Mick was my father. Obviously that wasn’t his name, but it’s a perfect pejorative moniker for an Irishman. Mick loved his lineage, the history, and its traditions. He loved his last name more than his children and gave it to any woman willing to take it. If I’m honest, I love my maiden name, too. It’s a painful admission.
He was the youngest of 4 children, born with 2 older sisters and 1 brother. The girls were the eldest, and the boys the babies. My maternal grandparents stayed married until they were in their early 80s and then they abruptly divorced, not a shock to anyone proximal. Suffice it to say they should have never wed. From the outside looking in, they fit the picture-perfect mold of the typical 1940s family. Mom stayed home while hubby went off to work on the railroad.
My grandfather was the happiest guy on the planet, and I’m not entirely sure why. He was either blissfully ignorant or willfully in denial. My interactions with him were so limited as to be lost in my mind, likely never retrievable. I have no real details or memories of him other than to say he was very tall. In the case of my grandmother, she was a raging, though highly functional, alcoholic with abusive tendencies that she never hid from anyone.
Even her grandchildren weren’t unscathed. I remember getting my ass blistered at my grandmother’s hand when I was 7 years old. Or maybe I should say her whip. The crust on her mincemeat pie wasn’t perfect, “it was messy.” And by messy, I mean that I didn’t crimp the edges correctly and the pattern wasn’t completely symmetrical because my little fingers likely couldn’t accomplish the task with precision. Not one person in the kitchen tried to stop her as I begged for forgiveness, flour on my hands, face, and Kermit the Frog tee shirt. My God I begged and the pain was relentless. Aunts, cousins, and others just watched. The outburst in her tenement-housing kitchen left me unable to sit for 3 days. Literally. Oozing blisters hurt and you cannot sit on Santa’s lap with them. That Christmas in the northeast sucked.
My mother entered the room sometime later to me sobbing on the floor in the corner and everyone else around me making pies. I had no pants on. My grandmother’s liquor-fueled rage immediately sent my mom into revenge mode. Pearl was discreet, calculated, and vicious, with actions befitting her intelligence. Silently plotting. My dad always said she was “dumb as a fox.” Nobody saw anything coming. Likewise, all were lost when the root cause of my grandmother’s trip to the ER was unidentifiable. She gradually sickened over two days. Nobody looked harder than Pearl did, trying to find the reason that my grandmother fell rapidly and violently ill, and yet she was behind it all.
I often think back to those events and I try to determine if Pearl was set upon killing my grandmother or just making her suffer. And, I honestly do not know. I remember Pearl sat back, told me what she did and why, and watched the entire scene unfold over a few days. From the sounds and sights coming from my grandmother’s bedroom, the vomiting was excruciatingly painful. Pearl’s laugh was devious and menacing. It also had a twinge of a middle school girl that was giddy with excitement. Warped. She never told me not to say anything. I knew my lips would stay sealed. And I don’t know if it was because I feared she would hurt me or if I feared losing her.
In my mind’s eye, I can see the packed kitchen, my mother messing with my grandmother’s liquor bottles, grinning and looking at me, holding a finger in front of her mouth, “shhhhh.” A sweet and endearing smile on her face. She did this a few more times over the course of the next two days. How was I to know that she had tainted the rim of my grandmother’s alcohol bottles with a liquid not for ingestion? This scene is locked in my mind forever. She wore a form-fitting turtleneck that accentuated her curvy figure, in a pattern that, today, would be called space dye. It was hues of chocolate brown, camel, and creme. It was God-awful, but she liked it. Pearl wore a long skirt, denim, and some cool flats. Ballet. Nice earrings, hair done perfectly. She was the picture of reserved, 1980’s style.
At just shy of 8, I was in awe of my mother for exacting revenge upon the person that harmed me so. For protecting me. The paradox of what I endured at my mother’s hand never entered my mind at the time. This singular event set into motion my idea of loyalty to those you love. You take a bullet for them…and sometimes engage in other unsightly things. I realized at that moment she would take someone out on my behalf and I felt protected. Safe. Cared for. It also scared the shit out of me and made me skeptical of every beverage that touched my lips…until the last time I saw her. Nobody in my father’s family knew what they were up against with Pearl. She used her brains to engage in revenge, manipulation, and vigilante justice; they used brute force. At that moment, I remember thinking that I’d rather be brainy than brawny. You can see brawn coming; brains operate in the shadows. At least genius ones do.
