As I move through life, my attention falls more on my offspring than on myself. Perhaps that is because their lives are more active and entertaining. It may also be that we want to share their lives as a means to feel passions and emotions that have moderated in our mature beings. It may also be that we want our children to advance further than we have gone in our generation. In my case, it?s the hope that my relationship, as a father, will be better than it was with my father.
Yes, I?m a clinical basket case when it comes to the issues I had with my dad. I think I actually had the best relationship with him compared to that of my two older brothers and older sister, partly because I came along later in life. My brothers were born on an Oklahoma farm in the worst of the ?Great Depression?. My sister came along just before World War II and I was an afterthought, born 20 years into their marriage, in 1949.
My oldest brother could only contend with dad by complete non-confrontation. My second brother was just the opposite. One of my first memories is of the two standing in the middle of the living room fighting and yelling, as my teenage brother wanted to take the car to town in a snow storm. He finally hit dad and walked to town. One of my last memories of them together was when my 90-year-old father had turned his tractor over, on the back side of the farm, and called my brother to take him to the hospital because he had a big gash on his arm. When the neighbor came over to right the tractor, my brother was so angry with dad that he told him to get out of the truck so he could see how much damage he’d done. Dad said: ?If I get out of this truck, I’m going to have to whip your ___.?
My sister and I were very close to our mother and generally used her as a shield against whatever rant dad was having. Our mother was only 5 feet 2 inches tall, but she could put him in his place and keep him there. For 66 years, she kept a lid on the man and held the family together. Unfortunately, she died first and we had four years of ?Uncontrolled Oren? to contend with before he finally drove off the road and flipped his small SUV at age 92.
How do you establish a normal relationship with your children when you had an abnormal relationship with your father? I now see many things about my father that are coming out in me. I am too quick to give too much advice. I tell stories that mean a lot to me but are irrelevant to the next generation. ?You talked at us, not to us,? said my daughter about her childhood. She confronts me in her conversational style and that?s the way that I like to deal with people, but it doesn?t work with my son, who takes the passive approach and just lets me wear myself out before he continues on with his life, unscathed by my urgings and warnings.
It is the mark of agricultural people to provide opportunities for their children that were not provided to them. My parents urged all of us to get an education, even though neither of them had any training past high school. On very little money, they managed to get all four of us through a university. ?We got your brother an education against his own will,? my father would say, of the 14 years from entrance to graduation that it took for brother Jim, the fighter, to accomplish a goal that was first his parents and finally his.
One thing dad taught us was how to work. He was very strong and very determined when he built fence or hauled hay. We knew there was no way to work with him without working hard, so we assumed that was normal. Our mother could work just as hard at her chores, from canning vegetables to killing chickens, so we all gained a characteristic that has served us well in our personal and professional lives.
In my son?s generation we didn?t live on a farm and the only thing I could do was simulate the work environment that influenced me. Both my wife and I came from similar backgrounds and we exposed the kids early to work and the satisfaction of labor completed and goals achieved. The action seems to have accomplished its purpose as our 20-somethings have an education and work ethic equivalent to our own.
Now I sit here and contemplate the pathway my son and daughter will take through life. I do best when I realize I can?t control it. Gail and I determined how many children we?d have, but we can neither determine how many our children will have, nor how they will raise them. Still, it is with the greatest anticipation we think of grandchildren and what their lives will be. Daughter Andrea is in the final stage of pregnancy, with twins, and I think that watching her and her husband go through the physical and emotional struggle of parenthood will reinforce our conclusion: that there are only some things you can teach the next generation and the rest they have to learn on their own.
With that, I can love my kids when I see them, speak socially with them on the telephone, wish them well in every good thing, and otherwise stuff that part of my personality inherited from my father in a sack and keep it there.
