RE: My Birthfather

It’s the day after Father’s Day, and I’m reading another book by Pat Conroy, Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life. Conroy is an author I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet and get acquainted.  Besides loving his books and his raw honesty about life, we had narcissistic fathers in common.  Conroy says early in the book “I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world.” Not that I’m tying to compete but I too have talked a lot about my father, maybe too much.  Now beyond my three score and ten and having retired from a forty-six year practice in social work, I hold the distinction of being the only man (or woman) I've ever heard of that their father expressly did not want his first-born at his funeral.  Not in a book, movie, with a client or via anyone have I ever heard of such. Certainly not so much a badge of distinction as it is just the reality of my 'relationship' with him all my life. Father’s Day meant a dreaded trip to Hallmark to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find a card that fit. It’s not that there weren’t qualities of his that I benefited from.  I think I modified his bull-headedness into a tenacity of “I think I can” and although he embarrassed us so often in restaurants with his flirting with every waitress, my take away was the gift of greeting and talking to strangers.  

 We were those proverbial ships passing in the night, two men cut from very different cloth. I think my father just didn't know what to do with me.  I was not the rambunctious, rough and tough boy he personally was to hear his mother tell it.  To try to make me tougher there was a good deal of name calling and belittling.  I am an INFJ profile (Myers-Briggs), a very intuitive, sensitive personality and was even as a child.  In a strange sense I think he knew I saw through his bravado and rage to his own immense insecurities.  

I never heard him say 'I'm sorry' or apologize to anyone.  As a young teen I found an Irish shillelagh under his driver's seat that I have no doubt he used to threaten if not harm.  I thankfully never saw him waylay anyone.  His mom, my saintly grandmother Martha, told me she never understood why he was such an angry kid.  He did lose his birthfather when he was very young and a few years later got a step-dad.  But his brother lived through the same circumstances and was a totally different guy.  In fact, Dad resented my uncle and went to his grave nursing a grudge.  It was my psychologist friend, Bruce, who helped me realize at the time of dad's death, I was fathered by a card carrying narcissist.  As I've told many, after living this life as a man and doing lots of work with men the last twenty-five years, we men do tend to be more selfish than our female counterparts.  If a guy's been married for thirty minutes, he's surely heard his wife claim how narcissistic he is.  I know, I’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada and know that boss lady Meryl Streep had good size gonads.  I'm just saying on the average, more self-centeredness runs in our genes as guys. But personality disordered narcissists take this to an art form.  

Living with dad was very unpredictable, like growing up in a mine field.  You never knew when he's going to blow off in an explosive rage.  I developed a tool kit full of defense mechanisms like flying stealth as far below the radar as I could get.  If there was wallpaper, I tried feverishly to blend into it.  If you didn't show up in his landscape, you hoped to avoid being the focus of his rage.  I also learned to disassociate, a fancy therapeutic term for checking out—switching screens.  To this day like my grandmother, I have no idea where his anger stemmed from.  She told me one time that the best thing that ever happened to your dad was he married your mom.  Yes, he married above himself which meant she did the opposite.  As an older teen and on into my adulthood I hoped for her ultimate freedom via divorce from him but his belittling was not only directed at me.  Then too, Dad's brother had married mom's sister, which meant double-cousins—all of us five, boys.  I was  second in that string.  Brothers marrying sisters likely added to the sibling rivalry even as adults.  I heard regular criticism of my aunt and uncle all my life.  It wasn't until I was married and Jeannie, who had known my aunt and uncle, confronted me with the truth about them as opposed to what I was repeating that I'd constantly heard at home.  I saw the truth even more clearly when mom was struck down with a brain tumor and my aunt Betty, her sister, came daily for weeks and sat all day by her bedside.  They were best friends as sisters.  Dad was like a poison...but a slow working one and like most narcissists, his public image was big, boisterous and not at all like he was behind closed doors. When I was in cub scouts he was pack master.  My nine and ten year old friends would come up to me and say, "Mike, your dad is so much fun!  I wish he was my dad!"  What I could not say but thought was "I'll trade you even-steven, sight unseen whoever your dad is”.  It wasn’t until years later I realized that those thoughts weren't 'normal' for a cub scout that age.  I felt trapped.  Should I speak up, I would look like an ungrateful kid who had a wonderful home life and father.  No, it wasn’t horrible or unbearable a constant 24/7.  (One of my therapists did claim I was good at minimizing) It wasn't until my aunt Betty's passing and at her viewing that the Smiths, Joyce and Danny, who had known our whole clan in church all of our lives came up to me and said, "Mike, we've never told you this but you were born into the wrong family.  You are way more your uncle’s son.” I was speechless.  It meant after all those decades someone outside the family had seen it.  It is the best compliment I’ve ever received. 

So like most of us (men and women) I grew up with father hunger but also a father wound.  My experience with 'father' had a definite influence on how I saw a heavenly ‘father’.  The hell fire and damnation I was also raised in pretty well sealed the deal regarding my image of God, i.e., keep my distance.  Men were disappointing or just simply not available.  Dad's step-father for one.  My only memories of him was telling me to move out of the way of the television where he constantly sat watching sports. Mom's dad died when I was in middle school but my memories of him were good.  I've wished all my life that he'd lived longer for me to know him in greater depth.  He too had lost his dad early but was a different cut of man than dad.  Granddad Booher had two step dads that he had to contend with.  Even as I write, I still long for a conversation with him.