But, back to Mick since you have an idea of what his family life was like. He was a diehard north-easterner, temporarily relocated to the south for his Vietnam-era Marine Corps duties, and then transplanted himself to the midwest where he lived the rest of his life. His accent popped up frequently when saying certain words, and I always found it entertaining. Baseball, football, and hockey remained his favorite sports and his loyalty was to teams that had names serving as reminders of Revolutionary America. He eventually picked up a fascination for skiing and NASCAR. The Olympics were always a huge deal in our house, too.
Mick believed superior Italian and Chinese food required proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. Same with traditionally Jewish foods. If it’s not from the northeast, he didn’t want it. The same goes for fish, though he wouldn’t hold firm to the compass when ordering waterlogged protein. So long as it was from an ocean, any ocean, it was good. But proximity mattered. Never order fish from a locale that couldn’t catch it and drive it to your kitchen. Flown in crabs, lobsters, and other pescatarian delights that required extended ocean-to-plate delivery protocols were considered swine food. Unless it could be driven to your kitchen, prepared, and on your plate in 3 hours or less, it was not worth eating. 3 hours. Hard stop. It could kill you and it was sacrilege.
Mick was tall at 6’1″ and very stocky. He had a long torso and his legs were proportionally short when viewed in totality to his height. His thigh muscles were tree trunks, and his legs were unbelievably hairy. I have passed both traits down to my son. Unfortunately, I’m a benefactor of the tree trunks, not the hair. Thank Mother Mary for that one. When Mick was in shape, which was until he was about 50, he could probably do squats with a VW Beetle on his back.
Mick had broad shoulders and gigantic hands. They were mammoth. His wedding ring was sized at a mens 12-13, I think. It is odd that I can remember Pearl’s bra size and the number of hairs on her head, but I’m iffy on his ring size. His fingers looked like Johnsonville Bratwurst with fingernails on the end. I can remember walking with him, hand-in-hand, thinking he could crush my digits with little to no effort. His fingernails were always well-maintained. No polish, but they were always clipped and filed. He wasn’t a nail biter or hangnail picker. Though, I will say that his nails were permanently stained from his line work with the power company. They were also covered in calluses. Of all the things about Mick, I remember his hands first and more than anything else. It’s kind of bizarre.
He had dark brown eyes and equally dark hair. It began receding early in life, and Mick was nearly bald by the time he was 35. The ring of hair, shaped in a C that spanned his head horizontally from ear to ear, was present until the day he died. Nothing on top. He did grey, but it seemed later than most. He wore a beard and mustache. Cleanly kept and meticulously trimmed. I can remember the little hair bits in the bathroom from his shaving routine.
I don’t have the details of physical characteristics to share about Mick like I do about Pearl. They were decidedly different people, and my relationship and recollection of each reflects this reality. I spent time in awe of my mom’s physical form, but I never did with my dad. Somewhere around the age of 8 or 9, I made a decided effort to keep my physical distance for reasons I’ll expand upon later.
The biggest difference with my parents is that while both harmed me, my mom was severely mentally ill, my father was not. She got ridiculed for her illness, therefore hiding it and it would explode out of her. I caught a lot of it. My mother doesn’t get a pass for harming me, she gets some grace. Mick gets none. My father knew what was right and wrong. As a parent his obligation is to protect his children, and he sucked at it. Deliberately shirking his responsibilities.
