Musings on a Father’s Day

I thought it would be appropriate to post this on Father’s Day, since I’ve been thinking about my own father recently. Actually I think about Daddy frequently, but I was thinking about him a little differently this time. It started with my last post and thinking about how everything I did in my life was designed to make my parents proud and not to disappoint them. And as I really kind of dug into that thought a bit more, I realized that the person I was trying to do right for was my father. Then I thought about his life and it made me wonder if it was really my father that was the one who had “the plan”.

My father was born and raised in a small college town in Michigan called Mt. Pleasant. He was one of seven children, nine if you counted his father’s son from a previous marriage and his mother’s daughter from a previous marriage. He was the third from the youngest, so he probably lived a lot of his life on the periphery, maybe just following in the footsteps of those who came before him.

I do know that after high school my father enlisted in the Navy. I don’t know if he ever thought about going to college then. I don’t know if he was a good student back then or what his career aspirations were. But he went in the Navy, served his time, and then came back home. At that point he did go to college, at Central Michigan in his hometown. Whether he had been a good student before or not, he was not a good student in college. He quit school before flunking out and then enlisted in the Army.

I don’t know if there was a method to his madness of enlisting in the armed forces. Did he want to see the world? Was it for some kind of training? Or the G.I. Bill? The only interesting place I ever heard that he went to was when he was in Germany after World War II, so I’m not sure it was for the travel. And since he did go to college again after the Army, I’m guessing that any training he did get, he didn’t use. I don’t know if his plan was to make a career of the Army or just what, but the fact that he met my mother most certainly was not was he thought would happen to him.

Once he did meet Marion Hunter, though, then there certainly was a “plan” for his life. My mother told me, when I married a man that didn’t have a college degree, that she had told Daddy she would marry him but only if he agreed to go back and finish college. Needless to say, she encouraged me to do the same. Mother obviously had her degree. I suspect that had she not met Daddy, she would have returned home to Charlotte and ended up married to one of the suitable young men she ran around with at home. Someone from a similar upper middle class background, with a college degree and a good career. I feel pretty sure that she never intended not to be married to someone like that. And so, she gave that command to my father.

So that brings me to where I started wondering about my father and what he really saw for his life. Did he really see himself in an office job with the phone company developing training programs? Did he really see himself in a business setting? Or was there something else he wanted to do with his life? Or maybe he was just waiting for someone else to point him in a direction.

I know that my father was a good husband and father. He loved my mother and was willing to do what she asked because he loved her and wanted to please her. He was a great father, something I’ve said over and over and over again. And he was successful in his job, well-respected and well-liked. I still remember the day of his funeral when I turned around and saw that the church was at standing room only, filled with people my father had worked with that had liked and respected him and were there to send him off. I know that he was content with the life he had. I never sensed that he was just going through the motions or that he was straining at the ties that bound him. But was that really what he dreamed of for himself?

I do believe that he was happy with the family part. But I wonder now if it was my mother that set him on a path that maybe was different in all other respects from what he thought he would do. He certainly didn’t feel compelled to go in one direction when he was younger.

So it leads me to the realization that it was always my mother that set the tone for me. It was always my mother that pointed me in the traditional direction. She would not have been happy to see me experiment with life.

I think back on my college years. I loved college. I specifically loved the parties and the football Saturdays and the lazy afternoons at Legion Pool and concerts and fraternity/sorority shit. I didn’t love going to class or studying or taking exams. Every chance I got I was doing all those other things. Spending time at the B&L Warehouse or Whipping Post or O’Malley’s. Going to fraternity parties and sorority dances. Playing jokes on dorm mates. Turning football Saturdays into football weekends. I remember one night deciding, along with my friend Patty Johnson, that we were going to go see Gregg Allman in Macon. Somehow we found a number to call for Capricorn Studios and Patty asked if he was there. (Do not ask me why I remember this or why we thought someone would actually tell us that Gregg Allman was in the house!) Anyway, we thought we were pretty together and we breezed through the lobby, casually (we thought) telling her roommate and her boyfriend that we were going to Macon. Of course, back in those days there was no MapQuest and we didn’t have a map and we didn’t know how to get to Macon directly from Athens, so we were going to go via Atlanta, where we did know how to get to. Once we got to Atlanta, it was after midnight and we were probably tired and so we ended up stopping at the local rock station and then we headed back to Athens, a little hungover and a lot disappointed that we had not gotten to see Gregg Allman after all.

