INTROSPECTION

It’s amazing that I’m meandering about feelings from when I was a child and wondering if I have come to some conclusion about my parents divorce which happened when I was seven years old and the little clues that I managed to glean through the years.

I mentioned previously that my father became furious when the hospital asked about paying my mother’s medical bill. So I started to think about him and his attitude.

My father was a master electrician and had worked on various government installations all over the country ending up in Baltimore, Maryland, so financially he did very well.

Meeting him after ten years of silence on his part when I was almost seventeen, I don’t remember him giving me money to buy something for myself. For ten years we (my three brothers and I) never received a gift from him except at Christmas when I think we got a $25.00 savings bond which cost him $17.50.

At one point he told me he never returned to Pennsylvania because my mother would have had him arrested, which she later told me wasn’t true and he knew that. But why would she have jailed him?  I always thought it was because he never sent money for child support. She finally did get $35.00 a month which it was upped to $50.00 in later years, the total for four children. She left him when the youngest was nearly one and the oldest nine.  Maybe he had abused her, but I do have a small memory that as we passed a by certain bar, I would always say “that’s where my daddy is”.

For those who don’t know, I met my father by accident while visiting his family home which was about twenty minutes from where we lived. My mother’s family never discouraged us from doing so although there was no fondness between them. I went there at Christmastime to deliver my picture. I was graduating from high school the following summer and the picture was a gift for my father who we thought visited the family from time to time.  He came into the house that day and didn’t know who I was.

So Dad came back into our lives, he and mom reconciled, remarried and divorced once again before I even graduated, we kids went back to our old lives where once again we had no money and plenty of worries.  But this time he stayed in touch and visited often especially after I was married and had children. Unfortunately, he would show up to visit without checking to see if it was convenient for us and stay for a week where we were expected to entertain him.

My grandmother always told me to pray at Mass that my father would come home.  I did so for ten years and then my prayers were answered.  What happened was that through the later years I always forgot to get him a Fathers Day card, so his card always late and he would get angry.

In this week of my 80^th birthday, I have finally come to the conclusion that I never really learned to like my father.