He would pontificate for hours on the relative wrongness of other peoples’ actions. And he did. Righteous asshole. Pearl constantly battled with inner demons, which frequently distorted her reality, whereas Mick never lost touch. He spent his life posturing, she spent hers lost. He never tried to stop the generational abuse from perpetuating forward. In fact, he attempted to justify it once by telling me that he was a product of his upbringing and he’d hoped I could understand how he “had to be” because it was all he knew. I cut him off, told him that some things children do not need to hear regardless of how old they are. I didn’t need to learn details about how brutal his mom was, over the course of his entire childhood, because I was neither his therapist nor mental healthcare provider. I needed, deserved, and wanted a parent to stop the cycle. To make the willful choice to be better. To do better. But, alas, here we are.
He loved playing the victim. In the last decade of his life, his calls to me circled around why. Why were his nieces so mean to him and cut him out of their mother’s funeral (his sister)? Why did his other sister keep information private about the death of her daughter? Why did nobody treat him the way they should? I’m no doctor, but I’m 99% certain he was a narcissist. And let me tell you, living with them, within their reach, or in their realm is fucking brutal. He was a whiny bully at his absolute worst, and moderately manipulative at his best.
Disappointment is a nasty emotion. It’s tangled with so many other things that often make it hard to distinguish from feelings of sadness, anger, and inadequacy. The problem with disappointment is that it requires a person to give a damn. Essentially, if you don’t care about anyone or anything, you can’t be let down. No disappointment. To care means you run the risk of getting hurt. When I look at my life in totality, I’m not sure caring is worth the risk. Granted, my world is skewed significantly to the negative side of the cost-benefits analysis.
Children place a lot on the shoulders of their parents. Some of it is justified, some not. When you are little, parents are entities of comfort and safety. As childhood makes way for adolescence and then adulthood, the needs are the same but their dynamic changes; comfort and safety are still needed but in different ways. Another shift occurs when the child becomes a parent themselves, but the parent-child connection remains a constant. Or an ideal of it does.
It’s hard to find a child that hates their parents for posterity. Frankly, I hate that I can’t hate mine. We come into this world hardwired, I think, seeking the love and acceptance of our parents. This is all well and good, unless your parents are abusive and the source of so much pain. Mick is a perfect example of this paradox. He was an abusive, covert narcissist, compulsive manipulator, sexist, misogynist, and all around asshole. Being the victim of other people’s absurdity was his jam, and his gaslighting skills were second to none. He could play people like a fiddle and loved to be the center of attention. My stomach churns when I think of him.
The thing is, Mick was also my dad. Despite our relationship being muddled by his dysfunction, the scars of his bad decisions forever imprinted upon me, there are small pieces of him that I held onto. I think I still do, 3 years after he started his permanent, 6-foot dirt vacation. There are fragments of him that I hoped would come together, glued like a shattered teacup, and emerge as a complete person to replace the bully that hurt me.
These pieces, when put together, could make a whole dad. It wouldn’t be attractive, but it would be a complete teacup nonetheless. Or so I hoped. I held on to the ideal that this better, complete being would, one day, show up and be the father I needed, wanted, and deserved. It never happened.
His complexities aside, he still had some redeeming qualities. They paled in comparison to the things that made him less than stellar.
Mick was funny and could tell a story like no other. He loved a good joke and had a deep belly laugh. The smallest things made him chuckle and he was a human newsfeed, pointing out the absurdities of this life to anyone within earshot. It was constant, and he cracked himself up. He could never make it through his own jokes before he started laughing. He didn’t have a pause button. His demeanor came with a certain aloofness that was enigmatic.
The kitchen was his playground, and that wasn’t always a good thing. Mick’s cooking sucked and he damn near killed my husband with food poisoning, but he was adventurous. He tried techniques and new foods whenever he could and meticulously followed recipes, but only when the mood struck him. And when he did, his food was an epicurean delight. When we went rogue and decided to free bird it, like he did with Campbell’s soup and raw chicken in a casserole, is when you needed to get your gag bag ready and prepare for a trip to the gastroenterologist. Or bacon. The man couldn’t cook bacon; it was either raw or burnt so badly that it just fell to dust when you picked it up. Or maybe he was secretly trying to kill the people that ate it.
