My father was raised by a rather severe man, who himself was raised by an even more severe man. My grandfather was only half a generation removed from living in a dirt floored shack. His older siblings had it far more rough than he did, those that survived. The grandfather I experienced as a child was not the father my father experienced as a child. He had softened in his old age, but I’ve heard plenty of stories and I never did want to cross him. There was a lot about my grandfather that my father rejected, as is usually the case from one generation to the next, but there was plenty that remained, a lot of which was probably subconscious.
And that’s how it goes, we pass these behaviors down, often unintentionally. I wouldn’t dream of telling my daughter anything other than that she has the capacity to excel at any skill she dedicates herself to. In truth, I received a lot of that overt messaging from my father. When he had to think about it, he made the right choice. He said what you should say to a child. But I also watched him, watched him closely while looking upwards. I saw how he reacted to his mistakes as much as I watched him react to my own. There were so many ideas I came to him with, with so much youthful enthusiasm, only to have them shrugged off or picked apart. In fairness, he was probably right about a lot of those ideas. Not all of them, though. Maybe I would have been better off finding failure on my own terms rather than finding discouragement before I had the chance to start. We can’t rewrite history though, we only have this one reality. His immediate reactions to these things spoke just as loudly as his pre-reasoned paternal messaging.
For a long while, I had a nice rotation of podcasts to listen to on my dog walks. Morning walks were for thinking, evening walks for laughing. One of my morning favorites was the Secular Buddhism podcast. I remember one episode in particular where the host talked about how much harsher we are the closer we get to ourselves. Like, I would never turn to a total stranger and tell them they’ll never be able to do what they’ve always dreamt of doing, but I’ve said it to myself plenty. I don’t think a lot of people got to see the critical side of my father. I don’t think they really understood how harsh he was on himself, maybe precisely because he was so kind and generous outwardly. He kept that part very close to the chest, perhaps because on an intellectual level he knew that voice was whispering falsehoods. What we know in our minds isn’t always the same as what we feel in our core.
So here I sit now, equal parts confident I can build this and terrified that I’m wrong. Failure here would not be devastating, so there’s nothing real for me to fear. Again, what we know isn’t always what we feel. It come in waves, the terror. When those waves hit, at their peak, they consume me, but they pass just as quickly as they hit. I don’t have to live with that feeling every time I ponder things, but I think my father did. I’m grateful that the last words I spoke to him were praise for a job well done. It is both what I know in my mind and what I feel in my heart.