Holes

I believe that there are parts of life that are commonplace and express an importance that we don't  always honor.  We adapt.  We make do.  We have a toothache so we chew on the other side.  The smart thing to do is to get the tooth fixed but some of us don't have the money or we're afraid of dentists or we're too drunk to get off the couch so we compromise and ignore the loss if we're missing something or live with the trauma if we're enduring something less than ideal.

I think of my father in this regard.  Dad was not unusual for a boy/man growing up in the 40s and 50s.  Men didn't express their emotions or admit their problems.  They buckled down and endured.  They went to work and attended a Christian church and provided for their families and that was as common a thing as you could imagine.  He was a friendly, funny guy who had a temper and was an isolator and was quicker to find fault and criticize than he was to praise.  I had an okay relationship  with dad - not close, not intimate, not warm, but not bad.  We didn't talk frequently and when we did it was superficial in nature or I was getting hollered at.  A typical encounter might have been watching a baseball game together, mostly in silence.  I didn't do this as often as I might have and today I realize that I might have shown up  more often for events like this.  It's what he wanted to do, what he was comfortable doing, and I think he just enjoyed my presence.  He didn't want to talk about his feelings with his grown-ass son - he wanted his grown-ass son to come over and watch the baseball game with him.  It didn't occur to him to maybe do what I wanted to do from time to time.  He was pretty fixed in his belief that he should be able to do what he wanted to do and that I should accommodate that.  I don't think he considered this overly selfish.  I think he felt he had done his part and that was that.

So . . . not good, not bad, pretty typical.  Lots of men my age would report the same thing.  There wasn't any electronic way to stay in touch and long-distance calls were expensive which made communication less frequent.  The point is this: when my father died I was flabbergasted at how big a hole it left in my life.  It was profound.  It was, for a while, devastating.  I was sober 25 years when he died so I had some pretty well-developed coping skills at that point but it still hit me like a ton of bricks.  I had adapted to a relationship that was less than ideal . . . or was less than ideal for a needy, attention-sucking, hyper-sensitive problem child like me.

It reminds me of an incident that occurred before they kicked me out of optometry college.  I was attending to a patient who came in complaining of headaches.  Our exam revealed that she had what is commonly called a lazy eye, a condition where the focus of one of the eyes tends to drift off to the side because some of the ocular musculature isn't well developed.  A pretty common condition that can be treated by installing a prism in the patient's glasses - this changes the angle of the incoming light rays so that the gaze naturally and easily shifts back to straight-ahead.  This woman did have the prism in her glasses but it was installed backwards so that the tension in her eye was twice as bad as it should have been.  She was unconsciously straining to get both of her eyes to focus in the same direction.  My recollection is that she put up with this for an extended period of time.  In A.A-speak she was just suffering needlessly and not doing anything about it.