Quite a Day

[smokingboot]

Father's Day isn't easy. Since his death I have noticed myself romanticising the idea of Dad, and it has got stronger since looking into genealogy and upon our deciding to move to Scotland. It's the antithesis of my usual approach; if you can't bear someone in life, don't suddenly go soft on the dream of them when they are gone, and don't soften them either. One has to face the truth, one's own and theirs. My father showed many symptoms of malignant narcissism when he was alive, and there might even have been an underlying psychopathy beneath all that. For much of his life he was a dangerous man. If he was a psychopath, he couldn't have changed the way he was wired, so the extent to which he was responsible for his actions is questionable. I don't know much about the diagnosis of MN, so can't guess his level of control over it. But there can be no glossing over the things he did. I try to balance it out, remembering that however abusive he was, it was never sexual which is more than many can claim. I recall his immense generosity and grandeur of vision and kindness to animals. There, that's the scales balanced, I hope.

But before I realised today was Father's Day, my mind caught upon something very cruel he said to me in my early 20s. I never tell people about it, and won't recount it here, only to say that it hurt so much, remembering felt like something pushed in flat but sharp just under my sternum, lying there like a big jagged sheet of glass. Physically it feels like something stops me breathing, and it hurts so today I cried. Before I realised it was Father's Day, I said to him, 'I wish you hadn't said that.' In his defence, he was saying something he thought was true.

But maybe I balance and/or defend too much. I try to be fair, but maybe...

Then I tidied the house for a viewing today, a viewing that has resulted in an offer. The would-be buyer wants to move in by the end of June. I don't see how we can do it, even though we have put an offer in a house up there, but let's see how real any of it is, how quickly things can move. Looks as though I could be in Scotland far sooner than I was expecting.

I am going to love it, but need to separate it from the experience of my father. Got to stay aware of seeing my father as a wild maverick cowboy forgetting his shadow side. I'm going to his country. But I mustn't imprint him all over it.