FATHERS

The past couple of weeks we have been on retreat from our city life in the little cottage in Laguna Beach we bought nearly thirty years ago. How lucky we were! Or as I prefer to say, how smart! Tucked away here in this cosy space between two gardens, front and back, that Ellie has lavished loving attention on, we are a long way from the problems of the world that we witness daily, foolishly (we should shut the damn thing off!) on our television screen. From this perspective, it can seem almost unreal.

Our stay here has been highlighted by family visits. Our daughter Sarah and grandson Luka came down to spend a couple of nights the weekend before the Fourth--they did not stay for the fireworks. It was a lovely visit. Luka still has boundless energy, enough to sap my own, but at ten years old, now, he is learning to manage it much better. He's fun to be with, funny, spirited, and too smart by half. He hones my wits. Sarah still very deeply connected with the friend she has known for five years now--a long-lasting relationship. The two seem like a good match, but have the misfortune to live on different continents. Hard at the best of times, harder still in a time of global pandemic. 

Then yesterday we had a second lovely family visit, this time from Ellie's older sister, Susie, and her niece, Yardena, who drove up from San Diego where they live. We sat down together to enjoy a delicious lunch that Ellie had prepared with much love and labor--cold poached salmon with orzo salad--and chatted genially. After lunch, we got into some deeper family matters, Ellie with Susie, I with Yardena. As she reported later, the two daughters had talked about their father, a man of great wit and charm whom they both adored, but who was also deeply flawed. Like most men of their generation, before women came along to raise the cultural consciousness, he was casually abusive of the women in his life as though by God-given masculine rights. He burdened both his daughters with secrets they should never have known, and proved himself faithless to his second wife of many years--as Ellie discovered only yesterday for the first time—up to the very day he died from an accidental fall.

Yardena and I, meanwhile, got into a different, equally emotional conversation about the effects of separation and divorce on little children. Her father, much like Ellie's, felt free to exercise those same masculine rights. In his case--as, I freely admitted, in my own--this ended up in a split between the parents that necessarily left a deep wound in the psyche of their children. She and her two brothers suffered, as did Ellie and her sister. I told her with great sadness of my own, similar experience and the mark it surely left on the lives of my two sons. 

They say it’s the inherent task of every father to inflict wounds on their children, and of every child to do the work that’s necessary to recover from them. This is the subject of my new book, “Dear Harry,” now in the final stages of production, and I guess it has been true at least since Oedipus. Thanks to Dr. Freud, we understand it better now; and thanks to Dr. Jung we know more about the healing process. But despite the efforts of these two good doctors and countless of their followers over many decades now, I can be quite sure that this generational predicament will persist so long as there’s a human species here on earth.

It was a rich discussion on both sides of the table, anyway, and I’m sure a rewarding one for all of us. Such deep connection makes for deepening relationships and more powerful family ties. All in all, it was, as Susie said as she and Yardena were about to leave, a memorable visit.