Lost

In every story he ever heard about his mother she was referred to as “Libby”. He clung to her name with the desperation of a hungry puppy latched to a tit. So when I was born a voice rose up inside him and he pleaded with my mother to call me “Libby”. “Libby Lou Smith”. My mother flatly said, “NO!” expressing her willingness to call me Elizabeth instead. “That was her given name, after all”, she explained. He would not give up his small child’s view. His mother had always been called “Libby” and nothing my mother could say would change that in his mind. In the end, my mother won out as usual but compromised by giving me the middle name of the woman who had supposedly taken my father in. Her name was Elaine. So, Paula Elaine Smith was the name I was given before the tw0 week’s stay in the hospital was over and I went home.

History has to do with the past. Facts pull into view aspects of an event outside of ourselves so we can remember. Memory brings the past into the present so we can grapple with the internal experience. Memory can be affected by all kinds of things: age, emotional awareness, perception, life events, and imagination, to name a few. Memories are akin to making up stories. That is why our memories often change from one telling to the next. Sometimes they become filled with magical thinking—and those are the times that the memories can become fantastical stories that have very little or nothing to do with what actually happened.

So, consider the story my father remembers being told about his mother. Libby is heating up water on the woodstove. She is a 32 year old, strikingly attractive farmwife living in Iowa. The sun is high up in the blue cloudless sky. Her husband, Will, is out on the land planting alfalfa. Her 2 older sons, 4 and 6, are playing outside near the house. She looks out the window and smiles as she watches her husband on the tractor making a large circle at the end of the row. Her 6-month-old baby lies in a basket kicking his feet wildly with joy. She is heating water to give him a bath. Suddenly, a flame catches her dress on fire. She cannot put it out, cannot get out of the dress because the flames are moving too quickly. Her blood-curdling screams bring Will running. He rolls her frantically in a worn carpet and the flames finally smolder out. For the next 2 weeks Libby suffers excruciating pain in their tiny farmhouse before she dies.

Libby’s story seems to end here. But, what happened to her family? Was the baby (my father) passed around from one good neighbor to the next family member to the next church lady? What happened to Will and the 2 other boys? To compensate for being too little to remember, as he got older he alleged to have been taken in and given a wonderful home with his mother’s sister, Elaine and her husband, Otis.

When he was 5, his memory kicks in and he is living with his father and brothers in a tent with a dirt floor in Kansas City. The next memory that he occasionally shared is factual. He is attending the University of Kansas on a football scholarship during the Depression, going to school and football practice during the day and working as a janitor in various buildings on campus at night.

Did his higher education and marriage to my mother, a woman from a very different social class, provoke a separation with his father and brothers? I do not remember his ever talking about them, nor did I meet any of them. Their complete absence was such an integral part of my life, it never occurred to me to ask about them.

What was it like for him to lose his mother in such a horrific way at a young age, his father and brothers as a young adult? How did these events influence his sense of Self? Did setting him loose on his life journey, like a baby floating aimlessly in a basket, eclipse entire parts of his psyche? These are questions that come up for me when I try to make meaning of my memories of the man I called “Dad”.

My mother occasionally told a story about Dad. When I would hear this story, it emoted the feelings and the image I had of my dad in most of my memories of him. They had just met at the University of Kansas and my father called her up and asked her out. She was a popular girl on campus and not lacking for boys’ attentions. She declined. He insisted, saying it was necessary that she come downstairs from her dorm room immediately. She reluctantly acquiesced. When she rounded the corner and started out the door—she saw him standing there with 2 ice cream cones.

I cannot for the life of me comprehend why my mother married my father. He was a constant source of irritation and embarrassment to her, his family and our community. She did an excellent job covering up for his inadequacies and kept him isolated from herself, my brother and sister and me. During the short time after my mother died and before he remarried, I spent a little time alone with him. I was shocked with his shortcomings and inadequacies that were painfully obvious and uncomfortable to be around. 

To me, he felt like a little child. Not childlike exactly, but powerless. He did not possess the power adults’ carry. Consequently, he was the one all the other adults in my world blamed for everything. Everyone in the family projected something negative onto him. I could feel these projections when I was young but could not sort them out or separate them from my actual experience. Negativity therefore became the foundation of how I thought about him.

In my memory he desperately wanted a family. Not his own family with Mom and us kids—but he yearned for parents and siblings. So he looked to my grandparents devotedly and could not wait for the next family gathering to visit for hours with my aunts and uncles. They made fun of him behind his back, in front of me. I started to believe that if he was such a loser as they implied, then perhaps I was, as well. This thought kept me isolated in silence and despair.

Sentimental is how I would describe him. Along with having a sentimental emotional streak running just below the surface he was also sentimental about things he saw. He could tell you in great detail and with deep emotion about a hay bale he had seen decades before. I often wondered if this sentimentality left his unprotected heart vulnerable to other people taking advantage of him?