Henry Andrew Booher, my maternal grandfather

As young men few of us really realize the vacuum that these father issues leave in our lives.  I suspect that the father hunger (and who of us has had perfect fathers) is intrinsically a part of what creates our longing for God.  In early adulthood establishing a home, a career, having kids, all take top plate and it's wasn’t until later that the longings began to show up for me—at least consciously. 

After an occasion where I’d spoken one evening at a church that broadcasted on the radio I got invited by two guys at the jail to come visit.  After complaining to God for a week that jail visitation wasn't in my wheelhouse, I gave up and went.  One of them I followed for over a dozen years to a prison in very east Tennessee.  I would visit a couple of times a year and would stay at The Chalet Retreat on Tiger Creek not far from Hampton Tennessee, just over the hill from Boone, North Carolina.  It was there I met Clyde Powell, the guy who pretty well built the whole retreat center himself and operated it.  Early on I found out that Clyde had attended Oklahoma A & M (agricultural and mechanical) for an engineering degree.  He'd gone to work for GM and then decided to go back to school and become a counselor.  Clyde was around my dad's age but his life tracked ironically similar to my own.  Oklahoma A & M became Oklahoma State University where I attended first in the School of Engineering going for a CE major.  In my first semester as a junior I made a jump to the School of Arts and Sciences and a psychology major ultimately going to grad school and seminary becoming a social worker/counselor.  Clyde too was fascinated by the similarities and when I would arrive on Friday nights he'd ask when I was going to have some time for him.  Most often it was with coffee Sunday mornings—for several hours before I would head home.  We'd sit down early and hit the floor running in conversations that were always hard to end.  He was easy to be with.  I grew to relish those times the most about my trips to east Tennessee.  As he got older and after loosing  Margaritte, his first wife, his responsibilities for the center had continued to increase, Clyde tried to get Jeannie and I to consider taking it over.  Clyde was a very good man.

Fast forward to another occasion.  As director of the non-profit we would periodically sponsor conferences.  With the dates for one conference quickly approaching Barbara Johnson, writer/speaker was to be a key-noter but had to schedule some emergency surgery which took her off the roster.  I was faced with coming up with a replacement in a short period of time.  Someone recommended Don Joy, a professor and writer up in Wilmore, Kentucky at Asbury College.  Taking a chance that he was available I made a cold call to him and found out he was.  As conference chair I made the arrangements for his hotel and would take him to breakfast and shuttle him to the conference site.  With Don, it was like we'd known each other all our lives. Rapport was unbelievably easy with him.  He too was around my father’s age.  Somewhere in the discussions over breakfast we learned we were both INFJs which had to be a part of the affection that was instant.  Lucky for the rest of you out there, there are fewer INFJs than any other profile—but for those of us who are, it’s so cool when we meet one another.  As I'd always done following a conference, I would write all the speakers to again thank them for their contributions.  I wrote a hand written note on Don's letter saying I hope that wasn't the last of our times together.  He within a few short days wrote back asking when, so we set a date.  Over the many years we met at St. Meinrad in Southern Indiana, in Wilmore or here in Franklin.  My first week home from cancer surgery Don came down to babysit me for a couple of days bringing movies, helping me out of a chair and fixing lunch.  My own father did not come.  Back when the transition from twenty years at the non-profit began the summer of 1995 it got ugly.  Don and Robbie, his wife, invited Jeannie and I to their home in Wilmore for the weekend to talk and grieve.  What a good man Don was as well.

Then frame number three, was my uncle Leroy. He and I became much closer the later years of his life.  He was the brother my dad despised.  Dad had quickly remarried nine months after mom died on Christmas Eve to the mother-in-law of my brother (father and son were then married to mother and daughter).  Always having felt estranged from him, that move rather sealed it.  In my last conversation with him a few years before he died I'd told him he was a Thompson (her name previously) now, since he'd had nothing to do with any Malloys for years.  

My uncle Leroy had had prostate cancer several years before my diagnosis and it was in and around those conversations about cancer that we started keeping in touch.  He would call to ask how I was doing and to find out when I was going to be in Tulsa again.  He loved BBQ and I do too so he would find a new BBQ joint each time I came to town.  At times my cousin Scott would join us, but mostly it was he and I.  Again, he was easy to talk to and he wanted to spend time with me.  You could say he 'liked me'.  I also knew he loved me as well as my wife and my family but it was the fact that he pursued me that proved it to me.  It had been that way with Clyde as well as Don.  I don't ever recall such times of pursuit with my father.  

These three men were the means that I came to see that authentic love pursues the object of its affections whether that's a person, an object, a sport, a location....whatever.  We go after what we love.  God does too.  He is a pursuer as well and loves it when we reciprocate.  Reciprocating was easy for me to do with these three men and ultimately God too.

There are no perfect fathers but along the way if your own failed you, others just may come along that are more mature and healthier, my life is proof.  The father wound may always be a tender spot, but it doesn't have to remain open and painful. 

All three of these wonderful men have now passed on.   I am a lucky guy to have had these three be 'surrogate' fathers.  Their lives are the reason I do talk a lot about my experience with my birthfather. 

Blessings at times like challenges, come in threes.  

I know.