She wanted me to unpack my feelings about his sporadic, largely absent role in my life. I refused; as a child I had created an entire mythos around him, and as an adult I merely resented his lack of presence, his seeming disinterest in me. I was 3 when my parents split up, and I couldn’t understand the ramifications of my father’s bipolar mood disorder on his ability to be a dad.
Growing up, we would have a rare Christmas (my birthday) with his family in Kentucky, and I would ever-so-briefly feel part of the fold. Because he self-medicated with sugar and alcohol rather than lithium, I’d occasionally receive a manic-sounding phone call from him, making plans together that never panned out. The phone numbers he’d leave, by the time I tried to firm up a visit, would be disconnected—he’d have moved, been fired from another job, gotten lost in the ether again.
Our last meeting was at my high school, a girls’ boarding school in Connecticut. He had remarried and was living nearby. He loved the historic campus, the perfectly-manicured lawns, and the curious glances of teenage girls as we walked around. Having grown up in wealth and privilege, he appreciated that I attended such a school and was going to a top university the next fall. When he drove away, I didn’t realize it would be our last sighting of each other, but the hollow ache of him leaving again was familiar.
I attended his funeral in Kentucky. At 52, he died in a fatal car crash, leaving me and my 8-year old half-brother (his son with wife #3) without a chance to ever know him. “You look just like him,” one of my paternal aunts told me, “but you know, he never talked about you. Just about his son. He loved his son.” I tried to ignore my “crazy Aunt Junie,” another product of my lineage who had been in and out of “the sanitorium” along with my father, but her words were like a rusty shiv. I didn’t cry for him at the funeral service, nor after, for many years. I carried my bag of pain like it was a precious commodity, an armor against feeling.
When I attended the Hoffman Process, I was instructed to bring photos of my parents or things that reminded me of them. I had my father’s high school graduation photo on my computer, as well as a few actual photos from my baptism. Looking at the impossibly-young faces of my parents, then 19 and 22, I felt a small movement in my chest, the tiniest of shifts into compassion and grief.
That week at Hoffman, I wailed many times—sobbing, ugly-crying, little-kid tears for the dad I had wanted so much. I had re-parented myself through my own mothering and work with children, but it was an imperfect patchwork with a father-shaped hole in its center. Allowing myself to finally feel his absence and come to peace with it was one of the healing gifts I received through the Hoffman work. I often feel his spirit with me now, a glimmer just outside my peripheral vision, a sudden token from nature under my feet. I know he is proud of the person I have become, and that our story is finally complete.
-Thérèse
Thérèse is the lead facilitator for MEA in Baja, currently pursuing another graduate degree in psychology to help serve our compadres in Baja and beyond.