How I Learned to Love my Father More

My relationship with my father defined the first 30 years of my life, at least. It is probably still defining it, as I step into fatherhood. He passed away in September 2021, 5 months before the birth of my first son. I was 34 years old.

As a man, the archetypal father holds tremendous influence in my psyche, something I downplayed until recently. When I began to earnestly examine my patterns and tendencies, it became clear that I was repressing a deep desire to be closer to my father.

I told myself I wanted nothing to do with him, that I did not want to connect with him when the inverse was the deeper truth: I yearned for fatherly connection, and I saw my father as so inherently flawed that I repressed my genetic need for a relationship with my father. I was ashamed of my father, and of where I came from.

There were many turning points in the story with my dad. I’m not proud of the way I showed up always. But, as I worked to become more whole and more aware, I tried to show up more intimately and authentically with him, and the rest of my family.

This is the story of how I learned to love my father better and love myself more in the process.

The Elephant in Our Living Room

My dad was overweight. Very overweight. That was the story for my whole life. He earned his living as a stand-up comedian and achieved relative fame and status opening comedy clubs and performing sold-out shows. Seriously. Whatever you’re thinking, he probably weighed more.

The earliest memory I have recalling my father’s weight was when I was 4-5 years old. I remember kneeling in front of the fridge in our family home in Maple Grove and talking with my mother. We were going to my paternal grandparent’s house the next day, and my mom was letting me know that my dad wasn’t going to be able to come. I still have no idea why I responded the way that I did:

“Why? Because he can’t fit through the door?”

I cringe thinking about myself saying this in response. I imagine it was part attempt to make a joke and also part confusion about his size combined with real curiosity about how he managed to move through the world. My mom, from what I recall, did not appreciate the comment. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but my takeaway was that:

1. Talking about my dad’s weight is not okay
2. Don’t ever talk about it, seriously

My dad managed to stay somewhat active until he had major back problems around the time I was 10 years old. It was after his father and mother had passed away that a mysterious back pain emerged, crippling him and confining him to a bed for months.

That bed sat in the middle of our family living room. He lived in the heart of our house.

He literally slept, ate, and went to the bathroom in the center of our homes and lives, for months, and in multiple stints - this happened later in his life too.

There was a particular summer that was dominated by this arrangement, for me. While my siblings were out and about at summer activities, jobs, or other stuff, I was home with my dad, every weekday.

I would typically wake up each morning to him yelling for me. My bedroom was upstairs, he was on the main floor. I would pretend not to hear him yelling, praying he would just stop. I just wanted space. I just wanted to sleep longer. I wanted to escape this situation.

Fuck. Just shut up.

Eventually, I begrudgingly got out of bed and went downstairs. I would make him breakfast - eggs, sausage, toast, whatever. I learned early how to make the perfect over easy eggs. I would empty any bathroom containers into the toilet - pee buckets, bed pans, etc.

I can look back on this time of my life now and recognize that so much was happening for me, psychologically and developmentally. I was the primary caregiver for my father. A boy, taking care of a man.

One thing I learned during this time was that it’s best not to be honest. Honesty was just not an option. My honesty, my truth at the time would have said something nasty, something hateful. We didn’t talk about this stuff. We didn’t even let ourselves think about it.

I hated my dad. I hated that he was always right there, in our living room. I hated how helpless he was. I hated that my friends got to have “normal” parents, and “normal” lives. I hated that, even when I had a friend sleep over, my dad would wake us both up by yelling from his bed, and even calling the house phone to wake us up. He would call, over and over and over again.

I would pretend I didn’t hear it, for as long as I could. Eventually, his screams would become angry, and I knew I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

And, god forbid, if a moment of honesty ever did slip out, all hell would break loose. My father would give us his famous silent treatment or do anything he could to wield power over us from his helpless, powerless bed. You would regret saying whatever you said, he made sure of that.

You have to understand. He couldn’t even sit up. Rolling over was excruciatingly painful for him.

He eventually got out of that bed, and out of our living room, into intensive physical rehab. I felt guilty for how happy I was that he was no longer home. I felt guilty that I didn’t want to visit him in the hospital. I began to associate guilt with happiness.

But, I also felt spacious, and free. Everyone in the house could breathe easier when he wasn’t there.

The Price of Honesty

In High School, I started smoking weed and cigarettes. I was caught during my sophomore year, punished handily, stopped both for a bit and then restarted both again at some point in my junior year. By this time, my dad had gone to months of inpatient physical rehab, had gotten gastric bypass surgery, lost over 200 pounds, gained some of it back, and was working again.

