Daddy Issues are Overrated

Freud was wrong about Oedipus — my father as a case study.

When my dad hooked back up with the babysitter he'd originally cheated on mom with, my siblings and I didn’t hear from him for a month. I was eating at a Texas barbecue joint a block from Times Square when that carpenter and millwright finally returned all of my ignored calls. I paced in the rain under the post-consumerism panoply of flashing lights while saying, “I don’t trust you anymore.” I blocked his number for a year.

In that time, I recorded an album full of songs. The song Seven Sitters spoke of babysitters who raised me and that affair. Boundary Stones narrated our two hour phone call.

When Stanley Hauerwas's wife lost her sanity, Hauerwas didn't talk about it until her passing. When only one side of a relationship is articulate, speaking — especially in public — can be a kind of violence. Hauerwas is a famous pacifist. His fame would have lent violence to his inarticulate bride, so his peacemaking required his silence. Following Hauerwas's peacemaking, I didn't want to publish these songs without dad's permission.

Yet dad and I weren't talking.

At age fifty-nine he came down with cancer. I was used to my maternal aunt being sick, not dad. Not cancer. A toxic combo of agricultural fertilizer and agent orange from the power plants where he worked as a millwright in Illinois, not Vietnam, mutated his blood. Yes, that agent orange. I flew from my New York home, away from my bride, back to St. Louis to his hospital.

First thing I bought him was barbecue. I stayed a month.

His once iron bones and once supple skin both grew very, very brittle. “I’ll be a better dad. A better grandpa.”

“Still don’t trust you,” I said.

“I get it,” he said. “We’ll work it out.”

“Dad, we’re all okay with you dating practically any woman, just not her, okay?”

“I’ll try.”

He was poorer than ever, between cancer and trips. He’d never travelled before, but he was suddenly going back and forth to the DR. Then he was engaged to his new fiancée from the DR, not the white babysitter, so he didn't seem to recognize his poverty the way he had in the past.

Remission came. He worked out, got buff, and started hanging out with my nephews on the regular. He called me and texted all the time, showed up for my sister at a low point.

"Bubba: it'd be different if you were telling my story as me. It's your story, your art, put those songs out there. I'm proud of you."

My dad. Proud of me. For airing our dirty laundry in public through music because of the way he had affected my life. That takes a level of maturity I've seldom seen in any parent, let alone mine. He enjoyed the songs, commented on how they flowed together as a unit. Boundary Stones had this line, "In years I will return to the lock on our boundary wall. Maybe then we'll build love without your betrayals and good memories to be evoked by the fall."

We were. We did. He changed his mind.

But that was autumn 2018.

In NYC 2020 with the entire city shut down and ATVs rushing life-saving medicine down apocalyptically empty avenues, compromised immunities throughout my family threw surges of crippling anxiety my way. Yet all of them made it through.

July 2021, dad whipped me silly on a tube pulled from behind his bass boat.

Two months later with my bride in the hospital, he called. "Old Hairy returned.”

Hairy cell leukemia. Typically, one of the most treatable cancers. Two months later, a week after his sixty-fifth birthday and retirement, he contracted COVID from a visit to a relation's nursing home that had been forced upon him. COVID swept through his cancer laden body. I filled out DNR paperwork right when dad was supposed to be landing in LaGuardia to meet me and Tara after her week in the hospital.

Dad’s hospital — Carle Foundation Hospital in Champaign-Urbana Illinois — refused me entry because of dad’s COVID. That hospital ignored all of our medical advice and requests, no matter the number of academic abstracts I cited. One doctor confessed to my siblings: had they listened, dad would have lived. Dead because of agent orange in the power plants (leukemia), dead because of agricultural fertilizer without a warning (leukemia), dead because of pandemic mismanagement (COVID), dead because of arrogant medical professionals (wrong treatment), dead because of pharmaceutical side effects (fried kidneys, fried liver), dead because of worker’s comp failures (bionic parts in his back, the pain from which required the medicine that hastened his passing), and ultimately dead because of a broken heart. It seemed every conceivable system that could have honored the man for his life of sacrifices failed him. His closest buddy, the week before he died, asked him, “Steve, you ever feel like your body is just being crucified?” They turned away the county clerk and minister, both willing to risk it to help him marry his fiancée. A side effect? My step mom didn’t receive dad’s social security or pension, so our step mom is now a widow twice over without benefits.

