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A Dad With Regrets
I do not know the daily life struggles and stresses of a man. I can only imagine. To day, I have never been married.. So, I do not have a husband to confer with on the life struggles that men as providers of the home and family tend to experience. Of course, no two men are even the same. Some men deal with life stresses in many different ways. I will just stick to what I knew about how my dad regulated his stress. From my perspective as a child, I do not think he did all that well, but I am sure he did the best that he could do at the time.
My dad married my mother in his mid twenties. I am not sure if he was necessarily ready to settle down or if it was just the thing that he believed that he needed to do, but once he met and married my mother, he must have had grave doubts about his decision. On a ride once in the car when I was about seven or eight years of age, I recall him telling a relative who was riding in the passenger seat while I was sitting in the backseat with one of my siblings that if he had to do it all over again, he might have thought differently about marrying my mother. It was not a conversation that I believe I was supposed to have heard since the radio was booming so loudly with music, but I did hear it, and it is a conversation that stood out to me.
My immediate thought was not something that I even think adults consider that their kids might even be thinking in terms of adult relationships. Nevertheless, I thought that if my dad had second thoughts in the beginning of his marriage to my mother, then he should not have married my mother. I might have been spared being born into such a volatile environment if my dad had not married my mother.
In fact, I might be someone else entirely … a different person other than who I am born into a different family. I might have been better off. For a few moments after my dad’s conversation with my cousin, I recall wondering what it might have been like to be born to another family. Would my life have fared a little better? Would I have been spared the unnecessary trauma I suffered? I could only wonder because I was snapped back into reality that my life was not going to change. I was here, and I was a product of a union that my dad now had regrets about.
Later on after the car ride, my dad mentioned to me what he was sure that I probably heard him say. In mentioned to me that he did not want to take back the years of his life that he shared with my mother because his union with my her gave him children that he loved dearly. It is just that life with my mother was hard … a lot harder than he thought it needed to be for him to want to remain with her forever.
I understood this despite my young mind. I understood this all too well. I understood this and could totally relate. All I could think was if he felt this way about his union with her, he needed to put himself in my shoes and understand how difficult it felt for me to be their child. Yet, upon listening to him and then looking him in the eyes, I felt that I should not be so connected with his words to me.
I felt that although I was branded and fashioned as mature for my young age, I really was not all that mature enough to handle and process adult issues. I cared though. I cared too much, but since I did not have the ability to affect change in my life or the lives of my parents because I was a child, I felt myself detach mentally. Instead, I stored his words into a compartment within the recesses of my mind. I gave him a smile and told him it would be okay. What else could I say? I was a kid.
As long as my dad did not regret that I had ever been born just as my mother said she regretted my birth, then I thought I would be fine. However, the conversation and the things that my dad had said to me would never be forgotten. Like everything else that I was faced with during my childhood, I held remnants of past conversations within different compartments of my brain. Within those compartments, I those remnants of words would form puzzle pieces that I could later connect together to help me understand the mysteries that I would need to help me later in my life.
Although I did not understand it all back then, now I believe my dad regretted marrying a narcissist. In a moment of regret, he mostly likely wished that he could turn back time, but choices had been made that prevented him from turning back. He was no longer just a husband, he had become a father too. So, there was too much at stake to risk losing. It was just easer for him to remain in his marital situation despite the woes. He had made a commitment for better or for worse. I suppose that moment was the “for worse”. The fact that he had chosen to remain married to my mother meant that he had hope for better. Maybe for a time it did get better, but just for him. On the horizon, the worse was only going to continue for me.
Stay tuned for more of the story …
My Voice Unchained 