When I was little I thought he was intelligent and clever. I watched as people at my grandpa’s lumberyard waited in long lines out the front door for him to figure up what materials they needed for their projects. For not having any formal training, he naturally demonstrated tremendous creativity and talent. You’d think this would have brought him some positive recognition. But, like everything my father did, this backfired, too.

Working for his father-in-law brought him in close contact with a parent, which he coveted, while making it necessary for him to turn his back to the abuse that was being heaped upon him. When he did something my grandfather didn’t like, Grandpa would complain about him to my mother. Her anger would build throughout the day and into the evening until after we went to bed. Then, she let Dad have it with both barrels. “How could you be so stupid? Why did you tell Chester Kolterman the least expensive way to fix his window? Why did you order so many tubes of caulk?” The yelling seemed to go on for hours. My memories about this are muddled, as I was certain the verbal abuse was being directed at me.

When I was 4 (and loved my father with all my heart), my mother, after one of her tirades, loaded us up in the car and announced we were leaving and never coming back. When we started out, I looked back at the house and Dad was sitting on the porch steps with my dog. I was hysterical the entire 3 hours drive to Kansas City. I could not stop crying. Eventually mom said, “ Because you won’t stop crying we are going back”. Then I cried all the way home with the weight of this responsibility. When we pulled in the driveway, there he was, still sitting in the same place on the stairs, dog in his lap.

Our trust was broken during the only years I remember actually loving him. I was 5 and desperately wanted to spend time with him. One day he came home for lunch and asked me if I would like to go to the grocery store with him. I was ecstatic! We went to the store and picked up bologna and a can of chicken noodle soup, my personal favorites. On the way home we stopped at the old hospital. He bodily carried me inside and waited in the hall while Dr. Fleckenstein gave me a booster shot. I remember feeling the sizzling anger of betrayal for the first time in my life. I knew I would never trust him again. My feelings of loving him never resurfaced after that incident.

All through my growing up years he let other people think for him and did whatever they said. For instance, he was told to polish our shoes for church on Saturday nights, which he did religiously. His job was also to sort through the lima beans whenever he was told. More humiliating for everyone was when he was told by my mother to say something that was hard for her to say or do something that was difficult. He was oblivious to so much of my day-to-day life that when my mother sent him in to deliver a message, he would surprise me every time with his unhinged rage. At those times he was a loose cannon and even more dangerous because he hadn’t stopped to consider what he was doing.

When I got my first period and told my sister, he burst into my room, threw sanitary pads on the bed, then turned around and left without saying a word. Another time he slapped me in the face in front of my high school girlfriends because I was getting ready to go to the Queen of Courts Dance with them for an hour. By not questioning ‘why’ he was well suited to be able to do my mother’s frenetic dirty work.

He was physically incredibly strong and athletic. Much to everyone’s aversion though, he frightened us by sensationalizing physical wounding. Working at the lumberyard carried with it many possibilities for getting hurt. When this would happen he would describe in gory details exactly what had transpired and insist, with pressuring force, to look at his injuries. This sensationalism was also especially bullying when he cut up fish. He seemed to get a real thrill out of terrorizing us with blood and guts.

I often wonder what it would have been like for me if Libby had lived? Without the horrible wounding would Dad have had confidence to think and make choices for himself? Would he have been able to say to my mother, “Stop it, Alice, you are scaring the children”? Would he have protected and supported his children—been engaged in our lives? Would he have dealt with people differently and directly so that our relationship could have been spared his displaced anger?

Toward the end of his life I realized my father had never had any idea who I was. He had been around when I was growing up but absent from my life. It felt like he had never been interested in me and didn’t even like me. I could sense his anger at the opportunities my mother provided and he completely ignored all my creative and academic endeavors. From my earliest memory of him I could sense his disappointment in me.  

I don’t think about my father much anymore. Some of my memories have worn away like sandpaper rubbed smooth, others with colors faded from overexposure. But when I do occasionally bring them out I begrudge the fact that they are not tender and loving. Some part of me wants to remember him as a gentle person with a big heart. I want to see him in my mind’s eye with his love of people and his vast curiosity about life. I want to celebrate his creativity, his strength, his love of the land and animals. I want to savor his enjoyment of his tomatoes and vegetables. I want to experience again the special bond he had with my son. I want to feel compassion for him and form a picture with all these things in it. But, I cannot.

If the role of fathers is to show you about the world, then I was shown how to give myself up for others, to have no boundaries, have no respect for myself and to allow others to abuse me. My deepest memories of my father are all about being repeatedly disappointed. Continually embarrassed. This was my experience. It is part of my story.

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