State of War

“There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war”

Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones

I haven’t had a good relationship with my father since I was about twelve years old. He’s always been quite an angry man and when things weren’t going well he would take it out on his family. A couple of years ago my sister said that she thought a lot of his bad temper was because he was always worried about being able to afford to pay the mortgage and so on and he would take his stress out on us. Well that and him not being able to turn down a drink – not that he normally waited to be offered one.

Anyway, one day when I was about twelve my father and I’d had some big argument and he’d been his usual malicious and violent self and I ended up getting away from him by going to my room. He came into my room afterwards and apologised, but I just turned away from him and said that I wouldn’t accept his apology because I didn’t believe him - I knew that he’d do it all again when the mood took him. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different if I had been willing to accept his apology but it’s too late for that now. That realisation of an apology not making up for all the things that he said and did permanently changed my attitude towards my father. I realised that I had no way of predicting the next time he would lose his temper or how long his moods would last, yes there were times in the interim when he was alright, but there was no way for me to be able to maintain that. I wanted some sort of certainty, some way to know what things would be like when my father came home from work. I’m not sure I ever made a conscious decision to do it, but somewhere along the way I realised that in terms of my father’s mood the only certainty was that he would often be in a bad temper, so maintaining an acrimonious relationship, whilst obviously not ideal, brought certainty and predictability. So a state of war began. One from which we never really returned.

It seems perverse that at times it is easier to maintain a bad relationship than to deal with the problem. I suppose I was young and didn’t really know what else to do. I wasn’t the one who should have been the adult in it, taking the lead in sorting it out, admitting that there were problems and finding ways to fix them in an honest way. But that would have meant some self-awareness, a willingness to admit fault and sometimes it’s easier to look for the answers in the bottom of a glass than to face things. I think in the end you lose your respect for someone who is so unwilling to look at themselves and admit that they may have some faults.

I suppose in my own way I learned that it’s easier to be angry and to be acrimonious than to deal with what is really there. Sometimes maybe it isn’t fixable anyway. I’m not sure that even with the best will in the world that my father would ever be someone that I would want to spend time with. Fortunately I don’t think I know anyone else who is so unaware or self absorbed as my father.

I sometimes think I will look back in years to come and regret that we never managed to sort things out, but I think what I wish I had is the concept I have of a (good) father rather than wanting to fix the reality with the one that I do have.

Instead I suppose I have learned that it is better to make peace with people as early as you can. It can be so much easier to fight and to hold a grudge, but sometimes you leave it too long to fix it. Sometimes war becomes the norm and you end up destroying all the reasons to be at peace. It’s not about admitting fault that is not your own, but to take responsibility, to see genuine faults and be willing to try and fix them. Sometimes it takes a while to find that will, there can a lot of hurts and many things to forgive along the way but I suppose if you care about someone then ultimately you get there.

Being at war takes energy and resources, things that it always seems strange that I would expend on my father, so maybe one day I will call a truce, for my own sake even if not for his.