Reviving Ophelia (18 page)

FATHERS

My father grew up in the Ozarks during the Depression. He was a good-looking, slow-talking Southerner. He left the South for World War Two, and his military service took him to Hawaii, Japan and, later, Korea. In San Francisco he met and married my mother, who was in the Navy. When I was young, he attended college on the GI Bill and developed a taste for big-band music and trips to Mexico. But he remained Southern in his beliefs about race and women until he died in 1973.

I was his first child and he insisted I be named Mary after the Blessed Virgin and Elizabeth after the English queen. He woke in the night to check on my breathing. By the time I was six months old, he had a Benny Goodman record that he played when he came home from work. I would hear that record and flail in my crib. He would pick me up and dance me around our small living room.

When I was five he taught me to fish. We walked to a pond filled with bluegill and sun perch. He hooked a worm on my line, sat beside me waiting for a hit, and then he helped me take the fish off the hook. He untangled line, chased away snakes and picked off the ticks I acquired en route to the pond. We could sit all afternoon along the bank, listening to frogs, watching turtles and filling a gunnysack with keepers.

He taught me to drive a blue 1950 Mercury on the back roads of Cloud County. Smoking Chesterfields and drinking Dr Pepper, he sat beside me, his black curly hair blowing in the breeze. He was an anxious teacher, always grabbing the wheel and shouting, “Steer, steer, goddammit.”

When I was twelve I told him I loved the smell of new books. I said I loved to hold them to my face and breathe in their aroma. He looked alarmed and said, “Don’t tell anyone that. They’ll think you are a pervert.”

When he and my mother drove me down to the state university, he was full of advice. “Don’t date anybody but freshmen and don’t get serious with them. Don’t get in with a crowd that smokes or drinks. Stay away from foreigners. Don’t get behind in your studies.” When he left he hugged me, his first hug in years, and he said, “I’ll miss you. I talk more to you than to anyone else.”

I had my last conversation with my father the day before he died. Much to his relief, I was married. He called to see if I had passed my comprehensive exams in psychology. I told him yes and he was pleased. Then I begged on—people were coming to dinner and I needed to fix a salad. He said, “I’m proud of you.” The next day he had a stroke and went into a coma. I was with him in the ICU when the machines bleeped to a stop.

My father was the best and worst of fathers. He would have given his life to save mine. He was embarrassingly proud of my accomplishments and naively certain that I would succeed. But he had a double standard about sex and rigid views about women. In short, we had a typical complicated father-daughter relationship, probably closer than most such relationships in the 1950s because both of us were big talkers.

 

All fathers are products of their times. The rules for fathers have changed a great deal since the 1950s, when to be a good father, a man should stay sober, earn a living, remain faithful to his wife and not beat the kids. Men weren’t expected to hug their daughters, tell them they loved them or talk to them about personal matters. Now fathers are expected to do all the things they did in the 1950s, plus be emotionally involved. Many fathers didn’t learn how to do this from their own fathers. Because they missed their training, they feel lost.

Most fathers also received a big dose of misogyny training as boys, and nowhere does this hurt them more than in parenting their daughters. They are in the awkward position of loving a gender that they have been taught to devalue, of caring for females whom they have been taught to discount. And yet in our culture, the main job of fathers is to teach their children to fit into broader society.

Americans tend to have a double standard on parenting. Mothers are seen as having great power to do harm with their mistakes. Fathers are viewed as having great power to do good with their attention. In our society when daughters are strong, credit is often given to fathers. But in my experience, strong daughters often come from families with strong mothers.

While most girls are connected to their mothers by close if often conflicting ties, with fathers they have varied relationships. Some girls barely speak to their fathers, while others have warm, close relationships and common interests. One client said, “I hardly know my dad exists. We have nothing in common.” Another said, “My favorite thing about Dad is that he plays duets with me every night after dinner. We both love the violin and have had this time together since I was three years old.”

Fathers also have great power to do harm. If they act as socializing agents for the culture, they can crush their daughters’ spirits. Rigid fathers limit their daughters’ dreams and destroy their self-confidence. Sexist fathers teach their daughters that their value lies in pleasing men. Sexist jokes, misogynistic cracks and negative attitudes about assertive women hurt girls. Sexist fathers teach their daughters to relinquish power and control to men. In their own relations with women they model a power differential between the sexes. Some fathers, in their eagerness to have their daughters accepted by the culture, encourage their daughters to be attractive or lose weight. They produce daughters who believe their only value is their physical attractiveness to men. These fathers undervalue intelligence in women and teach their daughters to undervalue it too.

On the other hand, nonsexist fathers can be tremendously helpful in teaching their daughters healthy rebellion. They can encourage daughters to protect themselves and even to fight back. They can encourage their daughters’ androgyny, particularly in sports and academics. They can teach daughters skills, such as how to change tires, throw a baseball or build a patio. They can help them understand the male point of view and the forces that act on men in this culture.

The best fathers confront their own lookism and sexism. Fathers can model good male-female relationships and respect for women in a wide variety of roles. Fathers can fight narrow definitions of their daughters’ worth and support their wholeness. They can teach their daughters that it’s okay to be smart, bold and independent.

In the 1970s, I did research on father-daughter relationships. I interviewed high school girls, one-fourth of whose fathers had died, one-fourth of whose parents were divorced and one-half of whose parents were together. I was interested in how daughters’ relationships to fathers affected their self-esteem, sense of well-being and reactions to males.

I quickly found that the physical presence of the father had little to do with the quality of the relationship. Some girls whose fathers lived in the home rarely spoke to them, while other girls who never saw their fathers were sustained by memories of warmth and acceptance. Emotional availability, not physical presence, was the critical variable. I found three kinds of relationships: supportive, distant and abusive.

