There’s a deep psychological connection between the men women “fall in love with” and their fathers. It’s full of texture, nuance, and of course entanglement.
Many thanks to Kimberly Dawn Neumann, who wrote about my book for the cover story today on Match.com, and captured the drama of how this plays out over time in our lives. http://www.match.com/magazine/article/13363/Do-Father-Figure-Types-Make-Better-Partners/
Thank you Lisa Klug for the nice story on my work and book, which landed in 4 million homes in this magazine: http://www.costcoconnection.com/connection/201306#article_id=294128
For those in or near Portland, Powell’s Books is hosting me for a reading and book signing on June 6, @ 7pm, at the Cedar Hills Crossing store in Beaverton. I hope you can join! http://www.powells.com/events/5328/
Readers of this blog and my Oregonian column are writing heartfelt, moving letters. The one below is excerpted from an email sent by “Rhonda” (not her real name). Her story is a poignant reminder of the profound, enduring loss felt when a father leaves his daughter’s life.
My father died when I was seven years of age. I was brought up to “be a brave girl and not cry” or maybe that was just my solution to dealing with it so that my mother didn’t have to worry about me. I just remember that’s what I thought about all the time – be brave, don’t cry. So of course I did “cry” in my own way. I cried at night when no one could hear or see me and I did this even into my twenties. I missed him every day, and even now, for the times we didn’t have. Death is so final. There’s no longer a Dad around.
If you cover this subject in a future column, I would appreciate my real name not being connected with it. At 72 it’s a bit embarrassing still being vulnerable!
Rhonda
Dear Rhonda,
Behind our masks of composure, we’re all vulnerable. Look around: You’ll see people who have lost parents, siblings, children, lovers, friends, their own childhoods, their jobs, their homes. Being fully alive is to be vulnerable.
I interviewed 50 women for my book; about 45 of them cried during our time together. They cried because of the love they lost when their fathers died; because of the cruelty they endured; because of the love they never felt. Sometimes they cried because of their gratitude for drawing the King of Hearts when the dad cards were dealt.
For anyone like you who’s lost a father, I have two short stories –meditations on living, loving and loss–from women who shared them with me.
Blanca received an MBA from Berkeley and a JD from Santa Clara law school. Her father came to the U.S. from Mexico as a guest agricultural worker, so that his daughters could get an education. He did backbreaking work all of his life. He and his wife raised their daughters in the servants’ quarters of the upscale Carmel Valley home where he was a landscaper. When new homeowners acquired the property, they wanted to demolish the servants’ quarters. Her father, Blanca said, “begged with them to not demolish the home, as he had raised his daughters there. And they sold the home to my dad.”
The first night we met, Blanca cried for four hours. She told me the story of her father’s lifelong sacrifice for his daughters, and his unyielding conviction that if you want to change the world, you help women get educated.
Four years ago Blanca stayed at her father’s bedside, in those servants’ quarters, for the last week of his long life. “I sat in the bed with him in the living room,” she told me. “And I kept thinking I wanted to bottle his breathing. His breathing gave me some assurance, like he’s still alive. So I called my office and I taped his breathing as a voice message. I still have it there. And when I need a little boost, I just listen to it.”
Blanca is one of the strongest, most determined women I know. I met others along the way as I spoke with women from 17 countries. And so many of them were strikingly open and vulnerable in their self disclosure. A week before she turned four years old, one of the women lost her father when he was hit and killed by a drunk driver.
“As a child that loses a parent, you just want to know,” she said. “I used to tell my mom, ‘I don’t even know what he sounds like.’ Or I can’t just ask him something stupid, like, ‘What’s your favorite color? What did you think when you first saw my mom?
“My mom says, ‘I remember you coming home and saying, ‘We did this project at school and I just want to have a dad.’”
As a girl she and her sisters would ride their bicycles to visit their father’s gravesite. “We would leave all sorts of stuff—pinecones, notes, little plastic flowers, little bows. When I was older, I went over there a lot more with my high school friends. I left pictures, like my graduation pictures.
