LHVD III Day

(excerpted)

Today my father would have been 82. It’s been 29 years since he’s been gone. It’s difficult and different to celebrate his legacy each year. 

Because he was a whole person and important to many people beyond me it feels important to name some of my essential memories about him: Old wool sweaters. Docksiders. Thick hair with a strong swoop across the front. His wood paneled library. Old books. Oriental rugs. Scotch. More scotch. Tin roofs (grape juice and ginger ale). Dominos. Backgammon. Fires in the fireplaces. Pictures and slides - he was the family documentarian. A raucous laugh. Dirty jokes. Patient and slooooooow moving. Wood working. Saw dust. Fly fishing. A social butterfly. Deep commitment to his family of origin. Papers - so many papers. He saved everything. I’m grateful to have a few memories of cleaning out his big studio room after he died.

I spent the first 15-20 years of his absence trying to forgive him. The continued dysfunction of our family makes that task easier and easier. In the last 10 years or so I’ve been able to shift my perspective enough to appreciate what his experience must have been like. 

I believe that it was true that he was not free to embrace his strengths and interests. He likely suffered from dyslexia or various learning disabilities as likely I and my children certainly do. My mother reports that his choices, per his father, were doctor, banker, or lawyer. He became a commercial banker. It suited him only in that it privileged the making and maintaining of relationships, which he was excellent at. However he allegedly hated his job and resented having to be the worker in the family working in a job he despised. I never heard him say that, or I don’t remember him saying that, but I never knew him without understanding that that was true. He would come home from work and put his feet up and watch the evening news and The People’s Court (trash TV really but I will never forget Judge Wapner.) I can remember the intro music and flashes of helicopters from the Action News segment. He loved woodworking and loved art history. He would have loved to have worked in a museum. He was apparently a fine artist. I remember finding some watercolor paintings including one of ladies in formal dresses under the sink storage cabinets in the playroom addition. Why they were there I have no idea. I remember asking my mom about them and being surprised to learn that they were paintings of my fathers from when he was young. I wish I still had them.

This year I’m sitting again with the synchronicity of his birthday and Columbus Day / Indigenous People’s Day. Growing up we almost always spent or celebrated my dad’s birthday at Pocono. We were in charge of closing up the camps for the winter and it was almost always excellent cold, fall weather. I remember that the last year he was alive the leaves were among the most brilliant I had ever seen. Even as a young teenager I was awestruck. I don’t think the leaves turn that early in PA anymore. We are in Southern Michigan now and they are just beginning to turn. 

I have some printed pictures from that weekend. These prints are 29 years old, so they may have faded some. I'm including them in case climate change causes us to forget this foliage brilliance!

I grew up with an untroubled perspective on Columbus Day. Of course I was taught the lie. However, it didn’t hold tremendous significance for me aside from the fact that it meant my dad’s birthday and a long weekend at the lake. Many of our other National fables and myths held more importance in my family. This one was held sort of neutrally. Of course as more truthful history has proliferated my perspective has changed. Not only have I come to understand the dangerous impact of this myth on Native peoples in this land (perpetuating empty land and glorifying colonization) but I’ve also come to understand the particular horrors of Columbus’s behavior such an feeding Indigenous babies to dogs, raping and enslaving people, and initiating a genocidal tradition in this hemisphere. 

With the push to more officially recognize indigenous people’s day and with my own effort to better educate myself I’ve been thinking a lot about the legacy of boarding /residential schools for Native children. Six years ago I visited the Heard museum in Phoenix, AZ. There was an exhibit on boarding schools. Thankfully this wasn’t my first immersion into this content. I was fortunate enough to take an Indian Boarding Schools class in college at Colgate. I think I was intrigued because of my own problematic boarding school experiences. I had no idea what to expect and remember being shocked and dismayed at what I learned.

I had a transformative experience at this exhibit and a breakthrough realization. What I was witnessing in the exhibit was presented as traumatic. And, it was. It was also very recognizable. The gender-enforced education. The extreme patriotism and Christianity. The moralization of work. The glorification of individualism but the subjugation of individuation. I walked the exhibit halls nodding my head with recognition. 