Papa Joe died unmarried to his Dominican fiancée, having not met three grandchildren from my siblings, drowning on air without anyone who loved him or whom he loved to even hold his hand. Without a hospital chaplain, this a year and a half after the start of the pandemic. For emotional context, a week after we put dad's casket in the ground, which was a week after he died, my forty-three-year-old maternal aunt, the chronically sick one, died. Both passed twenty-one months after February 2020. Dad's fiancée, because of the hospital's refusal to let in the clerk and minister, was not only a widow now, she was denied his social security benefits he'd started pulling two weeks prior. The union had scrapped his death benefit thanks to that one stretch of months during the divorce — the babysitter year — when dad couldn't afford to union dues, which only affected us kids and her. Granted, dad did that, but there’s no clause for a grace period of a half a year? It was everything I could do to not slap the union rep who handed me dad's second twenty-year anniversary pin in dad’s funeral receiving line (and he wasn’t even in the top ten most callous of those present). Should have been forty years and a pension for my siblings and step mom.

It fell upon me to eulogize him. He'd had his share of failures, but did he deserve to die that way? What could I honestly say?

But then I forced myself to remember the good, any good. Sure, I would tell the truth about his public sins. But could I find "good words" despite my predisposition towards funeral honesty a la Speaker for the Dead? My single You Still Believe in Me grew out of that eulogy:

I remembered how many times dad wracked up credit card debt to offer free carpentry for disaster zones like EF5 victims in Joplin, Missouri. "Always wanted to help those in dire situations," one of his journals said.

He'd missed starting guns at our races because of jobs. He'd missed finish lines because of hot dates. But when he attended my cross country races, he walked the course, found the muddiest patch in the hardest, most obscure leg. There, at my lowest and darkest, stood my dad alone in the field — a beacon in the dark wood. A voice shouting into the pain and silence. "Run free, run fast, it's just over that hill."

How many other fathers see the starting line, but fear you won't finish, so they get cold feet, get tired, get bored, and leave? These idealizing fathers?

How many won't commit to seeing you start, but will happily be there when your success is certain? These fair weather fathers?

How many fathers stand in the brink to hold back the tide of darkness for their kids when the path grows misty and shadowed and mired?

His beacons return to me now through the dense fog:

Together we hand carved winning pinewood derby cars and rain gutter regatta boats. We wrought a hope chest with a false bottom I used to propose to my bride. I'd thought for years that my friend's dad taught me to ride my bike. No. I realize now my friend's dad was there for the last push one day my father was out. A fair weather father. Every other day had been dad there behind the seat. He showed up for hard, inglorious work, missing only the finish line. I think he did it because he was no stranger to shame and so the shameful work of fathering never bothered him. In that way, he too was a kind of Inglorious Bastard of whom Taratino may have written: inglorious, yet a hero all the same.

Now focusing on whatever is good, whatever is noble about my dad, other moments have unblocked in my memory. He bought me my first guitar, first keyboard, trumpet. I can write songs about dad's sins against me because, in the first place, dad taught me to write songs. My exposés of him are predicated on his choice to teach me how to expose.

I remembered us sledding down insane grades of snow blanketed hills in tin soda signs. Waxing the giant stainless steel slide at the park with wax paper so that my brother and I (and unsuspecting neighbor kids) rocketed off its egress. He taught me to draw and airbrush and make my own halloween costumes from scratch. To play in the kitchen rather than fret over sustenance. Everything's art: do dirt bike wheelies, drive a backhoe home at bedtime honking its annoying horn to wake the neighbors, slide down the raised dump truck bed, use the spare sand for a sandbox, turn the spare culvert pipe into a carnival ride, dance to make a crowd laugh, sincerely chase your hat in a high wind for the joy of anyone watching, live the poetry of life before you write a thing. It reminds me of what Chesterton said of Francis:

St. Francis was a dying man. We might say he was an old man, at the time this typical incident occurred; but in fact he was only prematurely old; for he was not fifty when he died, worn out with his fighting and fasting life.

At this point he was told that he was going blind. If the faintest hint has been given here of what St. Francis felt about the glory and pageantry of earth and sky, about the heraldic shape and colour and symbolism of birds and beasts and flowers, some notion may be formed of what it meant to him to go blind. Yet the remedy might well have seemed worse than the disease. The remedy, admittedly an uncertain remedy, was to cauterise the eye, and that without any anaesthetic. In other words it was to burn his living eyeballs with a red-hot iron. Many of the tortures of martyrdom, which he envied in martyrology and sought vainly in Syria, can have been no worse. When they took the brand from the furnace, he rose as with an urbane gesture and spoke as to an invisible presence: "Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful; I pray you be courteous with me."