“I always wanted approval or love or just to have him know me. That can make me start crying right now. It’s like, ‘This is my way. This is who I am. Please pay attention.’ I used to pray to God that he would please just know who I am, that he would be able to pick me out if he saw me, all these years later, that he would be able to say, ‘That’s my daughter.’”
I lost my mother, first as a young boy when she was too sick to have her children live at home, and later when brain cancer paralyzed her at 45, then slowly sapped her life. You are anything but alone, Rhonda. There are more than seven billion people in the world. They come in two types: Those who know they’re vulnerable and those who don’t or won’t accept it.
You can erase the tape that says, “be a brave girl and not cry.” Delete the file. It takes more courage to feel, express and share our vulnerability than to suppress it. Find that little girl inside of you whose pain was suffocated, hold her in your soul and let her cry her heart out. Loss is timeless; you can run but you can’t hide from it. And if you are lucky enough to have someone in your life whom you love and trust, ask them if they will hold you so you can cry in their arms.
Kevin Renner appears on Thursday, June 6 at Powell’s Books, in Beaverton at Cedar Hills Crossing, where he will read from his book “In Search of Fatherhood: Daughters Praising, Speaking Up, Talking Back.” He invites readers to submit questions for future columns, which run on the 3rd Thursday of each month. He can be reached at InSearchofFatherhood@yahoo.com, on Twitter @kevinrenner, Facebook at Kevin Renner In Search of Fatherhood, or his blog at www.kevin-renner.com.
Katie and I were young when we separated for good. Or so we thought.
We met as sixth graders in an east Multnomah County elementary school. The following summer she became the first girl I kissed. Katie had strawberry blond hair, a warm smile, and eyes that sparkled like emeralds. Later she used that beauty to make a living, if you could call it that.
Our romance ended at the beginning of the next school year. I was the dweeb—four feet ten, 87 pounds—with the cutest girlfriend in seventh grade. This was junior high; there were real men to be had.
Katie went her way and I went mine. Three years later, I was living near San Francisco and getting my driver’s license. Katie was in Oregon, getting an abortion. Three years after that I was studying at Berkeley and she was stripping in men’s clubs.
Katie made good money, found the male attention that she craved, and lived like a lot of other women abused or discarded by their fathers.
We lost track of each other, until I found her decades later and asked if she would share her life story with me for my book. She came to Portland and we spent the day together, peeling the onion of her life, a life scarred by abuse she endured at her father’s hands, who in turn had been abused by his parents.
She’d been married five times. She had two children, but left them with their father, moving out of state to live with a man she’d met on the Internet. She chain-smoked, drank, and scammed pain medications from unwitting doctors. Her third suicide attempt came in 2001, when she mixed two bottles of wine with a bottle of Tylenol as the ultimate pain reliever. She went into cardiac arrest and was in a coma for three days.
Surviving that suicide attempt was perhaps her life’s first miracle. Within a few years, she experienced another miracle, with her father. Katie had lived through hell, then in an almost Christ-like sense saw death up close, walked alone in the desert, and resurrected the spirit that had been all but broken by the one man a daughter is supposed to be able to count upon and trust.
“My life was just a party,” she told me early in our afternoon together. “I didn’t want to deal with anything serious. I was like tumbleweed, just blowing in the wind. I’d use any chemical that could keep me from thinking too much about what I should have been thinking about and doing to get my head screwed on. All through my twenties I traveled and partied and made money and pissed it away. I just had so much self-hate and horrible self-esteem.”
During her coma in 2001 she had a communion with God. “That’s when everything turned around for me, because I didn’t see Him, but I knew there was a presence and I was somewhere I’ve never been before in this life. It’s not of this life. It was something completely different.
“I just clearly remember feeling or hearing this thought that said, ‘You have something very large to do. And you have to stay around to get it done.’”
After that suicide attempt and spiritual awakening Katie put herself into therapy. She began to execute her demons one by one, taking a sniper’s aim at the cigarettes, booze, Valium, Xanax, Vicodin and Percoset that she’d used to try patching the hole in her heart.
When her mother had serious health problems five years ago, Katie moved to Nevada to live for a month with her—and her father, the perpetrator of violence against her as a girl. That month turned into two years.
