My father is so worried about the safety of his family I think he’d love it if we all wore those ankle bracelets they give to prisoners under house arrest. Then he could track our whereabouts at all times and make sure we’re safe from all physical, spiritual, or emotional threats to our well-being. He’s been calling all week from Chicago with panic rising in his voice because of the incessant rainstorms we’ve been having. If I don’t return his call within a few minutes, he calls my brother and sister in Chicago to see if they heard from me before I drowned in the raging flood waters. It’s true that it’s a pretty unusual situation over here. Less than two weeks into January and we’ve already had way more rain than we usually get in an entire year. Following the pattern set in childhood, the more worried my father gets, the more nonchalant I try to appear. “It’s just a little rain, what’s the big deal?” I say in monotone, while inside I’m thinking Armageddon has arrived and maybe the fundamentalist Christians were right all along and Los Angeles is being punished for being a 21st century Sodom. As I run around the house in a tizzy, trying to survey all the leaks dripping yucky yellow water onto our gorgeous wood floors, I think of tsunami-ravaged Asia and I get some perspective slammed back into me.
I don’t remember a time when my father didn’t think we were a hair’s breath away from death. If I was cutting a sandwich in half I was obviously going to slip and accidentally plunge the knife into my carotid artery. If I answered the door when the bell rang I was, of course, going to be attacked by a band of vicious crack addicts running rampant in the neighborhood. If I was taking the subway past five o’clock in the afternoon, I clearly had a death wish. Wherever I was headed, my father always had the latest figures on how many people were assaulted or maimed in that vicinity in the last 30 days. I remember being with him on Mulholland Drive once and he was so panicked about the lack of guard rails that I felt like there was a little black cloud following my car and I practically did veer off the road!
Of course at the root of my father’s hysteria is a profound love for his children and we’re always aware of that. Whenever my siblings and I get frustrated by my dad’s fear-based view of the world (which he would call “being realistic”), we’re also painfully aware of how much we’ll miss it when he’s gone, just as we miss my mother’s palette of neuroses. Driving your loved ones insane is definitely an expression of caring in my family’s repertoire and no one will ever worry about the catastrophes that could overtake us at any moment with the same zeal as my dad. When I’m not downplaying some event to avoid his frothing at the mouth, I sometimes find that I need a “fix” and I’ll purposely bait him. I don’t think he actually believes, for example, that Kendall and I are thinking of taking Leah to Baghdad over spring break but it still manages to get a rise!
Then I worry, with good reason, that in some ways I’m just as nuts with my own daughter. I start to feel like Adam Trask in “East of Eden” when he’s panicking about the kind of man he’s turning into and when he asks his crazy mother Cathy why he’s becoming that way, she growls, “Because you have me in you!” Oh well, at least I keep the most insane worries to myself such as the one I mentioned that the Earth might decide at any moment to fling itself out of its axis. I’ll always worry about Leah, but I learned early on, as I hid in the bushes at her school crying because some kid was being mean to her on the playground, that we can’t and shouldn’t prevent our kids from experiencing all of life’s painful moments.
I think the your blog is very well written and funny. I also think you should arm Leah instead of crying. We were raised as such wimps. I have come to believe that a swift right to the jaw is at times the correct response. Get out of the bushes and take Leah to a self-defense class. I was such a gentle child--as Leah is--and I wish I learned earlier how to fend for myself.
As for your Dad's fears. As I grow older I understand them in a deeper way. Actually his view might be more realistic then ours. But to live life you have to suspend reality and delude yourself. How else can we function if you don't pretend that you’re somewhat immortal? If I think about what really goes on in the world too long I become paralyzed and still worse a French nihilist.
Posted by: Debbie Kanner | January 11, 2005 at 09:24 AM