False Responsibility
Bear one another's burdens . . . For each will have to bear his own load. Galatians 6:2a & 5 (ESV)
When I was a teenager, I decided to reach out to my absentee father to try to establish a relationship. I told myself that now that I was an adult (or so I thought), and I didn't need anything from him – no financial support (which he had never provided anyway), and no material things – he shouldn't have a problem being in a relationship with me. I didn't realize that an emotional connection/support was the main thing he could not provide, and that was the main thing I wanted.
So, I naively contacted him with the hope of building something we had never had. During that phone call, he swiftly dashed those hopes. Instead of taking responsibility for not being there for me, he blamed his absence on my mother. Her anger kept him away, he said. She would not let him see me, he whined. It was all her fault, he declared.
And though my mother and I didn't have a close relationship, I was not willing to let him place all of the blame on her, refusing to take responsibility for his own actions and choices. So I began to ask him questions like, Why didn't you try harder? Why didn't you fight for me? Didn't you miss me? Didn't you want to know me?
I deeply longed for my earthly “daddy” to love me, value me, and want me. So the more he excused his absence from my life, the angrier I got. Eventually, I interrupted him, telling him I was not going to sit there and let him blame my mother for everything. At least she had put a roof over my head, food in my stomach, clothes on my back, and money in my pocket, which was more than he had done.
True, I was still repressing the memories of the emotional and sexual abuse I'd suffered at the hand of the predator my mother had brought into our home. But I believe my father shared some of the blame for that as well. Maybe if he had been around it would not have been so easy for the abuser to prey on such a needy, insecure little girl. And maybe I would have told my “daddy” what was happening to me.
Whatever the case, that call ended abruptly, and I went back to living a detached, distracted, and dissociated life. In fact, I was so detached from my reality that a little more than a decade later, when my youngest child was about two-years-old, and my oldest about five-years-old, I decided I should reach out to my father again. I reasoned that he was getting older, although he was still fairly young, and I knew I would feel guilty if he died without ever meeting his grandchildren.
So I took on the responsibility for making that happen and tracked down his phone number. I called him, and he agreed to meet us at his home. When the kids and I showed up, he was clearly uncomfortable and spent the short visit showing me around and bragging about all the material things he had. He did not interact with my kids at all, and to this day they barely remember meeting him.
Still, having been taught as a child to ignore the truth, I lied to myself about how the visit had gone and continued to try to force a relationship with him. I believed that as an adult child I carried all of the responsibility for making that happen. I didn't realize that it was false responsibility. I didn't understand that it takes two people to establish and maintain a relationship, and he was either unwilling or unable to do so.
But that was made crystal clear to me over the next few months when I kept trying to connect with him, and he kept making excuses. One day I went to his house to confront him for not keeping his word about coming to my house for a holiday dinner. I was devastated when I got there and saw that his house had been cleared out and a “For Sale” sign was in the yard. He had moved without notifying me or leaving a forwarding address. I felt rejected and abandoned all over again. But this time it was worse because he could no longer use my mother as a scapegoat. After that, I gave up trying.
But when he died about seven years later, I felt obligated to attend his funeral. I showed up like the “good Christian” I had been raised to be, only to be slapped in the face by humiliation as soon as I walked into the foyer of the church. Family members were lining up for the processional, and I was trying to decide whether or not to line up with them. Someone became curious about who I was and why I would consider lining up with the family, and they began to ask each other if anyone knew me.
Appalled, my insides screamed: He never told anyone about me! He never even talked about me! It's as though I never existed! Full of shame, I defensively explained to them that I was the deceased's oldest child. Surprised, they remarked how they had never known my father had another child.
In the end, I walked in with my father's family, but I sat in the back near one of his sisters, who, incidentally, didn't remember me. My mother and some maternal family members also sat in the back of the church. I was doing okay until my siblings and paternal cousins started sharing how close they had been to him, how much he had helped them and taught them, and what a good person he was. Their perceptions of him were in stark contrast to mine. And the thought that he had done all those things for them, but not for me, was more than I could take. So I had to get out of there.
Though I felt guilty for leaving my mother's family at the church, especially my cousin who came from out of town to support me, I couldn't sit there anymore and listen to all of those people sing the praises of the man who had abandoned me and his responsibilities toward me. It didn't occur to me at the time that they could have been stretching the truth. Think about it: Have you ever heard anybody at a funeral comment that the dead person did not fulfill their responsibilities?
To the surprise of many, I walked out of the funeral services. Honestly, I couldn't believe it myself. Back then, I was not in the habit of taking care of my own needs. I was extremely passive. But even passive people, with few boundaries, have the strength to do what's best for them every-now-and-then.
A few years later, I spent 3-weeks in a Bible-based residential counseling center (Meier Clinics). That is where I learned the meaning of the reference scripture for this post. In the original language, the word “burdens” refers to heavy crushing boulders or extreme and traumatic circumstances that cannot be borne alone. But the word “load” refers to each person's individual responsibility for their choices and the consequences of those choices. I was not responsible for my father. I was not responsible for his choice to not be part of my life. It was not my responsibility to make up for lost time or repair what he had broken and left unmended. It was his responsibility to try to establish a relationship with me.
If he had chosen to reach out to me, I would have had the right to choose whether I wanted to be in a relationship with him, and to what degree. But since I could not make him into the person I needed or wanted him to be, I would have had to adjust my expectations and accept him as he was. Thinking about it now, I don't believe I could, or should, have done that. The reality is that my father was not an emotionally safe person for me to be around.
So these days I thank my Heavenly Father for protecting me from that relationship and a level of pain that I would not have been able to “bear”. What I once viewed as rejection, I now view as protection. And I am grateful.
Peace,
Janet
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Published 04/15/2018 by Janet Lyn Boswell, BA, CTRC