The second time I was caught was a big blow-up. According to him, it wasn’t about the weed, but the lying. I had to lie quite a bit to cover up the habit. I would lie about where I was going, who I was going to be with, where I had been. I would lie about anything.

My dad had a way of making everything about him. (I stopped using the word “narcissist” because it’s an unhelpful cognitive shortcut to a complex set of problems and patterns. Family dynamics were definitely “narcissistic” though.) My drug use was somehow about him. I lied because of him. It was because I didn’t respect him, he thought. He screamed so much in my face at one point,

“YOU DON’T RESPECT ME”

I didn’t think that was the reason I was smoking weed. I liked getting high and smoking cigarettes. It gave me an identity and helped me relax and fit in. It was definitely not the right move for my cognitive development, and it was certainly a coping mechanism. I lied about it because I knew he wouldn’t want me to do it.

I was very rarely thinking about how much I did or didn’t respect my father when I was doing it. Maybe that would have been different if I had more respect for him. I can imagine that, in his world, if I was as considerate of his feelings as he felt I should be, there’s no way I would behave this way. I must not care. Of course, I can see this in hindsight.

At the time, I took what he said to heart, truly. I wondered, “What if he is right? Why might this be the case? Why don’t I respect my father?”

This is me at 17ish years old. Let me give you a little more backstory here.

Whenever my dad overreacted to something or really messed something up, he would write us letters. We would never have the opportunity to discuss anything in person. My dad would write a letter telling us how much he loved us, sometimes apologizing for his behavior, and that was that.

Many times growing up, this would happen. I would come down for school in the morning after something happened, and there would be a long, typed-out letter waiting for me on the kitchen counter. He was a skilled and expressive writer who couldn’t bear in-person emotional conflict.

It was better than nothing, I suppose.

So at 17, I decided to write my dad a letter. I started by assuming that what he was saying was true. I started with, “Let’s say I don’t respect you. Rather than fight about that, let’s assume it’s true. What then?”

I shared with him my experience of being his primary caretaker for months. Seeing him, helpless, lying on a king-size bed in our living room watching soap operas every single day. Heating up cans of soup for him, disposing of his bodily waste, and roller-blading into town to run errands for him. Feeling confused, ashamed - all the things. Remember, I was a 10-year-old boy.

I asked him what he imagined might happen to a father-son dynamic in which this happened.

My intention with the letter was to instigate a conversation that had never occurred and explore his assertion.

“You say that I don’t respect you. Maybe this is why. I don’t know what to do about this.”

I gave the letter to my father and waited for him to read it. I think I walked into the other room so he could read it on his own.

He exploded. Crying, screaming, accusations, and demands to “Get the fuck out of this house, now.” He couldn’t stand being confronted with the emotional impact of his shortcomings. It touched a nerve so tender that he completely lost control.

I’ve never seen him so angry, hurt, and afraid in my life.

My mom took me out, I imagine she thought it best to go…anywhere else. I think we went to Target. In the parking lot, we stopped and talked.

She had the letter and re-read it. She could see that my intentions were not to hurt him. She seemed somewhat impressed with what I had given to him.

But we both knew. Giving it to him was a mistake. It would never have the impact we desired.

This seemed to reinforce that sharing what I truly think and feel with people was a bad idea.

Honesty carries a price.

Eventually, he calmed down. From then on, he was a bit more edgy with me. My sense is that I had threatened him and touched on something so tender, it was untouchable. Rather than bring us closer together, it drove a wedge further between us.

His defenses were on high alert with me because I was dangerous to the house of cards that was his psyche.

Becoming more whole again

In 2019, I did an in-depth Yoga Studies program. I had no money at the time, I wasn’t working, and I knew that I had to do this. I was at my parents’ new home, talking with my dad about it. He hinted that he might be willing to help pay for it, and he did.

My dad was always willing to invest in his children. Money was one way he was able to love us.

During the program, we learned about Yoga Philosophy in depth. One thing that really stuck out to me was the concepts of Vikalpa and Vasanas. There are multiple ways to understand these ancient teachings, but the most accepted ones are:

Vikalpa: an unconscious belief we hold

Vasana: The unconscious pattern informed by that belief

An example of this is: Everyone who gets close to me will hurt me (Vikalpa), so I won’t let anyone actually get close to me (Vasana).

We did deep work to unearth these - like writing our own eulogies from the perspective of different loved ones, among other practices.

When I went to meet with my teacher after working on these, I knew there was something about my dad in there. My Vasana was my self-destructive behavior - I was unconsciously denying my own potential because I hated my potential.

My dad would always tell me about my potential, and it always felt like he was doing it in a manipulative way. He only brought it up when I was in trouble.