In Nevada, Katie began taking long walks alone in the desert. “I found big therapy there,” she said. “I would just get these very strong thoughts. They were coming from somewhere. That’s where I really grew by leaps and bounds personally.
“From age 51 until 53, that’s when my relationship with my father was repaired, because I was repaired. I got him to try to see life sober, to see the beauty in things around him, to get in touch with himself and his feelings and his past.
“I remember him saying, ‘What are you doing? You seem lighter; you seem happier; you seem freer.’ I told him it was the road trips into the desert. You go out there and park and listen to nothing and you’re going to hear a lot. You can’t run from yourself anymore when there’s nowhere to go.
“And he saw me working with my art, my painting, my jewelry. He got to know how I think and how I feel. We lived together as adults without the bullshit when I was younger.
“We both grew in that two and a half years and our relationship benefited from it immensely. I’m not mad at him anymore. I forgive him for all of it. He was a very sick man and he didn’t know how to ask for help.”
I asked her where in the universe she found the grace to forgive her father. Having heard the details of his transgressions, I couldn’t comprehend her forgiveness.
“You have to forgive, because if you don’t, it festers inside of you like cancer and it eats at you,” she said. “I knew in order to get past it, I had to sincerely forgive my father. And because I have, I’m able to love completely now. It’s freed me.
“It took two years for me to realize the man loves me. He always loved me. He just didn’t have the right tools to show me and he didn’t have the tools to be a good parent. Now when we’re together, we have a great time. And he’s so happy for me and he’s so happy how I’ve turned out. So, it’s almost as if he’s at peace now and he’s let go of his issues and forgiven himself.”
For the first time in his life, he told Katie he loved her when she was 52. “I about fell over,” she said. “I actually stopped what I was doing and turned around and said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I love you. I think you should know that.’”
He was crying, Katie told me. “I told him that I’ve forgiven him. I cried with him. It choked me up, because I didn’t think he had any sensitivity in him at all. I thought he was just a hard-nosed jerk. But he’s a real soft man. I think the years of abuse that he did to himself and the way his mother treated him, he just didn’t know how to get off that.”
I checked in with Katie by email the next day to see how she was doing. “I slept like a rock,” she replied. “The only difference was my dreams. They were all about forgiveness and letting go of past hurts. Yesterday when we were talking, reliving all that crap, it was confirmation that I have truly forgiven him.
“It’s as if I received validation for my forgiveness. I never loved my father until I spent time with him in the desert and got to know him as an adult. I am truly grateful I have him now, rather than never having him and holding on to the anger and resentment that followed me all my life. How stifling it was for me and him, also.”
I couldn’t help but wonder about the epiphany she had on her death bed, that she still had “something very large to do” and that she had “to stay around to get it done.” Perhaps, I thought, her task was to share her story with fathers, to help shed light on the massive, enduring impact they have on their daughters.
One of the areas I research and work in is mindfulness, and how it can be used personally, in families, and in the workplace to address stress and chronic disease that deplete people and the companies they work for. More on this to come in the months ahead. But for now, do you want to help you kid in school? Or get more college $ aid? Check out this latest study, reported recently in the NY Times blog. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/how-meditation-might-boost-your-test-scores/?hpw
No truer words were ever spoken.
Shocking beyond comprehension. That’s the only way I can describe the headline and story on the front page of The Oregonian’s Metro section March 1. “Verdict: murder by abuse.”
I scanned the article’s sub-head–Donald Lee Cockrell of Sandy is found guilty in the death of his battered 3-year-old daughter. Then I saw the photos of Cockrell and his daughter Lexi Pounder. With big eyes and blonde hair in pigtails, she looked like a cross between my own two daughters when they were younger.
Lexi died battered and severely malnourished. At 3 ½ years of age, she weighed 21 pounds, the average weight of a 15-month-old. The story of Lexi’s brief existence is the story of hell, on earth.
It does not end with a dead 3-year-old, or with her father and his fiancée—who admitted causing some of Lexi’s injuries–alive in prison, eligible for release while Lexi would have been in her childbearing years. This horrific, senseless death is just a pinpoint on the tip of an enormous iceberg.
