My adoptive father has died. Strangely coincidentally, he died in a bathtub as did my biological father. My adoptive father was 79. He planned on living to 120. As they say, "Man plans, God laughs."
I met my adoptive father shortly after my mother did. It was 1966 and we lived in Berkeley California. What a time to live in Berkeley. People's Park, the Black Panthers, PoorBoy Suits and GoGo boots. My father was a good friend of my mother's roommate from college at the University of Illinois. He met my mother on a whirlwind visit with her roommate on his way to visit his mother in Phoenix. He first came in August. My mother married him in the Episcopal Church on November 8, 1966. She was a radical, a civil rights activitist, a folk singer. He was a conservative former GI from the Midwest. An Atheist. They were Polar Opposites.
We first lived in Athens, Ohio where he was an Associate Professor at the University there. We lived there until the end of the following summer when we moved to Portales, New Mexico. As my parents were polar opposites, so were Portales and Berkeley. My father's lace-up oxfords, suit pants, and button down blue shirts were a sharp contrast to the cowboy boots, jeans and western shirts of the parents of my classmates.
When my sister and I met my father, we were 6 and 8 respectively. My sister was cute, I was quiet. Our father was a Geography Professor. He introduced us to all kinds of geolological formations: flatirons, mesas, alluvial sands, buttes. To clouds: thunderheads, cirrus, cumulus, stratus, nimbus. We saved a snapping turtle from the road. Kept it in a box. Fed it hamburger and crickets. We caught and touched bull snakes, hog nosed snakes. At the family farm in Illinois, the outhouse was completely wall papered with living Daddy Long Leg Spiders. They pulsed. We bathed in an outside tub.
We travelled. Mammoth Cave. Zion National Park. Yellowstone National Park. The Grand canyon, Bryce Canyon, Vicksburg National Military Park, Natchez Trace, Palo Duro Canyon and closer to home White Sands National Monument, the Catwalk in the Gila Wilderness and Oasis State Park.
We did chores. We had tropical fish, gerbils and outdoors cats. When I was 10, I was given a Daisy Bee Bee gun. I was a crack shot with it, as well as with the long bow that was later bought for me. In summer, I was dragged from my books and forced to take swimming and tennis lessons alongside my more athletic younger sister. I didn't drown, I hit the ball, but I didn't excel. My sister was a firecracker. Better at all things physical. She bought a skateboard and excelled at it. I struggled to stay on my gangly feet that were too far away from my head. My sister got boobs. I did not.
Things changed the year we went to Colorado. We had a new baby sister. Things were tense. There were fights and silences between my mother and father, my mother and sister. I later would find out that this was when my father began his 'love affair' with my younger sister at the age of 12.
My mother got her doctorate and we never lived as a family again. My parents divorced in 1976. My father was awarded custody of my sister with whom he was having an incestuous relationship. She did not escape his grasp until 1978 when she graduated from College in 2 years, Summa Cum Laude. One year before I did.
My sister went on to work for Livermore Laboratories where she met her husband, ultimately doing post-doctoral work in bio-medical Chemistry. She had a daughter and a son. And then she confronted the family with her story at the age of 30.
My father never denied the relationship. Instead, he claimed his steadfast love for her and claimed that she was the one that "cheated" and started dating others. This, despite the fact that he married a beautiful woman whom I believe he chereished in 1984. He respected her, loved her, shared his knowledge with. This marriage was much different from that with my mother. His wife blossomed, went to school and ultimately became an R.N. and a person in her own right.
I know that my adoptive father was twisted in some way. Yet he loved and cherished. Above all he was a teacher and shared his knowledge with any one who would listen. He was broken. He loved perfectly and imperfectly. He cheated my sister of her youth and innocence.
My father died December 22, 2013. May he rest in the peace which eluded him in life.
I met my adoptive father shortly after my mother did. It was 1966 and we lived in Berkeley California. What a time to live in Berkeley. People's Park, the Black Panthers, PoorBoy Suits and GoGo boots. My father was a good friend of my mother's roommate from college at the University of Illinois. He met my mother on a whirlwind visit with her roommate on his way to visit his mother in Phoenix. He first came in August. My mother married him in the Episcopal Church on November 8, 1966. She was a radical, a civil rights activitist, a folk singer. He was a conservative former GI from the Midwest. An Atheist. They were Polar Opposites.
We first lived in Athens, Ohio where he was an Associate Professor at the University there. We lived there until the end of the following summer when we moved to Portales, New Mexico. As my parents were polar opposites, so were Portales and Berkeley. My father's lace-up oxfords, suit pants, and button down blue shirts were a sharp contrast to the cowboy boots, jeans and western shirts of the parents of my classmates.
