"It's All His Fault!"

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“Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; the patient in spirit are better than the proud in spirit.” – Ecclesiastes 7:8 (NRSVUE)

Everything that went wrong in our family was my father’s fault. At least, that’s how my mother told it. I was the oldest of the girls, so I became in-house auditor to her endless stream of complaints. After listening to nothing but negatives for more than a decade, I urged her to consider a divorce. She objected vehemently. “I made a vow!” she told me. She convinced my dad to go into couples therapy instead.

From therapy, Mom learned that Dad should be helping her with the dishes every night. Dad learned that his crippling anxiety was rooted in childhood shame over his parents’ alcohol abuse and affairs. He continued seeing a therapist on his own. By the time he passed away, a few years after Mom died, he’d begun tithing again to his childhood church and had compiled a list of ten character traits he was attempting to form in his last years of life. I found that list on his bureau after his death, carefully typed on a 3-by-5 notecard.

Parents always tell us, at least in retrospect, that they did the best they could. My dad’s best mostly involved retreating to his den or his woodshop during all the hours he wasn’t at work. We didn’t know a lot about anxiety-driven OCD then, so Mom got plenty peeved to see him spending long hours building perfect bookcases and clocks instead of rebuilding our rundown home. Nor did we know enough about childhood trauma to recognize that Dad wasn’t helping Mom with the kids because he didn’t know how to be with kids without hurting them. The best option he could see was to deprive himself of the experience of fatherhood so we’d be protected from a father who might prove as damaging as his own had been.

My grandfather and my father both became very different men in later life. Grampie found the strength to be human by leaning on a “higher power” as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Dad found self-understanding in therapy and strength in his childhood faith. The end of things in their lives was so much better than the beginnings. Unlike their families, God had seen the end from the beginning. For both families, only years of patient waiting would reveal the rewards.

Questions for Reflection:

1. What imperfections do you live patiently with in your father?

2. What imperfections (if any) have you seen your father work to overcome?

3. How do you find patience, acceptance, and forgiveness for your father’s imperfections?