Child protective service agencies in the U.S. received 1,545 reported fatalities in 2011. That’s according to the Child Maltreatment report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Almost 80 percent of these violent deaths were caused by the children’s parents. Those are just the reported cases; God, perhaps, knows the real number. Four out of every five of these murder victims are four years of age or younger. (https://www.childwelfare.gov/systemwide/statistics/can.cfm)
Hell on earth spans the global population, more than 20 times larger than that of the U.S. I shudder to think that the violence worldwide against daughters like Lexi, and sons, expands by 20. Thirty one thousand dead infants, toddlers and children, every year?
Can it get worse? Yes. For every child beaten to death by her parents, other children are beaten nearly to death, but survive.
Cockrell had another daughter. She’s alive. And Cockrell was found guilty of criminally mistreating her.
I don’t know anything about Lexi’s sister, or if she too was brutally beaten. But I have a sense of her life prospects. As much as we grieve for Lexi, I can’t help but think about the lives of her sister and the millions of girls like her worldwide abused by their parents. Theirs are the bones, hearts and souls that are shattered in bodies that live on, if hell on earth can actually be called living. These lives are ruined before they’ve even really begun. A child of severe abuse loses virtually all sense of trust, safety, and intimacy. Their entire lives, not just childhoods, are twisted by the trauma.
Girls who survived yesterday’s horrors are today’s women. They surround you. They are your friends, neighbors, team mates, fellow parishioners. They are your co-workers, bosses, employees, your wives and mothers. They are some of you.
Some hide their scars well enough to become outwardly successful or at least functional; others are destitute and suffer from a range of mental illnesses. Many, though, are quietly suffering and literally dying from the horrors they’ve endured.
Last year I was a keynote speaker to the California Council on Family Relations’ annual conference along with Vincent J. Felitti, MD. He is co-principal investigator of a collaborative research effort between Kaiser—his employer—and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Felitti and his colleagues have access to an enormous base of clinical data, and have found that the more traumatic experiences a child endures the higher their adult rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, suicide attempts, smoking, poor health, sexually transmitted disease, ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures, and liver disease.
His research has also found that childhood incest, rape and molestation are clearly associated with chronic depression, morbid obesity, marital instability and gastrointestinal distress, among other psychological and physical problems.
Writing in the Permanente Journal (Winter, 2002), a childhood abuse victim recalled her lifetime of profoundly chronic medical conditions, and how doctors could not effectively treat her: Neither they nor she understood the roots of her chronic illnesses until she underwent psychotherapy and uncovered the long repressed memories of abuse.
“The psychologist Dr. John Briere remarked that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty,” this victim wrote.
Perhaps humanity has such a future of diminishing insanity. For now, the world’s cemeteries are populated by Lexi Pounder and those like her. Prisons are populated with adults such as her father and his ex-fiancé, who fail miserably to do what the rest of the animal kingdom does—protect its young. And within the world between Lexi’s gravesite and her father’s prison cell is that silent shadow, hell on earth, populated by women struggling in silence, cursed with having drawn the short straw when the fathers of the world were handed down.
This is from my monthly column that runs in The Oregonian, Feb. 21, 2013.
“You will be the most important man in her life forever. When she is 25, she will mentally size her boyfriend or husband up against you. When she is 35, the number of children she has will be affected by her life with you. The clothes she wears will reflect something about you. Even when she is 75, how she faces her future will depend on some distant memory of time you spent together. Be it good or painful, the hours and years you spend with her—or don’t spend with her—change who she is.”
Meg Meeker, MD, Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters
I spent a year listening to the extraordinary stories of ordinary women from around the world, looking for what they could teach ordinary men like me about fatherhood. Over hundreds of hours of conversation, laughter and tears, I was moved by how profoundly fathers shape their daughters, for better and for worse.
