1. Let me introduce myself
“Come back Mum and Dad, You’re growing apart, You know that I’m growing up sad, I need some attention, I shoot into the light” (Peter Gabriel)
When I was 4, my parents divorced. Until then, my father lived in our home with my mother and 5 of my 6 siblings (all of them older than me), all boys except for one sister. The years previous to my parents’ divorce — the very first years of my life — were hell at home, as reported to me in the following years by several family sources. At home, frequent yelling and slapping built an atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and lack of self-confidence.
Almost two years before the divorce my sister was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It was not long after she died that my father decided to leave home. He did not leave us for good, he physically left home. And since then, I am always longing to build a home.
My mother was depressed ever since the divorce, probably before. I have no memories of the first three years of my life. My earliest memories of my mother are of a silent, sadly caring, fragile, God-fearing person. And one of my earliest emotional memories is one of an acute, overwhelming, devastating fear of waking up one morning to find that my mother was dead and that I would be alone forevermore.
My earliest memory — not an emotionally biased one but a memory of an actual situation where I was present and something real happened — is of me dressed in a bunny or rat disguise (cannot remember which of the two) in the kindergarten I attended, located right in the ground floor of the building where my large family lived inadvisably packed in a 70 square meters apartment.
I do not remember what changed when my father left home. I do not remember him being home either. He worked a lot. I assume he was not really longing to go back home after office and embrace her not so happy family. I suppose he needed time for him to take the decision he finally took one day. He was capable of taking decisions.
My father would take me and my brothers out on weekend days. On most of the occasions, he would take us to his office, where he would work and I would be fascinated by a big metal closet full of all sorts of stationery. One of my first memories of heaven on Earth is that closet, the smell of paper, new paper of notebooks, and ball pens, pencils, markers, erasers, sharpeners. Still, today, when I enter a stationery store I feel like I am a child again, all life and dreams ahead, all possibilities to unfold. When we would not go to his office, my father would take us to the zoo, the cinema, a football match, a science museum, a department store to buy new clothes, or even to the mountain to spend days in the silent beauty of nature.
My mother would take me to mass every Saturday. I did not like it, except for the songs. But I was afraid that if I did not ceremoniously attend, something terribly bad would happen again. It took me many years to gather the courage to not attend the silent terror of mass. Once my mother went on a one-week trip to Israel, to visit holy places. Driven by fear, I attended mass on my own that Saturday, feeling that I was the best son ever. The people of the congregation stared at me with an unforgettable condescending gesture of approval.
I think my brothers and I did not take a shower every day. I don’t recall being taught how to brush my teeth. I hardly know how to tie my shoe knots today. We all slept in the dining room. At night time, we would unfold six heavy, wooden-made bed bunks, and go to sleep. My sister slept in her own room. After her death, that room became one of my brothers’. A decade later, it was my turn. Three decades later that room partially burnt during the fire that started in my mother’s bedroom to destroy half of the apartment where we were raised. All was calcinated in my mother’s room. Including her jewels. She had obsessively preserved them her life long. They melted in twenty minutes. My former room did not smell fresh again. The scent of ashes remained. The first time I remember feeling unbearably alone and anxiously desperate was in that room.
My daughter is 6 years old now. At that age, I was living in a flawed family structure, filled with chaos, lack of boundaries, depression, anger, a biased moral compass substituting real parenting, and an appalling sense of blame in an appalling order of victimhood that nurtured the mindset of all my brothers for the rest of their lives. In our raising, blame became the one educational tool. A design for life.
With this mindset instilled in me too, becoming a father became a challenging revisit to my childhood. I have painfully discovered that, not totally unexpectedly, I do not have the slightest idea of one healthy, empowering, and confident way to raise a child. I have never seen such a thing before me.
In “Father and Daughter” I will explain all the complexities of my parenting skills as an ex-pat, stay-in-home, troubled yet loving father.
I do love my daughter, though more than I love myself. And this lack of self-esteem is a serious issue.
In the next, second post of “Father and daughter" will explore the roots of my lack of self-esteem.
