Deconstructing My Father – Part Six
Deconstructing My Father is a linear narrative about a weird point in my life – late 2018 / early 2019 (I’m not entirely sure) – where my estranged father developed dementia and I had to take over running his life and the lives of both of my little brothers. I started documenting it in a weird journal using pseudonyms for my brothers and family. It was probably the most stressful time of my life.
You should probably start with part one if you want this to make any sort of sense.
Brotherly Love
I got to spend time with my brothers this weekend. Time where we got to be brothers. Just three guys, who happen to share some parents, enjoying each other’s company, goofing off. I might have sicced my children on both of them in the pool.
Uncles are supposed to be playgrounds for their nieces and nephews.
Admittedly we’ve never been very good at being brothers. At being family. We never had any examples to follow. Well, no good ones. We’ve been doing the best we can for a while now. We could obviously still use some work.
I was an only child until I was 16 years old. I don’t remember exactly how my father and stepmother told me that I was going to be a big brother; but I remember being excited. It never occurred to me, until I had children of my own, that it might not have been the best idea for my father to start a new franchise at 45 years old. By the time I’m 45 my children will be in high school and middle school; I couldn’t imagine changing diapers at that age. Realistically my father couldn’t see himself changing diapers either.
When Ryan was around six months old my father came into my room, sat me down, and wanted to have ‘The Talk’. My father wasn’t around for the original talk, so I thought that maybe he was trying to make up for lost time. Maybe he was trying to make sure that his first son didn’t miss out on the fundamentals.
“Dad,” I said, annoyed, “I’ve had the talk. I know about sex.”
“Oh, no, I get that. You’re sixteen. If you didn’t know about sex by now I’d be embarrassed for you. This isn’t the sex talk, this is about understanding that actions have consequences.”
This is probably one of a dozen real moments that my father and I have had together over the course of my life.
“I want you to know the reality of things. So, for the next month, when your baby brother wakes up in the middle of the night; it’s your job. Not mine. Not DeeJay’s. Yours.” With that my father set the baby monitor on my dresser and left the room and I became a teenage father.
For the next month whenever Ryan woke up in the middle of the night I was there. I changed him. I fed him. I rocked him and put him back to bed.
I was his default babysitter.
I’ve been his big brother, uncle and pseudo-dad since he was born.
I need to pause here, readers, and give some additional background. I need you to know, in the full course of this story, that I am no hero. I am not blameless in the canon of the relationship between my father and I.
I was a holy terror of a teenager. Drugs, troublemaking friends, stealing. I was not an ideal citizen. At fourteen years old I had run my mother so into the ground that she was ready to send me to a military academy for troubled youth. The only problem, as far as my mother was concerned, was the staffing ratio. At the academy there was one counselor per 25 kids. At my dad’s house there was my father – a senior enlisted man with over twenty years in the military, several war time deployments and (if rumors and hearsay are to be believed) more than one deployment that was classified by the CIA. That is a story for another time. And there was my father’s fiancé, a high ranking officer who commanded hundreds.
I was outnumbered.
That was the point.
These two were tasked with rehabilitating a troubled teen. My future stepmom, with no kids of her own, and my father, a less than present parent, were given a child that they did not ask for and told to “unfuck this problem.” I’m sure that the irony isn’t lost on most.
And that is how I was kicked out of my mother’s house at fourteen years old and came to live with my father, full time, for the first time in my life.
I am not the virtuous and innocent white knight of this story.
By the end of my junior year in high school my father and stepmother were heavily invested in their infant son. Ryan did not come with the years of baggage. In Ryan there was potential and in Travis there was a deficit that was hard to overcome.
I remember calling my mom and telling her, “I don’t think they want me here. I think I want to come home.”
By seventeen years old I had been enough of a burden to both of my parents that they had all grown tired of me and needed a break.
Patrick was born at the end of my senior year of high school. I was obviously less involved in his life. He was scared of me almost every time I came over to visit. He used to hide behind his mom’s legs when the ogre of a big brother showed up to play. It took him a lot longer to come around to the idea of a big brother who looked more like a dad than a brother.
Yet here we were, the three of us, on this weekend where we had big problems to deal with just… being us. Being three wayward kids who had managed to find an equilibrium in life. Three kids of circumstances far beyond our control just enjoying each other’s company and being the closest thing to a family that we know how.
It’s only taken us twenty plus years to get here.