That was the kind of adventure that I had the entire time I was in school. And beyond. I just wanted more from life than the workaday world. And I wonder if somehow I got that desire from my father. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought. Maybe he was not the one with “the plan” and maybe he would have been the one to have understood my desire to explore.

I’ll never know for sure, but I do know he was always the one to tell me “you can do whatever you want”. Without parameters, without boundaries. Maybe he was trying to tell me something back then and I just didn’t realize it. Maybe he was trying to send me off into the world on my own terms.

You know what they say about best laid plans….

So I posted on Facebook the other day about “what if you woke up one day and realized that you lived your whole life wrong?” I had a lot of well-meaning responses, like “you’re where you’re supposed to be” and “you have an amazing life and have done amazing things” and “yeah, been there and then I realize what a great life I have”. All nice responses and, I think, what we would tell someone who just blurts out something like that without any context. We assume they’re having a bad day or they’re feeling stressed or that they’re having a mid-life crisis. But for me this really runs deeper. This has been a journey for me. I even said when I first started this blog about my mother’s diary that I hoped it helped me gain insights into myself. And it has. I’ve felt unsettled for a while and as I explored this year in my mother’s life, it opened up a lot of a-ha moments for me.

So it isn’t just having a bad day or feeling stressed or just wanting something to change, it’s been kind of an evolution. It’s owning the fact that the life I’ve lived has been the one that other people wanted me to live. That I have spent the vast majority of my life trying to be someone else and not being me. I’ve really tried to dive in to some of the reasons for that, which led to the feeling that I have lived the wrong life. And worse, that in living the wrong life, I’ve lost the opportunity to live the one I should have lived. For those who said “go for it!” or words to that effect, I only wish I could. Because it’s not enough to just walk away. I could do that tomorrow (as long as I could sell my house). What I can’t recapture is what I wish I had done with my life. Those things are for a younger person to do. I’ve missed that boat. Which makes everything going forward feel like too little, too late.

It’s hard to realize that I have missed the chance to run away in the middle of the night and chase a dream. To live an unfettered life, to just experience everything and have every day be different. I’ve spent a large part of my life writing stories. Sometimes just re-imagining something already there, sometimes my own take on “what’s next” and sometimes something all new. But the thread running through all of them was not being tied to the life I’ve ended up with. It was to run away and experience life in a whole different way. Whether that was chasing a band or writing stories or living life off the grid. It’s hard to convey that in a sentence or two. The yearning that I pushed down because it didn’t fit someone else’s plan for my life.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mother had everything pretty planned out for her life. She went to college, became a teacher, got married and had a family. Things went pretty much according to plan. I’m sure there were situations that were unexpected and obstacles to overcome, but she had a pretty simple plan and executed it pretty perfectly.

I had no such plan, surprisingly. I think the only thing I did according to plan was go to college and graduate on time, without having to go to summer school or take longer than 4 years. But that wasn’t necessarily my plan, that was Mother and Daddy’s plan. I definitely didn’t sit down at any point and plot out my career moves. Occasionally on the fly I would make a decision to find a particular kind of job or go to work for a bigger company, but I never had an end in mind.

Growing up, I think I made a lot of assumptions about how my life would go. In very broad brush terms, I assumed I’d have a good job. I assumed I’d make good money. I assumed I would get married. But I didn’t really plan. I just let life happen to me. Albeit in the way that someone else determined was the correct life to have.

