You have a father?

There is an old joke about two boys sittin' around one Saturday afternoon trying to outdo one another in describing the deprivations and hardships of their respective lives. It goes something like this:

First boy: I have to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning just to be the last one in line for my breakfast.
Second boy: Well, I don't even get no breakfast until supper time.
First boy: My clothes are all hand-me-downs, and I never get nothin' new.
Second boy: All my clothes are hand-me-downs from my stupid sister.
First boy: My father lost his job, and we are gonna be homeless by next Tuesday.
Second boy: You have a father?

I'm just making an observation and not actually feeling sorry for myself.

I often wonder what it would have been like for me to grow up with a father and grandparents. I did have two sets of GINO (grandparents in name only), but I didn't know them, and they certainly didn't know me. My maternal grandfather, allegedly a musically talented and intelligent man, was victimized by a stroke at a fairly early age. I only knew him as a wheelchair-bound, aphasic male entity with a lopsided, paralyzed face, a weird eye that roamed and scared me as a child, and a breathing organism that did not communicate except to drool and mumble. As a child, I did not understand any of that. I just knew that when my parents and I visited, he was always seated in a large wooden wheelchair beside a kitchen window, and he was scary because he didn't "look right" to me. I don't think he knew who I was. If he did, he couldn't indicate that he cared. My grandmother, his wife, was so busy cooking, baking, cleaning, and taking care of her husband that she didn't have time to "see" me. She and grampa lived on their homesteaded farm along with her youngest son, his wife (my aunt and uncle), and their seemingly dozens of children. Those children were well known to my gramma, and she always seemed like a friendly, heavy-set, kindly gramma, but she never said my name or held me or acknowledged me as a child. I blended in with the wallpaper. I ate her food and played in her yard, but there was never any individual attention. It made me wish back then that I had grandparents, so it was a lonely thing to see my gramma but not to be able to interact with her.

My paternal grandparents lived in North Dakota and I in Minnesota. I only saw my paternal grandmother once, and I was very young, and it didn't mean anything to me. I saw my paternal grandfather twice, but he was a standoffish, stern, and somewhat mean-spirited man who came to check up on my father on our farm. I had the sense that my father was afraid of his father. As it turned out, it was for good reason. When I looked at pictures of my paternal grandparents, it was an emotionally vacant experience. I didn't know them. They didn't know me.

My father and mother lived on a 160-acre farm in central Minnesota that my paternal grandfather had homesteaded. They had 3 living children long before I was born and one infant son who apparently died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or "crib death" as it was known then) at one month of age. I came along almost 10 years after my nearest sister. I have no idea what my father was like when the 3 older siblings were at home. By the time I arrived, he was largely uncommunicative. I don't believe he and I exchanged more than 2,000 words in the 17 years I lived at home on the farm. He was there but not there. There was no positive interaction that I can remember. He took no interest in my school work or music activities other than to make me worry about how I would get to band practice in the summer when there was no school bus running. We lived 6 miles from the town where I went to school, and I often had to ask neighbors if I could catch a ride with them. My mother talked to my dad, but there wasn't much of a response. He kept things down to as few words as possible. Asking him for money or the car keys, which he always kept in his pocket, was torture because you never knew if it was going to be yes or no or an "I don't know" or "maybe" that could keep you in anxious suspense for hours and even days at a time. It was a feeling of utter powerlessness and a good deal of humiliation and embarrassment. My mother did the best she could by me, but her life was one of constant worry and anxiety for these and other reasons. Essentially, I was raised by a single parent, my mother, even though we were a "traditional" two-parent, church-going household.

There is much more to the story, but the point is that I now often wonder what it would have been like for me to grow up with a fully functioning set of parents and at least one set of supportive grandparents. I think I would have felt more loved, more confident, less fearful, less anxious, and less self-conscious. I know I have the chance now to re-parent myself, but I frankly don't know how, and it is a little late in the game. This isn't about self-pity. It's just a yearning to dream about what might have been.