A Relationship Lesson My Dad Taught Me

This is part two of an on-going topic begun here:


An acrimonious custody battle finalized my parents’ separation when I was six-years’ old. Even as my personality was in its final stages of development, it did not escape my notice how happy my parents seemed to be apart. My dad missed my mother: washing, cleaning, cooking all of which were accepted as a wife’s duty by men and women born in the 20s. He missed her in other ways, too. He felt the financial burden to raise a child alone as well as those worries accompany a new father at 47 (my mother was 52, by the way). This was the new normal in the Me Generation days after the Summer of Love (the year I was born) and the advent of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

I had a front row seat to a drama of two people who were moving in opposite directions and did not belong together. It did not escape my notice that my father was often mistook to be my grandfather; my ideas were precocious next to those of my peers; my ability to articulate was more mature; or that expectations placed upon me by my parents were higher than those placed upon my generation with younger Beatnik-Hippy parents. I learnt a few private lessons from all this.

I loved my mother or my father and, being partial to both & neither at the same time, I became aware of a simple truth: relationships do not simply work between two really nice, loving people. After my parents’ marriage imploded, they formed another relationship around me in which they worked well together, separately.

What I failed to comprehend though obvious it was to see (perhaps because my critical thinking had not yet developed) was how compartmentalized all these adult relationships were for my parent(s): an adult for companionship and sex; an adult for minding a child; an adult to educate a child; and many adults as friends and colleagues offering different kinds of support. I look back on it now and hindsight makes everything appear obvious and my childish notions of monogamy rather silly.

The lesson on relationships my dad taught me was filtered through our Judeo-Christian-Sophist-Edwardian era religious beliefs that every man has one woman created for him (and visa-versa for the woman one presumes, if one is as egalitarian-minded as I).

My dad was married 20 years to a woman who kept his house while he enjoyed extra-marital affairs. Like I am, he was a handsome man but, unlike me, he was faced with a difficult choice with his first marriage. To leave his hometown he married a woman worldlier than he; but this opportunity only came with a woman no one wanted. In my estimation of her from photographs, she fell from a great height off the ugly tree and hit every branch coming down. She was extremely intelligent and loving because my father, who was riddled with sinful guilt, repeatedly told me admirable stories of her. She had died abruptly while my father was carrying on with my mother. And once my father was a widower, my mother revealed she was pregnant and, four weeks later, she married my father.

It was a shocker for my parents’ time. But what shocked me was how poor a match my mother was for my dad and, yet, so beautiful in comparison to his first wife who had been so good to him. Even at six years of age, I realized I would be frightened to awake to the face in the photograph - like some children are terrified of clowns.

Now, worldlier than a 6-year-old, I can better understand the feelings I can articulate how uncomfortable I would be wearing a bag over my head during s3xual intercourse. I am sure less superficial people wouldn’t mind it as much as I.

But the lesson my dad taught me was to make a wise choice and seek some one more in balance with what I wanted. The egalitarian in me informed me that I had better give as good as I take. Know thyself is an imperative for such a balanced relationship to happen.