I saw a movie recently called “The Company You Keep” and I found myself thinking about my dreams from years ago. The movie was about a group of Weathermen who had gone underground after a robbery gone wrong and had remade themselves into different people. And then one of them decided she couldn’t keep up the lie anymore and confessed. And then all hell broke loose. The 60’s were a fascinating time to me. And this movie took me back there.

I was too young to experience everything that happened all those years ago, but I remember wanting to be in San Francisco, in Haight-Ashbury, living the free love life. I wanted to wear long skirts and have flowers in my hair, living with people who had a purpose, even if that purpose was nothing more than just laying around in a park or chanting while incense was burning. I wanted to go to Woodstock and experience a life with no boundaries. The causes of the day spoke to me and resonated with me and I remember being angry that I couldn’t participate. I wished I’d been old enough to run away and join up with people that I thought would accept me and bring me in.

I’ve also been watching the TV show “Nashville” and it reminds me of the years that I used to yearn to be on the road, like those entertainers are, living an unconventional life that didn’t involve getting up every day and putting on a suit and going in to an office. Living a life that’s raw and real, feeling everything deeply, both the highs and the lows.

I do realize that the reality of all those things that I have fantasized about is likely not as nicely choreographed or as beautifully edited as what I saw on the screen. But I also know that the life I do have, with a nice house and nice things and a good job, feels pedestrian.

I found myself wondering what my life might have been like if I had woken up one day and just run away. If not to Haight-Ashbury, then to someplace else. What if I had just chucked it all and gone in search of a dream, looked for a life that was raw and real.

I went to a party school and I was a party girl, even after I graduated. I’ve come to realize that what I loved about college was the parties and the football games and the occasional spontaneous moments. I studied so that I could maintain my grades in order to satisfy those needs. There were times when I wanted to be on the seamier side of life, where things were unpredictable and life would be something other than the day-to-day humdrum of life. Or gone off to “find myself” on a spiritual journey to just experience life and find my soul. But it had been drilled into me my whole life that I had to be responsible, that I had to have a “good job”, that I had to be predictable.

I remember when I moved to Ft. Lauderdale. It was the height of the “Miami Vice”/”Scarface” period. Steamy, decadent South Florida. I remember actually writing down in a journal that I was hoping to explore that dark side. It was hot, sultry, bright white with sunlight, pastel and terracotta in color. It was, as it turned out, a very interesting time in my life. Drama makes me weary, but messy is intriguing, and that time of my life was very definitely messy. When I moved away, I was ready to go, but not necessarily ready to leave, if that makes sense. It was more than just a place to live, it was a way of life and it did touch some of what I was looking for.

I’ve written before about how “Eat, Pray, Love” spoke to me on a very powerful level. It still does. But I would want more than a year; I’d want a lifetime.

I wonder if that’s why I have ended up where I am. Without a plan, not feeling fulfilled, feeling at cross purposes. There’s been a little bit here and a little bit there, but not the whole thing. I have a hard time staying in one place because it always feels like there’s somewhere else to go, something else to experience, someone else to be. I can’t articulate anymore what it is that I actually want. I only know that it isn’t what I have. I’ve lived life feeling like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, never quite fitting in the places I was always told I needed to fit.

I wish I had the freedom to just go and see where life takes me. But, because of what was drilled into me as I was growing up, I would find it difficult to just walk away. Too many responsibilities, too much of what’s expected of me. It used to be that when I got bored with something – a job, a house – I just left and found another. But that’s much harder now. I don’t like the same thing every day – I need something new, something different, a fresh start. It’s almost like a drug. And it frustrates me when I can’t make that change, like right now. It leaves me feeling like I’m faking my way through every day.

I wonder what life would have been like, if I had been old enough to run away to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. What if I had run off to chase a band or a singer? What if I had disappeared into the steamy, sultry side? What would my life have been like? Where would I be today? What experiences would I have had? It sucks to be too old to just run away. It sucks to be too scared.