Supportive fathers had daughters with high self-esteem and a sense of well-being. These girls were more apt to like men, to feel confident in relationships with the opposite sex and to predict their own future happiness. They described fathers as fun, deeply involved and companionable.

In my study, the majority of fathers fell in the distant relationship category. They may have wanted relationships, but they didn’t have the skills. Girls with distant fathers said they liked the income their fathers brought home, but they appreciated little else. Besides being the breadwinner, often the father had only one other role: rule enforcer. Distant fathers were generally perceived as more rigid than mothers, less understanding and less willing to listen. As one girl put it, “If Dad moved out, we’d be poorer, but there’d be more peace around here.”

These distant fathers were often well-meaning but inept. They were likely to work long hours outside the home and have less time and energy for the hard work of connecting with adolescents. Distant fathers didn’t know how to stay emotionally involved with their complicated teenage daughters. They hadn’t learned to maneuver the intricacies of relationships with empathy, flexibility, patience and negotiation. They had counted on women to do this for them.

Some distant fathers had more than a skill or time deficit. Because of their socialization to the male role, they did not value the qualities necessary to stay in close long-term relationships. They labeled nurturing and empathizing as wimpy behavior and related to their daughters in cold, mechanical ways.

The third category was the emotionally, physically or sexually abusive father. These were the fathers who called their daughters names, who ridiculed and shamed them for mistakes and who physically hurt or molested their daughters.

Katie’s father was a supportive father. However, because of his illness, Katie had taken too much responsibility for him. Holly’s father lacked the skills necessary to help his daughter. Dale was well-meaning but distant. Klara’s father also fell into the distant category. He was a rigidly sex-typed father who imposed his definitions of femaleness on his daughter. These fathers all played important roles in the lives of their daughters, for good or ill.

Pete was a single parent whose wife had died in a car accident when Katie was three. An invalid, homebound with muscular dystrophy, Pete managed to support himself and Katie with a computer consulting business.

When Katie was in high school, he insisted she come to therapy. He was concerned that she was letting her love for him keep her from living her own life. Katie came in under duress, claiming that she could share all her thoughts and feelings with Pete.

Katie was so loving and insightful that she seemed too good to be true. Unlike most teenagers, she had a sense that her work was important to others. She took care of Pete, worked at a nearby drugstore and studied. Time after time she managed to make good decisions about a life filled with problems.

I asked about her relationship to Pete. “He’s always trusted me. When I have a problem, he insists I figure it out for myself. He says that I’ll make the right decision. We can talk about everything: sex, boys, drugs, menstruation, you name it. He’s the best listener in the world.”

I asked her if she missed having a mother. “I don’t remember my mother. Of course I wish she were with us, but I’m happier than most of my friends. I have more of a father than anyone I know.”

Only when I asked about Pete’s health did her tone change. Her face darkened and she said softly, “He’s getting worse and I hate to leave him for long. I’m worried about his future.”

While she detailed his health problems and his poor prognosis, I listened. Her voice was clear and firm but filled with pain. She had thought a great deal about what she wanted to give to Pete, but less about what she needed to keep for herself. I worried that she had few other relationships to sustain her when her father died. I wanted to be careful and not fix what wasn’t broken, but on the other hand, Katie needed to think more about her own life. Pete was right—she needed more friends and more fun.

I shared my thoughts with her at the end of the session. Katie said, “Dad is so great that I don’t miss friends. I know that sounds weird, but I like my life just like it is.”

I wanted to meet this great dad, so I drove to their small suburban home one Saturday afternoon. Pete lay on a daybed covered with quilts and three Siamese cats. Nearby were his computer and telephone. He was thin and frail with a big smile and an outgoing manner.

Pete and Katie joked about my black coat and the white cat hairs. We talked about the ice storm that had frozen our city over the weekend and Katie’s skills as a cook. No one seemed eager to broach the topic of Pete’s health.

I complimented Pete on the wonderful job he had done raising Katie. He laughed. “She raised me. She’s tons more mature than I am.”

I agreed with him that Katie was mature, but I noted that she needed more social life. I thought to myself she needed friendships and Saturday-night dates. I suspected that some of her reluctance came from worry about her father, but some probably stemmed from ordinary teenage social anxiety.

Pete said, “Usually I respect Katie’s judgment, but she needs to look at herself in this area. She’s more comfortable with me than she is with kids her age. She hates to fail and she knows she can succeed with me.”

I offered to be Katie’s “social-life consultant,” and she agreed to come in for a while. But I could tell she was humoring us. I changed the subject. “How will things go when Katie graduates from high school?”

Pete and Katie exchanged looks and Pete laughed. “We have a big difference of opinion there. We have my wife’s insurance money. Katie can go to school anywhere she wants. She can get into Harvard, Yale, her grades are first-rate.”

Katie interrupted, “I want to go here.”

Pete continued, “Katie has things all planned out. She wants to live at home and care for her sick old pa. I won’t let her do that.”

“You’ve never told me what to do and you can’t start now,” Katie said.

We all laughed.

But then Katie’s eyes filled with tears and she said, “You are all the family I’ve got and I won’t leave you. I couldn’t enjoy being anywhere else. I’m not staying to take care of you. I’m staying because I want to. ”

Pete shook his head no.

“I’ll live in the dorms if I can come home every day for a visit.”

“What do you think I’ll be doing?” Pete joked. “Snorting coke, losing my money in crap games?”

Katie stood up for her position. “I think you’ll be doing what you do now and you need my help to do it. You can hire someone for some things, like shopping and cleaning, but I’m going to visit daily and that’s that.”

“You’ve raised a stubborn daughter,” I said. “I suggest you accept Katie’s offer. It’s not unhealthy or wrong for families to stick together.”