We agreed on this, my teacher and I. I told him I was having trouble articulating the belief that was informing it. My best guess was that I was trying so hard not to connect with my father. The belief I imagined was that I wanted nothing to do with my father, so I wanted nothing to do with my potential.

My teacher smirked. He was able to be direct with me and could see through any smokescreen I put out.

No, he said. I actually longed for connection with him. I yearned to see myself in him, deep down, but I wouldn’t allow myself to see it. The truth of the matter was that I wanted a deeper, more intimate connection with my father.

I’ll never forget the feeling when he said that. I was stunned. Speechless. I could feel the truth of this in the core of my being. I remember laughing because it was so obvious, yet my mental framework wouldn’t entertain it.

What I really want is not to disconnect from him, but to connect deeper with him. This realization changed everything.

What did I do with this information? I sat with it and used it as a way to understand what I really wanted out of my relationship with my dad. There are specific meditative practices to dismantle the beliefs as well.

The Moment of Truth

A year or so later, my father and I experienced a reckoning.

We were sitting in my parents’ house, and I was talking about my work. I had just launched my website and was committing to, at the time, healing work as a means to make a living.

My dad saw this as a good time to show me some old comedy skit on YouTube making fun of astrology or spirituality or something. Rather than be curious or supportive, his decision was to share something that, from my perspective, belittled something that was very important to me.

I was furious. It was on. I refused to let him off the hook as he tried to explain away how it wasn’t personal, he just wanted to share it because he thought it was funny or whatever.

I wasn’t having it. “Why would you share this with me right now?”, I asked.

I said, look, just because that was your intention doesn’t mean that you’re not at least partially responsible for how it made me feel. I explained that it felt like he didn’t respect me (ding ding ding) and my work.

I conceded that yes, I am probably taking this more personally than you meant it, and I could have been more curious about your intentions when you shared it, but this was my reaction. I’m sorry for that. I owned what was mine, to the best of my ability.

“Can you at least acknowledge and apologize for how it made me feel?”, I asked him. “Can you just say it?”

Mind you, my mom is here this whole time. She tried to make herself busy and distract herself, but she was sitting on the couch, 10 feet away from us. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable that was for her.

I’m standing, 5 feet from him. He’s squirming. No going back now.

I wasn’t leaving until I got what I needed. I planted my flag in the ground. I don’t know how long this went on for. Eventually, he apologized, after an agonizing few minutes.

And in that moment, I forgave him. For everything. I forgave him for what he put me through growing up.

I forgave him for the way he held our whole family hostage to his feelings without ever considering ours. I imagined everything I was ever holding on to leaving my body in that moment, releasing years of resentment and pain.

My father buried his head in his hands, crying, unwilling or unable to show his face for several minutes.

We embraced, and that was that. I told him this is me loving you as best I can. I want to be honest with you. I want a relationship with you, and that means I have to be able to show up in a way that is honest for me.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

If I didn’t want to be close to him, I wouldn’t have bothered.

Pulling back the layers

Connection to me is about intimacy, and intimacy isn’t possible when we hide from others.

We share different realities when we keep secrets and lie.

I’m still untangling some of these knots, 2 years removed from his passing, and I imagine they will continue to soften for the rest of my life.

One thing I know now is how important honesty and authenticity are to me. If I can’t be honest about who I am, and if there are things we can’t discuss, I will feel uneasy.

I didn’t have the skills needed to have the conversation in a more generative way at that time.

I feel passionately that if we have those skills, we can be more honest, we can trust each other more deeply, and we can bridge our disparate realities.

If there’s something we’re not allowed to talk about, that’s going to be a problem for me. There is a rule in relational communities:

“If the thing is awkward to talk about, you must find a way to name it and talk about it.”

Bringing it Home

About a month before he passed, I did the 3-2-1 Shadow Process. In the process, you take a person in your life who is triggering for you, or with whom there is unresolved conflict.

The thing I found unacceptable about my father was how he refused to take accountability for how his actions made other people feel. He did not consider the needs and preferences of others. He was incapable of doing it, yet he demanded it from his family.

He never thought about how they impact others or how people might want to be considered. He was the hub of our family. Everything revolved around him. We were all just spokes in the wheel, extensions of his own agency, his capacity to get what he wanted.

He never saw me, really. He saw what was comfortable for him to see, and when he was forced to see something uncomfortable, it burst his bubble, the image he had of the perfect life.

He took up so much space in our lives. He wasn’t just the elephant in the room, he was the whale in our psyches.

By going through the exercise and looking at his life from his perspective, I was able to realize that, deep down, he didn’t want to be this way, and he didn’t know how else to be, or how to be any other way.

I was able to see that, because his father forced him into farm work and other jobs, and because he did not encourage my dad to follow his dreams, my dad really never got a chance to find out who he really was. His father refused to see him.