When my sister and I met my father, we were 6 and 8 respectively. My sister was cute, I was quiet. Our father was a Geography Professor. He introduced us to all kinds of geolological formations: flatirons, mesas, alluvial sands, buttes. To clouds: thunderheads, cirrus, cumulus, stratus, nimbus. We saved a snapping turtle from the road. Kept it in a box. Fed it hamburger and crickets. We caught and touched bull snakes, hog nosed snakes. At the family farm in Illinois, the outhouse was completely wall papered with living Daddy Long Leg Spiders. They pulsed. We bathed in an outside tub.
We travelled. Mammoth Cave. Zion National Park. Yellowstone National Park. The Grand canyon, Bryce Canyon, Vicksburg National Military Park, Natchez Trace, Palo Duro Canyon and closer to home White Sands National Monument, the Catwalk in the Gila Wilderness and Oasis State Park.
We did chores. We had tropical fish, gerbils and outdoors cats. When I was 10, I was given a Daisy Bee Bee gun. I was a crack shot with it, as well as with the long bow that was later bought for me. In summer, I was dragged from my books and forced to take swimming and tennis lessons alongside my more athletic younger sister. I didn't drown, I hit the ball, but I didn't excel. My sister was a firecracker. Better at all things physical. She bought a skateboard and excelled at it. I struggled to stay on my gangly feet that were too far away from my head. My sister got boobs. I did not.
Things changed the year we went to Colorado. We had a new baby sister. Things were tense. There were fights and silences between my mother and father, my mother and sister. I later would find out that this was when my father began his 'love affair' with my younger sister at the age of 12.
My mother got her doctorate and we never lived as a family again. My parents divorced in 1976. My father was awarded custody of my sister with whom he was having an incestuous relationship. She did not escape his grasp until 1978 when she graduated from College in 2 years, Summa Cum Laude. One year before I did.
My sister went on to work for Livermore Laboratories where she met her husband, ultimately doing post-doctoral work in bio-medical Chemistry. She had a daughter and a son. And then she confronted the family with her story at the age of 30.
My father never denied the relationship. Instead, he claimed his steadfast love for her and claimed that she was the one that "cheated" and started dating others. This, despite the fact that he married a beautiful woman whom I believe he chereished in 1984. He respected her, loved her, shared his knowledge with. This marriage was much different from that with my mother. His wife blossomed, went to school and ultimately became an R.N. and a person in her own right.
I know that my adoptive father was twisted in some way. Yet he loved and cherished. Above all he was a teacher and shared his knowledge with any one who would listen. He was broken. He loved perfectly and imperfectly. He cheated my sister of her youth and innocence.
My father died December 22, 2013. May he rest in the peace which eluded him in life.
Well said Tarin
ReplyDeleteThree women were damaged by him. But you each found a way to fight back in the end. some things are still broken, but time may still heal. You turned out the be a great, loving woman full of life and love. You also did not let the abuse touch the next generation. That is victory!
ReplyDeleteMany more than three, as he neither started nor stopped with your first sister. But there was more to him than that, you are right. Which makes his life choices suck all the more. Thank you for your honesty -- and I have always hoped that it didn't hurt you when they breaking point where I stopped seeing him was when he wanted to have me fly to you, and then pick me up at your place. My relationship with you was something clean -- I couldn't do it. The idea made me physically ill. But then, visiting him had done that since I was 9. The wonders he shared came at too high a price. I never saw him again without a bodyguard of friends, including at your wedding, and our other sister's. But to deny the good is to forfeit one's full rights to be honest about the bad. I just hope you know that his explanations were for the listener, and not the sake of truth, when it came to justifying his darker side. You deserve the truth, however comforting the convenient fiction may be. But his choices were not yours, and I love you -- even if it was safer for me and my daughter for us to do so from the other side of the world, where he couldn't find out what public spaces I would be in, and ambush me there against my will and stated wishes. I don't know if you recognized that that's where my later-husband first met that side of my family -- he was themost faithful of my guards against my father, and though he never spoke a word about the matter until I brought it up to him years later, he knew from that first meeting why I felt the need of guards. You always deserved better than to be used by Dad to help lend the appearance of legitimacy to his quest for further unwholesome access, once denied -- I will not have you used to propogate his convenient fiction, now that he is gone. When our mother sensed something wrong, and took him into counseling before the divorce, he denied ever laying a finger or an inappropriate thought upon our sister, as he later denied the change in his relationship with me. Grieve the reality, grieve mesasa and cloud formations, river valleys, and caves, grieve gerbils and camping and canoes... ...but do not grieve a lone love affair with the wrong female, that part was never real, and you deserve the truth of love. I know, because I love you.
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