If there be any such thing as the art of life, it seems to me that such a moment was one of its masterpieces. Not too many poets has it been given to remember their own poetry at such a moment, still less to live one of their own poems. Even William Blake would have been disconcerted if, while he was re-reading the noble lines, "Tiger, tiger, burning bright," a large live Bengal tiger had put his head in at the window of the cottage in Felpham, evidently with every intention of biting his head off. He might have wavered before politely saluting it, above all by calmly completing the recitation of the poem to the quadruped to whom it was dedicated. Shelley, who wished to be a cloud or a leaf carried before the wind, have been mildly surprised to find himself turning slowly head over heels in mid-air a thousand feet above the sea. Even Keats, knowing that his hold on life was a frail one, might have been disturbed to discover that the true, the blushful Hippocrene of which he had just partaken freely had indeed contained a drug, which really ensured that he should cease upon the midnight with no pain.

For Francis there was no drug; and for Francis there was plenty of pain. But his first thought was one of his first fancies from the songs of his youth. He remembered the time when a flame was a flower, only the most glorious and gaily coloured of the flowers in the garden of God; and when that shining thing returned to him in the shape of an instrument of torture, he hailed it from afar like an old friend, calling it by the nickname which might most truly be called its Christian name.

Dad lived his poems, even amid the torture.

This ADHD functionally illiterate man helped teach me to read. His bedtime stories the night before early rising? In a roundabout way, dad helped me pen this piece for your eyes. Sometimes I’ll look down at my handwriting and realize, with a shock, that it’s his. When on earth did that happen? Can I get back to where I can remember him teaching me my letters?

Perhaps many of the bad things he did came from that toxic shame, from an unwillingness to see his own goodness?

My trauma had blocked good memories. Now that he's gone, I'm chronologically thinking through life with him. I'm only allowing myself to think about the good for now and it's unblocking joyful flashbacks. Feelings I haven't felt since childhood like wonder and courage have returned. I was visiting with a therapist when I blocked his number originally. That therapist left town for another job. I’ve cycled through several because it’s hard for folks to stay in NYC. Trauma came up with many, but not Freud’s idea of trauma. Not even Jung’s.

It was Adler, the great counselor who taught us to stop talking about “poor me” and “this bad person,” but rather “how now shall I then live?” It’s not about the trauma, see: daddy issues are overrated. What's a far more inspired life to me is that every father you meet on the street isn't a has-been or a might-have-been.

He’s a great might-not-have-been. Like the items on Robinson Crusoe’s ship that might not have been offered a hairbreadth escape from the shipwreck.

Chesterton also said every item on Robinson Crusoe's list is poetry. A spoon becomes a shovel. A bit of twine becomes Brooklyn Bridge cable. A piece of flint is Promethean flame. Everything in existence has this hair-breadth escape as if saved from a wreck. Including fathers. Fathers that exist at all are also saved from the wreck: the shipwreck of having never had a dad at all.

A wreck like the Oedipus complex.

You know Oedipus whom Freud and champions of trauma often mention? The dude who killed his father? That's only part one of a trilogy of plays by Sophocles. Oedipus actually kills his father accidentally. It's not some willful act growing out of daddy issues. When Oedipus realizes what he's done, he immediately blinds himself and begs for exile. In the following plays, this blind prophet carries the fire of peace for his brother-in-law and his sons. Oedipus dies a peaceful death with a grave sacred to the gods. That's not a man who merely shanks his father to screw his mother. Who sees patricide as a fair price for matrophilia. This man knew the horror of focusing forever on his daddy issues. Oedipus prophesies against all violence stemming from daddy issues, from patricide to passive aggression, accidental or otherwise.

Yes, everything feels rescued. Even a busted down, beat up old dad whom Freud and the culture taught me to hate.

Maybe Freud’s wrong. Maybe Adler’s right.

Maybe it's just a qualitative, unspeakable good that I ever had a dad — any dad — at all. His life poured out for us kids once. Just the once.

There’s a four-hundred-square foot sandbox still in Southern Illinois where a hole had hid before, now filled from the overflow of one long lost carpenter’s job site. Thirty years ago, dad poured tons of sand forth from his rusted, wood-paneled dump truck quick as an hourglass to make us that sandbox, bounded by rotting railroad ties, salvaged from the wreck. An hourglass the size of his dump truck.

Hourglasses that huge never turn over and start again.

Run free, run fast, kid. It’s just over that hill.