Mar
06

You Might Want To Skip This One.

On Saturday I had breakfast with my toothless, cancerous, manic depressive, math-obsessed father.
As previously noted, I hadn’t seen him in a while. Perhaps it is for this reason that I was rather rusty at the game I play when I do: Manic, Drunk, or Just Dad.

“Manic, Drunk, or Just Dad?” is the question I use to analyze my interactions with my father—I am an expert at said analysis, having been doing it for upwards of fifteen years now.

Some characteristics of “Manic” include:
1. Talking about possible ambitious life-plans such as starting one’s own traveling science museum
2. Rapidly detailing the benefits of recent odd purchases, which he just happens to have brought with him (tiny tripods, two-dozen plaster hands, or similar)
3. Presenting me with lavish and unasked for gifts

Some characteristics of “Drunk” include:
1. Reminding me that I am the only one he can talk to, as Wife #3 is not smart enough to understand him
2. Crying
3. Belligerent manipulation masquerading as affection
4. Once, when I was ten, harassing a band at a sporting event by repeatedly requesting Inagaddadavida.

But here is where it gets tricky. My father is…hmmm. Colorful? Eccentric? Would it help if I told you that he invented a shape?

A tetrahedrally space-filling toroid, to be more precise.

Anyhow, the third option, “Just Dad,” exists because almost any behavior that could be attributed to either “Manic” or “Drunk” has also been observed when my father was both sober and mood-regulated. Except the Inagaddadavida incident.
For instance, Saturday’s breakfast included both of the first two items I listed in the “Drunk” category (they so often go together), and in addition, my father drank throughout from a plastic bottle of “Seven-Up” he carried in his coat pocket. So—Drunk, right?
However! My father had all of his teeth pulled last year for radiation due to neck cancer, and is unable to swallow food without copious liquids—the ostensible reason for the bottle of clear soda. Also, he was not slurring his words, nor was he excessively calling me “kiddo.”
And besides, he displayed many “Manic” characteristics—the long, spooling loops of chatter, the entreating me to listen to a passage from a John Prine album, the insistence that those lyrics connect to a notebook connects to a concert connects to a cigarette case.

In the end, I was unable to make a determination. I spent the morning looking for clues and willing myself not to grab his Seven-Up bottle and swig from it—as a test, of course. Well, mostly. My first thought after dropping my father at his door was that I needed a drink. I went home, ate some leftover steak, and had a glass of wine at noon.
And then the guilt began.

You see, I wasn’t very nice to him. I got impatient with his rambling and annoyed when he started to cry. What sort of daughter am I, anyway? Normally I am able to be tolerant, funny, and kind. Normally I am able to listen patiently. But Saturday his prattle made me furious and I barely attempted to look interested. I sighed, I tossed my hair, I reminded him snottily that Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit. And then I felt bad and said something nice, and he started talking again, and the longer he talked the angrier I got. I was angry at him for making me sad and anxious on his behalf, I was angry at having served as his psychiatrist throughout my teen years, I was angry that my mother and brother share none of this burden with me, having simply cut him out of their lives years ago. I was angry at him for looking so frail, and I was angry at him for being simultaneously at my mercy and able to have shaped my fear of the world. I was angry that I was still playing “Manic, Drunk, or Just Dad” and will probably play it every time I see my father until he dies. Mostly I was angry because I had spent the previous weekend with the Nearly’s family, and spending time with the Nearly’s father only serves to underscore all the things my own father was not, and then all the good things I would have missed if he had been, if that makes sense.
After all, without my father, I might not be the person I am now. I might not have spent my first seven years aglow with the knowledge that to him, I was the cleverest, most amusing, wisest child on the globe. At the very least, my knowledge of polyhedra would be significantly less impressive.

And so now there is the guilt. I don’t know how much of this is actually guilt and how much is a selfish worry that my father will be despondent because of my cruelty and commit suicide as he has always threatened–and that it will be my fault if he does. I make it my job to be jokey and en garde, so as not to be caught unawares as I was at eleven, the first time he begged me to give him a reason not to kill himself.

Maybe I feel guilty only because it is too exhausting to figure out where the blame should lie, and it is easier to simply heap it upon myself.

Or, perhaps I feel guilty because I have become the kind of daughter who rolls her eyes when her father begins to weep into his bagel–cut with a pocketknife, the better to force down his cancer-ravaged throat–prompting him to wipe at his eyes and say “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again, until I hand him a napkin.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |