BAD BLOOD
He loved Trivial Pursuit to a wildly competitive degree. He was saturated by music. He sang it. He wrote it. He loved it. In the car, he played “dashboard piano” as he jammed out to the likes of Joe Cocker and Jethro Tull. His exuberance and authority were both entertaining and intimidating. He was robust and unapologetic, always. He was larger than life. He was…
I speak of him in the past tense, though he, my father, is very much alive. Although he is living, I think his true being, the one that could remotely pass as a functioning member of society, died long ago. Honestly, I’m not even sure if he was ever that type of person. A conventional human being who knew right from wrong, good from bad. My mother will sometimes recount stories she heard about my father when he was a child. He would entertain his pre-school classmates with tall tales of owning lions and tigers, and tantalize them with yarns about putting his head in their mouths. Even at that early age he needed an audience. That never wore off. He always needed someone to confirm he was special. He still does.
My dad breeds Pit bulls, wrote the Folger’s Coffee theme song and has arm cancer. Oh and he is a pathological liar. His childhood tall tales turned to teenage whoppers and morphed into adult psychosis. He is for all and intents and purposes “mentally ill”. Which is now corroborated by the government who sends him a monthly disability check. Although I’ve never been quite sure of his clinical diagnosis, I know that whatever form of illness he has is severe and unsavory.
Like a traveling troubadour, he spreads his lies to any audience willing to listen. But lying can be an exhausting trade, and when he’s worn out his latest sob story, he checks himself into the local psych hospital. My sister and I often joke that daddy is on one of his “extended vacations”. It’s better to laugh than cry.
I used to resent him for his behavior. A life of lies and cruelty inflicted upon me and my loved ones. He was a man unable to be a father. Every encounter with him was marred and overshadowed by delusional stories and attention grabbing narcissism. It hurt as a child and continued to do unspoken harm to me as an adult. However, things are slowly changing for himandme. The fragility of old age has begun to set in and has watered down his grandiose personality and ridiculous delusions. Real health issues have taken their toll on the boy who cried wolf and have caused him to mellow out a bit. He is slightly more tolerable than in years past, or perhaps it’s just that I’m older, and I see him very infrequently. Nevertheless, the sharp jab of pain that I once felt because of him has morphed into a dull ache. My anger is abating, and empathy is setting in. I now know that much of what he did to me and others was beyond his control. I view his cruelty not as an intention but as an affliction. A symptom of the stigmatized disease that he suffers from and that his family simply tried to love away.
My father is a man that I have limited access to, but who’s had untold influence over me. Like it or not, for better or worse, I am his daughter, and I possess many of his traits. I love music. The rhythm flows through my veins and eases my soul like a much needed drug. I am a writer, and although I’ve never tackled coffee jingles, I write lyrics. I too am obsessed with Trivial Pursuit, and like the father before me, I am mentally ill. And though it took quite a different form than his, my illness cast a shadow on my mind, body and soul.
I’ve lived thirty- four long years of endless anxiety and strange compulsions. I now depend on therapy and tiny pills to help keep me functional. I am not a liar or delusional, but I suffer from OCD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Unlike my father before me, I recognized I had an issue, and I sought help. I am a “lucky one”. And yet each and every day is a battle. There are ebbs and flows and lots of anger and resentment over this genetic curse. My mother refers to it as the “bad blood” and I have no choice but to let it course through my veins.
People find solace in the notion that “things will get better,” and while that may be true for some, I believe that for a larger population it does not. I know that I will never be cured of my illness, never be drained of the bad blood that feeds my demons. But I have accepted it, albeit bitterly. It’s no longer my future with which I wrestle. No, now I look beyond myself and my battles. Now my greatest terror is that I’ve transmitted this plague to my own three children. Still young and exuberant, it’s hard to tell who and what they may become. But I can’t help but bristle when they tell a white lie or shudder when I witness their excessive worry. Is it the normal behavior of a child, or is it the foreshadowing of an unsettling future? Someone once jokingly told me that crazy gets watered down with each generation, but I can’t help but worry my gene pool is not yet diluted.