On My Father’s Birthday

Today would have been my father’s 99th birthday. Since my own birthday is tomorrow, I was his present, at least according to the doctor who delivered me.

We had a complicated relationship as I was growing up. I started out as his little girl, with whom he would wrestle and cuddle. For the first ten years of my life, I was treated similarly to my older brothers, so I became a tomboy with both barbies and dump trucks. I was a happy child for the most part, although it was obvious that my sensitive nature seemed like an affront to him at times. He wasn’t sure how to deal with a child who cried easily and felt things deeply, so he was often chiding me for my tears while encouraging my sense of humor. When I started to show signs of becoming a woman, he backed away, unsure of what to think of me once I was no longer his little sidekick. As a result, I rebelled, and he became distant.

Once I grew up, the relationship adjusted and changed. I wanted to become a writer and he believed my future existed only as a wife and mother. Had my mother not been there to act as a mediator our story might have ended quite differently

It wasn’t until I had children and realized I was in an abusive marriage that I came to understand why I followed the wrong path. I left the marriage behind and went home, where I slowly began to heal from years of emotional abuse. As I moved away from the abuse of my spouse, I also grew to understand why my father was the way he was. He was raised in an environment where, while love was abundant, it was always tempered with the understanding that emotions were not expressed and stoicism was the preferred method of expression. He was also a WWII veteran who had seen the worst life had to offer. His fear of storms was born on the battlefield, where bombs and thunder were often indistinguishable.

Over the years that followed, we learned more about one another. I rarely talked about my ability to connect with the dead until I learned he, too, had this gift but had buried it most of his life. We began a new tradition of having lunch together on Tuesdays while my mother played bridge. We ventured to some of his old haunts, and I met his high school friends. The person they knew was far different than the father I grew up with, and I understood that part of his psyche was left behind in Europe, a victim of death and destruction that would never be completely eliminated from his soul.

There’s so much more to this story, but it must be written in bits and pieces so as not to make this a book. But, after his death I grew more determined to heal from my own trauma. As I did so, it became clear to me that every time I transmuted a piece of my own pain, I was also transmuting bits of his. This is the way transcending trauma works. Each time you release a painful part of your own journey, you clear the path for those who came before you as well as those who come after. As a result, today I can look back on my father’s life and know that his soul is being released from his own history. It is the same for his ancestors as well as mine and my mother’s.

This isn’t to say that you need to maintain a relationship with someone in your life who is toxic, even if they are part of your family. It simply means that once you choose to heal yourself, you are also choosing to heal everyone in your genealogy. This is how we stop generational trauma and provide the next generations with full lives free of shame and hurt.