way out of Hungary. My mother tells a story of my father escaping across a policed boarder with friends a couple who had a child. There was some incident where as they were moving across the boarder, where the couple and child were separated and in the chaos my father saved the child and brought her across the boarder reuniting her with her family.
My father spoke no english when he arrived her in 1956. So I guess the fact that my father moved to a new country without family, without speaking english shows that there was something quite determined about him.
My mother says that he was an amazing father prior to the time we could speak english better than we could. It seemed to phase him that we could potentially out smart him by the fact that we had a better command of the english language.
My father had the most spectacular handwriting, it was curved and italic like. It reminds me of caligraphy and when I think about him writing in his second language. I find something strangly beautiful and romantic when I think about this.
My father had a complete love of food and wine. He was a wine waiter when he met my mother, who was a waitress. He could have been a sommelier, but his gambling got in the way.
My father eventually became a foreman for the biggest brewery in NZ. So this required him to manual labor, likely quite hard for my father as man who saw himself lifting himself and his family out of the poverty and peasent lifestyle of his childhood. But what I remember, every morning, my father would at 5.30am and he would shave and he would put on an ironed white shirt, trousers of business suit and a tie and would put his blue work overalls on top. My father would brylcreem his hair and would file his nails. He has the softest hands of male I have ever known.
Why am I telling you this? I guess because my father at the end of the day was a man of human fraility. He was a childhood abuse survivior, a refugee, a hard worker, and man with beautiful penmanship and a lover of good wine and food. He also happened to be a compulsive gambler and emotionally abusive and unavilable husband and father. Seeing the man in his totality is important.
I am now the age my father was when my father was in his most addicted period of his gambling. I look at my own life and my struggle with all of my demons and dragons, and I think, likely my father was trying to slay his own, the best way he knew how.
I forgave my father a long time ago for being who he was and what he did.
Now I just have to forgive myself. Mu neither of are our father's. We know better and have done better.
