… my elderly father….
Let me give you a bit of a background… my father is 82 years old, and as many other elderly folks are described, he’s a bit of a stubborn man. Ok forget a bit, he is a VERY STUBBORN MAN. He was born and raised in the Philippines, and from his stories, it sounds like he didn’t have a very enjoyable childhood. He had an older brother and a sister whom he claims is adopted, but when I look at her features, they are strikingly similiar to my father’s features. So I’m not sure if he’s telling the truth about that or not.
Anyway, my father wasn’t exactly the most loved kid in the family. The parents loved his brother, and seemed to have given him more support than my father ever had. My father was always buried in a book and longed to go to engineering school, but the parents only had enough funds to send one child to college, so they sent his brother, who eventually knocked up his cousin (I know, eww), dropped out of school, and got married. My father wasn’t even given the opportunity, yet his brother threw it all away.
Growing up, my father eventually found a way to travel to Canada, get a job and live a descent life away from his disfunctional family. He met my mom. They were married and had a kid: me. My father wasn’t always the most pleasant guy to be around when I was growing up. He was fun and hilarious when him and I joked around – we punched each other with paper bags over our hands, he played with my toys with me, chased me around the house, and was an all-loving man. But he had another side to him… he had a jealous, insecure, incomplete side to him that always reared its ugly head from time to time.
He was jealous of my mom’s sister. My mom and her sister were very close, and my dad didn’t like that because it took his wife away from him. It also took his daughter away from him – I loved being with just the girls: my mom and aunt, and my dad said to me one day when I was 5 years old: “I don’t like your auntie.” I was confused, but way too innocent to comprehend it fully so I let it go.
My father has a very passive aggressive, narrow minded view of the world, and this view didn’t help to get along with me, and my mother. He is quiet, introverted, but sometimes ridiculously funny. Sometimes he acted like an adorable 2 year old boy. Other times, he was like a ticking time bomb in a war zone.
Fast forward a bunch of years, and my mother passed away in 1997. In cleaning up her belongings and going through all her paperwork, my father was in shock, disbelief and confusion. He didn’t know what he would do without her, yet in my gut, I made the assumption that he had pushed her away. He wasn’t easy to get along with during the time that we were sorting through my mom’s belongings. He would yell, get angry out of the blue, demand irrational things of me, and I would often get fed up to the point where I would look up at the sky and ask my mother why she left me with him. It was a difficult few weeks, but after everything was sorted out, life got back to normal, and I found my new habit of calling my father every single night to make sure he was ok. And he always was.
Now fast forward to today – he had since moved in with me and my husband and the question that I used to ask my mom in the sky – it prevailed once again, but this time I know the answer. Why did you leave me with him? I ask. And the answer is: So I have the space to work on the parts of me I have always ignored. That is, the part of me that is my father.
So here lies a journey ahead – lots of turmoil inside me around finding peace with my father. I have never faced my issues with him the way I am forced to today. Often times, I blame him, other times I am feeling compassionate, but rarely am I in a place where I can truly say I am at peace with him. That is my goal though. I want to find peace with the part of me that IS my father.
I am hoping that blogging about him will help sort out my thoughts. Comments are welcome.
Adventures with my Elderly Father 