He wanted to do better, but he didn’t know where to begin. He had no control over himself or his impulses, how could he hope to change his behavior?

He internalized the belief, likely due to extended neglect during his infancy, that there was something really wrong with him. He really believed that there was something evil inside of him that did not deserve to be loved. He was afraid that he did not deserve to be loved.

I also saw that I was subtly asking other people to allow me to take up space in their lives by being considerate of my needs and respecting me. I was doing the exact same thing as him. I saw my own selfish desires in him and reflected back at me.

I saw my own desire to have my existence and worth acknowledged and validated by the world around me in him, and I couldn’t bear to see it.

I was him. He was me.

I’ll never forget how it felt when I finished the exercise. I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks, and like a weight left my entire being, all at once.

I was in shock, and I was relieved. All before I even ate breakfast one morning.

I was liberated by the realization that I could show up differently with him. That at any moment, I could start fresh, begin anew.

Understanding my Father

I often wonder what it would be like to walk through life carrying the pain my father carried. He was in constant, chronic physical pain. It was excruciating to watch, let alone experience.

I think pain changes people. It distorts and twists their mind and perceptions of reality.

Couple that with being confined to a bed, forcing your family to wait on you hand and foot, and feeling like a failure as a father and husband, and I imagine you would experience a world of darkness.

I don’t, currently, blame him for how he showed up and the impact it had on us as a family.

He made me the man I am today. He and my mother raised me, and my father believed in me. I mean he really believed in me. He had never done yoga, but he saw how it was lighting me up and wrote me a check with very few questions asked.

He always told me I could do anything I wanted to. Even though I didn’t like the way the word came out of his mouth, he did make me believe in my potential.

He encouraged and recognized my gifts.

He couldn’t see how I felt on the inside, or he refused to see it. My story was that my feelings and truth did not matter to him. Often, we see sons pining for their father’s approval, and it seemed like it was the opposite for us:

My father looked at my life as a validation of himself. If I did something he agreed with, it meant I loved him! If I didn’t or I did something he did not agree with, I must hate him.

I can see this now through the lens of child development. There are deep unmet childhood needs that he was never able to break free from.

He wasn’t taken care of as an infant, so he was unconsciously living out the dream of being taken care of as an adult.

And it was the source of his suffering.

Loving Him Until The End

Doing this work allowed me to love him more fully, in a way that was nourishing for both of us. He died about 2 weeks later. In those 2 weeks, I was there for the reading of his Last Rights - my first time witnessing this final Catholic sacrament.

And, 2 days before he left us, my wife and I visited him in the hospital.

He could barely talk, couldn’t really move. He would drift in and out of semi-alert consciousness, 10 seconds of genuine presence, and sleep. He was medicated for pain and anxiety. We all knew he could go any moment.

And so we sat with him, I held his hand, played him some of his favorite songs, and sang them to him. I told my wife stories of the songs, stories about me and my dad.

We stayed there for a couple of hours. It was surreal.

As we got ready to leave, I told him. He woke up, for a few moments, and alert as ever, looked me in my eyes, and told me how much he loved me, and we saw each other genuinely, authentically, and lovingly in that moment.

I thanked him for everything and told him how much I loved him. I left him with a blanket, a soft quilted Kantha from India.

Why a quilt?

My father was unconsciously trying to satisfy the needs of an infant for most of his life. So I thought, what does he need?

The blanket was my best attempt to make him feel seen, heard, loved, and appreciated.

What does a child need to keep him company on one of the last nights of his life, fearing he may not make it through?

My thought: A warm, soft blanket, from someone you love.

Sweet Release

For years, my family was just kind of waiting for my dad to die. He was unhealthy and, frankly, hopeless. The path towards health and peace was a path through hell, and he had been through enough.

For years, we hoped, shamefully, that he would go. He was suffering, he couldn’t get out of bed. He was in perpetual agony.

He wanted to make it to one last Christmas. He wanted to watch me get married. He wanted to meet my son.

And our family needed peace. We needed space.

Towards the end, I even told him this - one regret I have, before I worked through my own shadows.

I told him, “We don’t have the energy to keep visiting you in the hospital. Mom doesn’t have the energy to keep taking care of you. Dad, we can’t keep doing this.”

Haven’t we all suffered enough?

When I got the news that he had passed, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I lay down in bed and breathed one of the biggest sighs of relief I can recall. My wife met me in that space.

It was over. Just like that. I was relieved. For me, for my mom, and for our family.

Mostly, I was relieved that his pain was over now. The agony of his existence was too much for me.

Did it have to be this way?

I don't know. But it’s hard to imagine it going any other way, now.