What a strange, strange month it’s been …
A month ago today, I was traveling around London with Tina, jetlagged and struck by how surprised I was by everything. The main things on my mind were the stage production of “His Dark Materials” and Damien Hirst’s wonderful pickled shark. It never occured to me that a month later Tina would be expecting, that I would seriously start dealing with issues of fatherhood, issues I sort of glossed over as we tried to conceive. In less than thirty days, my life changed in extraordinarily tremendous ways.
And oddly enough, I find myself thinking about my grandfather.
It’s no secret that I’m not on speaking terms with him. This effectively amounts to cowardice on my part, and I won’t get into the circumstances that lead to the current state of my relationship with him. But I’m relieved that I don’t have to deal with him. To put it simply, he’s not a very nice man. And as he gets older, he gets meaner, more bitter.
I realize that a lot of my personal issues — and a lot of what makes up the essence of who I am — can be attributed to him. Nasty, domineering, verbally abusive, he terrorized his children, his wife and to a lesser degree, his grandchildren. They all bear the scars of dealing with him — a pattern of failure that has roots back to how he broke their confidence in themselves when they were children, or in my late grandmother’s case, over the bulk of her life. My father was the most untouched by him, but still bore some of the effects, mostly in his own feelings of inadequacy. It’s no coincidence that none of my grandfather’s children were ever as financially or professionally successful as he was. He discouraged them at every turn.
When my father died, he tried to convince me to drop out of college and go to work. “You’re not good enough for any of that,” he told me. I replied that he could go fuck himself in the ass. When I said it to him, it was his voice that came out of my mouth — his sort of response. And therein lies the core of my current dilemma.
Where so many of my relatives were torn down by him, I was influenced in a completely different way. I was taken under his wing as a kid, and there are bits of his nastiness inside of me. To my shame, I sometimes find myself laughing at inappropriate things. I see it in how my own jokes can sometimes be too mean, how I can take things too far with people. My conscience plagues me. I remember every single time I was ever mean to someone, from childhood on. The memories of those terrible, shameful moments pop into my head at strange times.
And now I’m going to be a father. Will I inadvertently transmit some of my grandfather’s pathology into my children, along with his genes? Or will I stem it off, will Tina temper his traits in our child the same way my mother tempered them in me? My conscience, my sense of justice clearly comes from my mother, counterbalancing the selfish, nasty traits of my grandfather. Will Tina’s kindness and generosity do the same?
Can my grandfather’s influence be dilluted into nothing? I hope so.
