It took me a long time to realize that the way people behaved toward me had almost nothing to do with me. I have come to understand I tend to act as a sort of emotional mirror. I see people as they present themselves to me, and reflect that back to them. Often when people are uncomfortable with what they receive as a reflection, they have a negative reaction toward me as a result.
I used to take this very personally. I know better now.
Even though I DO know better, the closer I am to the person on the other end of the equation, the harder it is to remember.
I have felt this particularly keenly with regard to my father and the time we have been spending together of late.
My dad was not an ideal parent. He was inconsistent, frequently absent, and always self-serving. For many years, I refused to communicate with him as he remained an intense source of toxicity well into my adulthood.
About ten years ago, I relented on my no-contact position; mostly out of practicality. I wanted to attend birthday parties and family events where he might be present, and I had been avoiding them so I didn’t have to encounter him. I did tell him that his presence in my life was conditional. That he was not allowed to ever raise his voice to me. He accepted this with reasonable good grace and has kept to it, with perhaps one or two exceptions.
Recently, his health has been in significant decline and he is preparing to be transferred to hospice. I have had to consider how I want my relationship with him to proceed at the end of his life. Having lost my mother unexpectedly last June, I have a very present example of what grief and unresolved conflict can feel like. I know without question I want our remaining time together to be marked by a conscious effort to remain open-hearted and present with him, despite any element of our history.
This has been more challenging than I expected. He is not an easy person to be around, in many respects. He has a terrible temper that has only been softened a little by his illness. He is stubborn to a degree I find completely infuriating. He is also uniquely tone-deaf to the feelings of others.
He has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been very focused on the mistakes of the past. A not uncommon end-of-life posture, it has manifested in him being deeply preoccupied with certain events from my childhood for which he feels regret. These are memories that are quite traumatic, and not something I want to revisit with him. I am still working through my own interpretation of these memories and still feel tremendous vulnerability when confronting them. Given his temperament, he is completely incapable of being a safe space for this process and his need for forgiveness shouts down any competing emotional demands from anyone else.
I have forgiven him. I have expressed EXPLICITLY that I have forgiven him. Long since. Not due to any virtue of his, or even a change in the essential qualities in him that caused the initial harm, but for my own peace.
Nevertheless, every single time I have seen him in recent weeks, he brings up – again – some transgression of his for which he wants absolution.
This is undoubtedly in part because he has significant functional limitations on his memory. He genuinely doesn’t seem to remember we have already talked about this multiple times. Even still, it is excruciating to have the conversation repeating itself in a grim groundhog-day-like loop every time I see him.
I have made a significant effort to be patient and compassionate with him each time this happens. To engage in a way that might help him find some comfort or resolution, even if it came at a cost to my own peace of mind. It has only been in the last week that my therapist has helped me realize I do not necessarily need to continue to participate in this exercise.
I had been anticipating the next visit, prepared with a script about how I care about and love him, but that having this conversation over and over isn’t helping either of us and I’d like us to focus on happier things in our remaining time together.
Then, my sister texted.
My two younger sisters have a different relationship to our father than I do. They are significantly younger, and had a mother who was engaged enough to ensure he showed up for them in a healthier way than he did for me. While they each have their own difficult experiences of him, neither of them have had as much reason to protect themselves from him; physically or emotionally.
When he and I have had conflict in the past, they have taken his side. Over the years and with more experience and understanding, they both seem more sympathetic to how different a father he was to me than he was to them. I was under the impression these wounds had healed. It’s always surprising to see the way an impending death will expose buried or forgotten pain.
She wrote to say she had been having some “not great” feelings about some things that had been going on. One of which was the way I was treating dad. She went on to say he told her that every time I saw him I was giving him a “guilt trip about being a shitty dad.”
My blood ran cold, and then very very hot indeed.
I have been doing my absolute UTMOST to avoid telling him that. He is the one who keeps bringing things up and wanting to rehash these painful memories. At worst I have elected not to argue with him when he expresses that a particular decision he made was a bad one. Mostly, I have told him I know he is truly remorseful, that it is in the past, and that I forgive him.
I told my sister as much, and after brief reflection, she conceded my version bore the greater ring of truth.
I am FURIOUS that he is characterizing these exchanges as me browbeating him. I am not SURPRISED he is doing so, on a fundamental level. He is notoriously bad at accepting responsibility for his actions and very fond of sketching himself as the victim. But the way he talks to me in these conversations and the way he describes them to my sister bear absolutely no resemblance.
Both he and my sisters seem to think my difficulty with him is about things that have happened in the distant past. The truth is, he is still behaving in ways that hurt people and refusing to acknowledge his role in the unfolding consequences.
He is hurt he is not getting some particular kind of emotional tenderness from me that he HAS NOT EARNED. He is resentful that I do not seem to care about him as deeply as my sisters do, while remaining an UNSAFE person for me to be vulnerable with. I have been acting with profound effort and considerable intention to remain present and open-hearted toward him, and to find that effort is being met with the petulance and self-pity he exposed in his description to my sister makes it hard to imagine the value in persisting in the effort.
Yet, even with all of that being true, I know it is worthwhile. Not for any value he might derive from it, but from what I will know about myself. That my compassion can exceed the pain it is confronted with. That my willingness to be present and vulnerable through intense difficulty is a strength I can be completely sure of. That a mirror cracked through circumstance still shows the truth, even if only in fragments.
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