I was also marveling at how people thought it was ok to take children from homes at such a young age and send them away to school. And then I realized - that’s what happened to my own father. He was sent to boarding school in 4th grade. He was also not allowed to eat in the dining room with his parents until he was 10 (note: his aunt’s memoir reports the same was true for his parents generation until age 7.) He called his parents by their first names. My father entered my grandfather’s journal from 1941 only 2 times - he was 2 years old. 

The reality of the parent-child relationship that they had is completely different from my experience as a parent but only partially different from what I experienced as a child. What I saw echoed the socialization I received. I say echoes because of course there were differences. We ate family dinner together, likely as a result of having no domestic household help. I went away to boarding school at the age of 16, after my father had died. It’s another story but I was desperate to go and would have gone sooner if I hadn’t felt an obligation to my mom and brothers who had just lost my dad. I certainly felt pressure to carry on various family status traditions. 

Much of my socialization came from school. I grew up going to church not just on Sundays but chapel at school 3-5 times a week from ages 8-18. That is a lot of church. And of course we took religion class on top of that. What I recognized most standing in those exhibit halls was the constriction and conformity. The narrow performance standard and the rigid gendering. I was witnessing the codification of whiteness and white supremacy without the language or frame to fully understand it.

My hair raised at the “good girls should…” and “real boys should…” kinds of messages. The uncomfortable and constraining uniforms. At school I had to wear a blazer everyday, all day or face demerits and detention. The uniform was a holdover from what the boys were made to wear when it was an all boys school. The feeling of wearing clothes that aren’t for you but give the appearance of ...well, uniformness...sameness. I could feel the heavily punitive stance. The hardened process of the making of adults. It was a lot to take in.

I had become accustomed to looking more deeply at the legacy of how my people harmed other people. I had become (more) accustomed to hearing truthful history about atrocities committed. I had been accustomed to viewing that history as action and decision led by bias and dehumanization. I wasn’t used to seeing my own socialization through the museum glass. To considering too the intersection between harm done both to self and other.

This really brings forward a compounding tension for me. How terrible that we can’t even name or recognize the trauma that we commit to ourselves. How unstuck can we possibly become if we haven’t done the deep and reflective work of tracing back those threads of harm, dehumanization, and destruction? I hated my school experiences. But I just got the message that I was difficult. Not that there was something flawed in the foundation of the system or institution.

Related to this (ignorance of our own wounds) is the following question: Is it really that hard to believe that we can harm and victimize others and other’s children when we do a version of the same with our own?  How much easier is it to dehumanize and traumatize others even more cruelly when you have a narrative of your own supremacy and their inferiority emblazoned in your mind.  Truly, if you’re willing to send your own children away, why would you protest the sending away (forcible removal) of other’s children? Especially when you consider them to be less valuable, capable and sophisticated than you or your children. This has helped me look at the trauma we perpetrate differently. I had mistakenly thought that we systematically victimize and traumatize others. I am also learning the ways in which we do that first to ourselves.

A similarly unlocking book for me has been My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menkham. They look at epigenetic trauma lineage in various groups of people: White, Black, and Law Enforcement Officers. The section on Black trauma aligns well with DeGreu’s work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. But this book was one of the first that I saw to look for and name, long-line ancestral trauma in the White / European Communities. This kind of inquiry has surfaced for me again as I’ve been exploring a bit more about medieval history and Ancient History, especially of Western Europe. It raised again for me the traumas and cultural patterns that informed some of our genocidal behavior and colonization. I’ve learned about the Roman occupation of Britain and the experience of colonization that people there experienced. I’ve learned that during the time of the Byzantine empire that Western Europe was considered much less sophisticated and barbaric. I’ve also learned that in the middle ages (named the Dark ages as a PR ploy by the Renaissance period) it was very customary to move children out of the home by age 7 or so. Usually the selected inheriting child would stay while other children in the family would be sent to begin working or apprenticing at a very young age - often 6 or 7. They would live in the places they worked, severing ties essentially with their family of origin. The impacts of this on the human development, role of family tradition and ancestry, norming of emotional connection and nurturance is just astounding to consider. Interestingly it was some of the more puritanical Christian religions and Quakers that shifted the centrality of and relationship to their children, and that shift flourished with their move to and early colonization of America. I need to learn more about some of the gaps that I have but it seems like that history and patterning is literally hundreds if not 1,000 years old. To position that as good and even normal is truly mind-blowing. How could it not have catastrophic consequences on how we conduct ourselves and our societies?