Relic/Remnant #5: My Father, August 1962

A deep, wild current runs between father & daughter.  Through her, he sees the evolution of a woman--the dazzling progression from infancy to willowy childhood to adolescence.  It can change a man, witnessing this transformation.  Through her father, a daughter learns how to love or how to lose.

In this photo, he is in the Navy--still unmarried, still childless, still trying to find his way out into the world.  He is already in love with my mother.  Their passionate correspondence burns across page after page of their letters.  His hasn't been an easy childhood, & in my mother, he sees home for the first time.  He sees the first thing worth waiting for, worth becoming a better man for.  This is what he tells her.  He begs her to wait for him.  He spins elaborate stories of what their life together will be like.  He mentions the children he sees in their future.  Two, a boy and a girl.  Theirs.  Perfect.

I am something my father never saw coming.  The fifth born, but only the third to be born alive.  My father got his perfect two babies and then two stillborn sons.  Loss can also change a man.  By the time I was born, I was already a reminder of all that wasn't.  No fault of my own, but I was the baby born carrying the weight of the bones of the dead who came before me. 

This quiet heartbreak of my father's may have been what started us down the path to all that came after.  When I look at this photo of him: August, 1962, I feel a confused wash of maternal love.  He is so young here.  So many trials & sufferings still coming.  I want to reach out & stop him for what he will do.

The story is ours...is mine...is still being written.  It is dark & sad & full of thickets, bramble-wild.  I have "Mom" tattooed over my heart--but, "Dad" may be the deepest scar I carry on it.  A week & a half ago he was in the ICU, my beautiful, adrift, complicated Irish father.  He has come through another trial & it has stirred up in me old vestiges of our fractured past.  What I know:

mending...

fragility...

hope...

possibility...

that I may yet get to learn forgiveness.