Who is my father?

I don’t know my father. He wasn’t absent, but he was. I grew up in his house but we’re still strangers. I used to blame him for that. He was a difficult man sure, but when we broke it was me that did the damage that we haven’t been able to mend, it was me that walked out.

Back in England it’s already my brother’s birthday, I just got off the phone with him. He’s spending it in the worst part of cocaine withdrawal, that 3-5 week window where the hyper-mania, sleepless nights, sweats, and mood swings are at their worst. And all that after a week in the hospital following another overdose to try and kill the voices in his head.

I was surprised to find him almost chipper on the phone — the last two nights he’s finally been able to sleep, after days without. He’s kept himself busy by continuing to scan old family film negatives, a project he and I began when I last returned to England to get him sober at the beginning of the year.

The scanning is slow and repetitive or steady and methodical, mood depending, but there is delight in it. It keeps him occupied. It’s a weak substitute for the dopamine spike that coke can deliver, but it’s something, and out of it comes tumbling a positive flood of memory material.

And confusion, and questions. We create stories to make sense of our experience and the world around us. Jamie and I have stories about dad, but do they make sense? I know he didn’t want children, he had a vasectomy young, ma persuaded him to reverse it — there our story begins — and it has been a story of contradictions.

We see photos of our father and through them we see our father, in ways we’ve forgotten to, or ways we never did. I look at photos of him before we were born, in that window when he was master of his own life, and I wonder. I wonder at my own life. I am in that window now, on my own feet and in my own power, able to live as I want to.

He gave that up for us, uprooted the life he’d imagined to make a go of things for us, and before it was all over he would come to resent us for that, but why shouldn’t he? He and ma came from resentful families anyway, and here he was living a life he hadn’t wanted with two difficult, ungrateful children who would turn their backs on him before long. And sure he has to own his part in it, children shouldn’t have to be afraid like that, but surely we can do better now? See clearer now?

When did things go off the rails? How did he feel back then? How does he feel now? And really, Who is he?

I wonder because my father looms large in me. I used to hate our similarities. I thought I hated myself because I was like him, but I don’t hate myself any more and I’m still like him. He’s there, in the good parts of me. But while we have much in common, we find little to say. Everything that might be is suffocated by everything that is, and still I don’t know who he is.