©2023, David Ney Dodson, Tucson, AZ
When I was a teenager, I was nuts about my father. I was a sycophant eager to massage his aches and pains until my fingers cramped and a bit beyond, willing to give up my childhood pursuits and childhood friendships to work at an extremely low wage doing his grunt work with and without him. I mixed the mortar for the concrete block retaining walls and gigantic planters for the trees that eventually surrounded our beachfront home and carried the mortar and blocks over to where he was working. I filled a wheelbarrow with a shovel endlessly and pushed the dirt up narrow and high walkways. The trees Dad planted now tower over the rooftop of the 3-story home on the sand owned by my youngest brother. I received hugs, letters from all around the world written especially for me, and one-on-one time with him as we usually quit work in time to bodysurf together and lie on the sand in the sun.
It was a mixed bag and horribly confusing. On one hand, it was obvious this brilliant, nuanced and charismatic man loved me. On the other, he felt like a competitor with an axe to grind. My personal problems – even those with him – were a taboo subject. He never taught me to box or allowed me to use his old punching bag moldering in the garage, yet he set me up against my older brother with boxing gloves and told us to “have at it.” He bragged about a baseball team of mixed boys and girls whom he coached back East, but I learned to throw a baseball in seventh grade from my elementary school coach. He bragged about his bicycle shop and bicycle racing days and kept a great bicycle he never used, but my first bicycle was my sister’s old hand-me-down girl’s bike and the second was a one-speed in ugly dark olive painted haphazardly by my older brother with random pink day-glow stripes. (I abandoned that ultra-ugly bike at my high school in my senior year and it was weeks before it was finally stolen … or carted away to the dump.) He won each and every bout between us “indian wrestling” and, when I held him to a draw (having biceps that bested all my friends’ curls by 15 pounds or more due to my shoveling, hod carrying, and toting of thousands of concrete blocks), he was in tears and never challenged me again. When I started dating and brought home a girl, he would swoop in, take her away from me for 10 minutes or so, bring her back to me, and leave. His relationships with each and every girlfriend of mine excluded me … including a fiancée I brought to my sister’s wedding from Ohio (whom I clued in to this behavior beforehand).
And then there were his affairs. It wasn’t until much later that I learned about his affair with his secretary while living in his widowed mother’s home with my mother and us three young children two months after I was born. And, though he loved this second woman dearly (as did I and just about everyone else that ever met her), he cheated on her as well (brazenly in front of me and my step brother while shirking his duties as a father and husband).
Because of this as well as studying psychology for many years, I have a lot of insights into narcissism. For one, it seems to be fight with reality using a strong will to alter a negative self-perception. A narcissist isn’t a psychopath. He or she knows right from wrong but eases his or her conscience with an alternate view of things, a different interpretation of the “facts.” And, being charismatic and oozing self-assurance, the altered view is often accepted by people who are charmed and supportive, giving support to dysfunctional and increasingly dishonest thinking. It’s like the boys years ago who were “popular” and bragged in the locker room about their conquests, whether real or imagined. They fed off each other’s false perceptions and wanted to be liked so badly that they imagined an abusive relationship was something real and cherished.
And, of course, there’s the codependent side of these relationships. My mother was beaming when Dad made an unexpected and unusual stop by her bedside just days before her death and days after I’d said my last goodbyes with no particular response. And my stepmother knew all about dad’s affairs but made the conscious choice to stay with him until her unexpected death lying beside him. And I’ve had over 20 years of ACA and Codependents Anonymous, vast amounts of psychotherapy, and boxes of step work and inner child dialogues. Dad was a difficult man not to like but the closer you got, the more difficult everything became.
Whenever I got angry at my father, his response was an instant and intense rage which squelched whatever feelings I had almost before I knew what those feelings were and caused me to doubt myself and my version of facts and reality. It created a high, almost insurmountable barrier between my concerns and any meaningful dialogue or assurances I might otherwise have received from this man who obviously cared about me but was terrified by my inquisitiveness. I imagined his own father, my grandfather, a fundamental missionary, might have had similar reactions to his precocious youngest son’s perceptive and nuanced disbelief in religious dogma.
My middle step-brother, Charlie and I went back to Thailand to crew on Dad’s sailboat when I was 29, Charlie was 20 and Dad was 60. We stayed for three months until it became clear that his boat wasn’t able to leave the Gulf of Siam and was a money-pit into which Dad was throwing his life savings and the rest of his life while sleeping with a 16-year-old Thai girl in the master bedroom of a house I had rented while we repaired the dry rot that never stopped multiplying and made daily trips to the medical center to treat a severe injury to Dad’s leg that kept festering in the tropical climate. Dad stayed until much later.
Years later, in one rare moment of intimacy after my stepmother passed, my father told me, “You can ask me anything.”
I responded with the question that had been burning in me for several years, “In constructing a timeline of your life, your affair with Mother started in June of 1946 [according to the obituary of my stepmother he had written in the local paper] but Mom didn’t go crazy until January of 1948. What was going on?”
Dad first started with “It was a close thing…” but quickly discovered that was ill-advised and clammed up – permanently. He even made sure I had no access to his biographical notes; a demand that his heir has told me about several times. And he shamed me into returning his father’s African spearhead that I had proudly displayed with a tapestry of two lions in my home. The spearhead now resides in a trunk at the beach rusting slowly in the salt air of its oceanfront grave.
I last bodysurfed with both my father and my youngest brother, his heir, shortly after his 91st birthday and we were holding his hands when he died a month short of his 98th birthday and well after dementia had turned his mental acuity and vast knowledge into mush. Dad did a lot of good in the world. He just had mental illnesses he couldn’t overcome.
Dave's World 