In the course of our intimate conversations I witnessed an abundance of “father hunger.” We’ve all seen it in our own lives, our classrooms, our neighborhoods. It’s what happens when a father leaves a hole in his daughter’s heart. It’s not just abusive fathers who leave this hole. More insidious forms of damage are left by a father’s abandonment, detachment, and ambivalence that never sound the alarm bells of protective services, yet leave their lasting psychological imprint, deep below the surface of a daughter’s conscious mind.
In “Were You Born to Cheat?” writer Danielle Pergament shares how her father’s emotional abandonment shaped her sexualized trajectory.
“During the winter before my wedding,” she writes, “I was on assignment in Sicily, where I met Diego, a photojournalist with black hair, a scruffy beard, and warm brown eyes that could liquefy concrete. He was my guide in Palermo, driving me around the city on his motorcycle. On my last day, as we stood in a bombed-out cathedral—him talking about World War II, me trying to focus on his words—he started inching closer. Another inch. Then a fraction more, and he was in my personal space. The slightest gesture from me would have been an invitation. I froze. I was madly in love with my fiancé, so what the hell was I doing?
“The desire to cheat is hardly a new emotion for me. In fact, I can fairly say that if you’ve dated me, there’s a pretty good chance I was unfaithful. (I’m really sorry!) You might even call me a natural-born cheater—and I think I get it from my father.
“Henry Pergament was a businessman, entrepreneur and chemistry genius. By the time I was born, he’d raised several fortunes and had two families and half a dozen children in and out of wedlock. I have memories from my childhood that I wish I didn’t: One night when I was about 10, I was at dinner with my sister, my father and his friend Mike. I overheard my dad say, ‘What have I been up to? What men are up to when they’re not with their wives.’
“Daily life in my family found my sisters, my mother and me running around the house like it was a disrupted anthill, my father somewhere off-screen. He worked hard and was often in absentia. But as I started to understand the adult world in increments, I wondered: Was he with another woman when he could be home teaching me to take a picture/drive a stick shift/make potato pancakes?…
“I take after my father in many ways—I got his dark eyes, his hot temper, his taste for burned toast. And I understand why he cheated: There wasn’t enough love in the world to make up for what he’d missed as a child. I just wish I wasn’t doomed to repeat it.”
The world is full of Danielle Pergaments, daughters left behind literally or emotionally by their fathers. They apply their makeup and masks of composure as they walk into adolescence and adulthood, unconsciously seeking to fill their craving for closeness and affection.
They try to fill this emptiness with all kinds of diversions and addictions—fantasy relationships, sex, drugs, food, shopping, alcohol, fame. They pour these transient pleasures into the top of their hearts, only to see them flow through the hole at the bottom as the intoxication wears off from the binge or tryst. This emotional cotton candy looks enticing, tastes sweet, and dissolves in one’s mouth. Yet its seduction is almost endless; lives are ruined chasing its illusive fix. Our desire to feel desired is that deeply ingrained.
This pursuit of fool’s gold can last a lifetime for those who don’t awaken to its insatiable nature. When a hole gets seared into a daughter’s heart, it’s burned from the inside; it can only be healed from the inside, too, not from some pain reliever “out there.” That healing is hard work. I know that.
I will never forget seeing three young African children years ago, adopted by American parents. The children had almost starved to death earlier in their childhoods. When food was within their reach after coming to the U.S., they still stuffed it into their mouths as if their lives depended upon it. In fact their lives did depend upon it, once. Hunger was literally programmed into their psychological wiring.
Father hunger is the same for a daughter. If she grows up starved for attention and affection, she will stuff herself with the best available substitute to soothe the craving. The longing is that powerful, that consuming. A daughter’s heart aches forever when her father burns a hole in it.
Here is a contribution from a woman who’s written to me after reading some of my work. She shares her personal journey of coming to terms with her father.
I want to describe the two last important times I shared with my father.
The first was in 1987, when I was 45 and he was 73. My parents were in Minnesota for our first-ever family reunion. 365 people met in a park near Northfield, MN, all descendents of two brothers (one, my great grandfather, Arnold) who came from Norway to Minnesota in 1887 to start a new life in a new land. My husband and I and our three children were temporarily housesitting in St. Louis Park after my husband was fired from his job at a boarding school.