Mick had a very strong sense of family obligation and believed in the ideal of loyalty. He just didn’t live it. Despite the fact that he ran past any boundary he deemed irrelevant with his immediate filial grouping, he wholeheartedly believed in the idea of family. Things like having integrity and doing the right thing for your people. “Showing up” was a huge deal to him. It didn’t matter that his mother was a viscous drunk, if she called he’d hop on a plane and go to her. Running right back into the dysfunction, thriving on it. Again, he was selective in his adherence to this ideal when it came to his wife and kids. But, at his core, the ideal was pure, it was his application that fell short.
On the surface, Mick was a deep thinker and came off as very confident in his own skin, but it was a great farce. He constantly second-guessed himself because of his own shitty upbringing. His mother was a battle-ax and was not fit to parent. When he had his life situated in a way that was comfortable, he thrived. Predictably was essential for him. A place for everything and everything in its place.
He had zero boundaries. None. He made crass, sexually explicit joke wherever and whenever he could; his biggest mistake was talking about a girls “gigantic knockers” while visiting me in the rehab facility where he had me locked up. A nurse overheard him and my therapy changed on a dime. They finally saw through his manipulative charade and I got the care, resources, and bravery necessary to facilitate my 2,000 mile relocation a few years later. He wanted to snuggle with me every night before bed, well past me being 18, and Number 2 would frequently tell him it was inappropriate. He once visited me in Atlanta and he grabbed my shoulder, as if he was entitled to touch me at 32. It was an inappropriate moment, fueled by entitlement, and a complete inability to grasp the idea of consent.
Because of his mommy issues, Mick seemed to operate best when he had an anchor in his life or something to focus his energies on, be that my mother’s best friend, finishing the basement, my mom’s sister, or his weekly trips to the VFW. I can see now that his need to have focused attention is a part of his intrinsic need to dominate others, but I have just happened upon this realization. When I was living it in real time and before I realized it was a tactic, life seemed great.
Mick considered himself extremely principled. Extremely. And in a way, I suppose he was. There was some sort of internal equilibrium inside him that dictated right versus wrong almost immediately. When focused outward, he could size a person up in a millisecond. And his assessments were spot on. He was an excellent read of character based on body movements, facial expressions, agitation, or if his beloved Great Dane didn’t like you.
He loved to travel and flying made him act like a kid in a candy store. Adventure was his middle name. There was no drive too far, no hour too late, and no language barrier too high to keep him from satisfying his wanderlust. The furthest corners of the earth were his mental playground. To have the window down, music blaring, and singing like he was Barry Gibb was his favorite pastime. Road trips made him come alive. Even a trip to the grocery store was a reason to get your mind in music mode and the vocal cords working until they were raw.
He was also a very pragmatic thinker when it came to others or their sticky situations. Go to him with any problem, and the troubleshooting hat went on. Situations could be analyzed, evaluated, and decided upon with logic and reasoning. He picked up on the small nuances of gnarly scenarios and made sense of it all…so long as it wasn’t about his own world. Mick lost all sound reasoning when it was about his family.
The best part of my father was his predilection for gift-giving and he loved the holidays. When Mick was planning a gift or a surprise for someone, he was giddy with enthusiasm. In truth, I get my love of gift giving from him, and, most especially, gift wrapping. The holidays in my home meant the cessation of fighting, torture, and torment. No worry and the peace came with cookies…it was awesome. Literally, from Thanksgiving Day until New Years Day, life was sweet bliss. A Norman Rockwell painting to me would include a horrible fake tree from the 80s with flammable lights and flimsy metal ornaments that were decorated with lead paint. Regardless, the packages under the tree were always wrapped with meticulous precision. Patterns lined up exactly; not a millimeter off. No joke. Bows were beautiful and the tags matched the package wrapping paper. I could sit with my dad for ages and wrap presents.
The hardest part of all of this is that I feel hoodwinked. For decades I felt bad for him, like I was the failure and let him down. Then, I just felt like he was dismissive and a lazy parent. When I realized he was abusive and the instigator of over half of my trauma, my world forever changed.
My God what I wouldn’t give for life to he frozen between the period of Thanksgiving and New Years just one more time. I would drink it all in with the wisdom of an adult, taking nothing for granted yet knowing everything was a farce.
