Autobiographies 3, 4, & 5: Croatia and my father

I have never had an ideal relationship with my father. I’m not certain anyone who has so many kids can really have a magnificent relationship with all thirteen of his children, but to add to this, my father works a lot and I only ever got to see him on weekends growing up or after my parents divorced I would see him during the summer. I suppose the fact that he is very analytically minded and has never been able to relate to my terribly emotional self doesn’t help. Even after all of this, I think I could have found myself easily loving and idolizing him because of his intellect and stalwart spirit, except for the fact that ever since I was very young my mother and he did not get along and she had always led me to believe that he did not really love me, he was only fighting for custody because he disliked her so much.

Children believe a lot of things and with nothing to contradict her (like I said, he was never really home and he never reached out to me when we were together) I continued hating my father for a very long time. About the time that I was 16 I moved to Utah and I began to really forgive my father. I still am not entirely certain if he did the things my mother claimed that he did or if he even knew how much I hated him, however, I finally was able to forgive him inside of me. Forgiveness is funny in the way that once you fully forgive you realize that you were the one being hurt and not necessarily because of the actions of the other person, but because you were holding onto bitterness inside.

It wasn’t easy, it took a lot of praying and crying. I never said “I forgive you” to my father, he may not have known what he even needed forgiveness for, but I forgave him anyway. I forgave him for the years I felt inadequate and the years I thought he was calling me fat. I forgave him for the years of my childhood when I felt like I was running away from him. I forgave him for all the pain I felt at him not loving me.

I began to call my dad. Now that we were hundreds of miles away, I only saw him occasionally on holidays and rare visits so I took it upon me to call him a few times a week. My dad isn’t the best at keeping tabs on his children, so I am convinced that had I not called him I probably would not have heard from him at all. However, through these bi-weekly phone calls I began to learn about my dad. My dad doesn’t talk very much about his feelings. He doesn’t really talk about himself at all. Asking him how he has been doing is like pulling teeth, he would rather talk about everything and everyone else before he begins about himself or how he has been feeling. My dad has a lot of goals and he feels fully capable of fulfilling them even as he gets older in age including: visiting every country in the world, creating a dream house in the middle of Kentucky that is modeled after the European style houses with accompanying bed and breakfast with little cottages from various European countries, taking all of his children on an out of country trip, etc.

The most revealing two experiences for me though were once when I was 15, just about to move to Utah and then later when I was 20 and had agreed to go to Eastern Europe with him.

When I was 15 ½ my mother decided that she would take me and my two younger siblings and we would transplant ourselves from Possum Trot, Kentucky to Spanish Fork, Utah. She had received this location through prayer and Anna, Louis, and I were ecstatic about the decision as we had wanted to move since I was in the 3rd grade. My dad was against the decision and my mom fought for a while to finally get him to let us to leave. He finally agreed, but we had to stay with him in Kentucky until the end of the summer. One day he took Anna, Louis, and I up into the play room upstairs where he had a large list on the board. Labeled on both sides were pros and cons of being in Utah versus Kentucky. He sat us down and droned on about school systems, housing conditions, socioeconomic status, spiritual progression, family ties, and everything else that may change with our location.

Set on my decision to leave, I sat with arms folded, determined to prove that Utah was by far the superior in quality and that staying in Kentucky would be a detrimental damn to my progression in life. And then as we reached what I deduced to be the conclusion of the lecture, my dad turned around with tears in his eyes and said something to the effect of:

“And still, none of these things would really matter if it was where you needed to be. But the biggest thing I am worried about is that you will be away from me and I will not be able to see you. I’m your father, I love you.”

The tears. The sincerity. The way he exposed himself in that instant hit a chord in me so violently that I began to shake and then to cry. I could feel my heart ripping from my chest. How could I be so cruel and so judgmental? How could I possibly have be so callous as to think that this man didn’t love me. He was my father who had sacrificed so much of his life in order to earn enough money to support us. He was the man who spent countless hours in the summer building houses so that we could learn the meaning of hard work. He was the man who was intelligent enough to have done anything in his life and yet he decided he would rather have children than wealth.

At that moment I was more confused than I have ever been in my life, I had no idea what to do and I felt a wall breaking. The wall of hatred that I had built against my father had sprung a leak and from that moment, although I still moved away, I have tried to learn to love my father.

Another revealing moment was in Croatia, coincidentally enough. My father had offered to pay for my tickets to travel to Europe with him, my step-mother, Natasha, and my two half siblings Ilya and Maria who were 5 and 3 respectively. I jumped at the opportunity even though it meant spending $300 on plane tickets to Kentucky and missing 2 ½ weeks of school, which can be detrimental in college. Little did I know what I was really getting myself into.

After a very stressful 24 hour commute from Nashville to Budapest, I was on the verge of killing my father. I had been put in charge of chasing little children through the airport and staying up with them almost the entire time. My father, on the other hand, is not exceptionally good with small children (which is odd considering how many of them he has had). While Natasha and I were irritated and fed up with this so called vacation, my dad had slept almost the entire time for both of the international plane rides we had been on. I began to realize how hard it had been for my mother raising 9 children with a husband like my father. He has a hard time relating to the hardships you are feeling and although he feels very sorry for you when you explain about how difficult it is, he doesn’t step in and help out. He is also more likely to let a kid run into the street than to sit on his lap and he can’t stand crying.

Needless to say, I was not feeling particularly inclined to be with him, however, when we reached day 4 and 5 of our trip we stopped at a pleasant city called Dubrovnik in the south of Croatia. This was affectionately called the “Jewel of Croatia” and as soon as we entered it we knew why. It was a beautiful ancient city encased in a pre-medieval castle on the coast and speckled with fruit trees and sailboats. Natasha and I quickly realized that this was no place for children as they spent the majority of their time running into tourists as they chased pigeons. In an effort to restore sanity and keep the children happy and occupied, Natasha and I traded shifts and while one was with the kids at our apartment the other would be out with my dad.

During this one on one time with my dad I asked him “Dad, why did you become a member of the church?” My father had grown up in a Catholic family where everyone back to our ancestors in Ireland had been Catholic. The strength of his testimony which he then bore and the story of his life which ensued made me marvel.

He told me about his ambitions when he first came to college and how he had met a lady who had included him into her family and through her he had joined the church. He told me about his first love and their engagement and how they had spent time with each other every day during the school year, but as the year came to a close her parents came to pick her up and when he went to see her she came down with a box of everything he had given her, handed it to him, and declared it was over.

He told me that he took the box and cried. He was so disoriented and heartbroken that he just wondered the streets crying until he finally collapsed and just continued to sob. He was finally picked up by an ambulance because a police officer tried to talk to him and he didn’t respond and he assumed the tear stains on his pants were from him wetting himself so he thought something had gone terribly wrong. I knew the heartbreak he told me about. I knew what it felt like to have love ripped out from underneath of you and to have the one person you felt truly connected to turn you away.

When he told me about joining the Navy because he didn’t want to get drafted, it was a world I could hardly imagine. His friends would get drafted and every day was just another chance that you too may leave never to return again. One of his best friends left for Vietnam and when he returned he was just a remnant of the man he had once been, returning with both legs and all of his spirit gone. He joined the Navy because they promised that he would never actually see battle, he instead became a nuclear weapons instructor and married my mother.

To retell all the stories he told me would take another evening and another Dubrovnik to do it justice. But it was then that I realized that somewhere, in some part of me, he was a hero. Transitioning from a villain to a hero is not an easy thing to do, but he had done it and although I still do not always understand him, I will always love my dad.