One day during that visit, my mother and I went to the Walker Art Center for lunch. As we were finishing she said, very uncharacteristically for our relationship, that she needed to tell me something. There had been an unusual occasion in Portland when they were going to a movie, meeting up with her brother and his wife. My father had told her as they were leaving home in Hillsboro, that she would have to drive—the first time he had done that. When they got to the theater, he couldn’t walk. My mother and her brother took him to a nearby hospital for examination. When the doctor came out to report to her after the examination, he said the only thing wrong with him was that he was nearly dead drunk—that the measure of alcohol in his blood was at a point most people would be dead, if they hadn’t been building up their tolerance for many years.
My mother then had apparently driven him back home and done nothing to follow up on this startling news until a few months later, now, while they were in Minneapolis visiting us—and she confided in me.
I, though somewhat surprised at the severity of the problem, told her I had known for at least ten years that he was an alcoholic, based on my own observation of his behavior during my visits in Oregon, and having surveyed all our relatives who lived in the vicinity. Each of them had concurred with me and given multiple examples of having observed him drunk at family occasions. I reminded her—interrupting her multiple attempts to stop me—that I had even tried with her, but she had vehemently denied his being a drinker, and told me that smell on his breath was “just how one gets in old age.” Not one of the relatives, who had all agreed his drinking was a serious problem, was willing to join me in planning an intervention to get him into treatment for alcoholism. The most common reason given, if any, was that it wouldn’t work because she would never cooperate, and without her, it wouldn’t work. Some said she was the cause of his drinking, and made “poor man”-type comments.
She continued to deny the possibility that he was an addict, so I suggested we talk to an alcohol counselor, since we were in Minnesota, at least at that time one of the major treatment areas in the country, with Hazelton, The Johnson Institute, and other major centers located there. I told her the daughter of one her friends was married to a recovering alcoholic and I would be willing to call her for advise on who we could consult.
She actually agreed to this—and to make a long story short—first she and I, then my father and I, and then just my father talked with a very competent, no-nonsense, (even Scandinavian!), counselor, over the course of the next two days. In the end, the counselor told me, while my father was still sitting in the counselor’s office, that he had never in all his long experience run into a case like his. And that he did not need to be in a treatment facility. All he needed was 1) to attend a weekly AA meeting the rest of his life and 2) to have a conversation with me before they left Minnesota for Oregon. That conversation had to be initiated by my father and had to consist of one hour where he told me what his life had been like in relation to alcohol and to me; and one hour of me telling him what my life had been like with him as my father.
I arranged my parents’ introduction to AA at an open meeting, which, as it happened, was held in a Lutheran Church on Lyndale Avenue. A woman, who had been a Lutheran pastor’s wife and was now a recovering alcoholic, gave a talk. That was followed by a coffee hour. People were invited to wear nametags. My mother balked, saying she understood AA was anonymous—but eventually complied to some extent. But having such a distinctive name and among many other Norwegian Lutherans, she got drawn into numerous conversations with people she knew or who knew her or someone from her or my father’s family, especially several from our college!
I later got a letter from my father—followed by monthly letters for 3 years after they returned home, thanking me profusely for my help in getting him into AA, telling how much he loved those weekly meetings, and other more personal, friendly letters than he had ever written to me. Sadly, he developed Alzheimer’s after three years and could no longer communicate, but we did thankfully have that short gift of real relationship.
The second part of the assignment was so hard for him that they had to extend their stay with us by one or two days until he could get himself to ask me to have our one-hour-each conversation. But we did each speak one hour as assigned, with the other listening—an amazing, difficult, moving time–truly the only time we ever had what could be called a real conversation. But it went a long way for me—and I think for him—in making up for an otherwise missed lifetime of communication with each other.
The other important moment with my father was during what turned out to be my last visit with him, alone with my husband, in the Forest Grove nursing home where he died not long afterwards in 1997. After a very frustrating, sad time of sitting there with him, trying to hold a one-sided conversation and having him able only to make odd, occasional sounds; as my husband and I approached the door to leave, my father said, clear as a bell, “I love you.”
