Faith of a Father: A Father’s Open Letter To His Daughter

By Frank Barbehenn

This psychologist writes an open letter to his daughter about his trauma-driven, highly conflicted quest for truth and his magnetic draw to Jesus Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clovercroft Publishing
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781940262901

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PART 1

The Forging of Conflicted Faith

It Took a Village

I’ve borrowed the title of former First Lady and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s book to convey how parents aren’t the only ones with the power to shape us. Our neighborhoods, cities, and nation shape our identity as well.

In the first eight years of my life, from 1951 to 1959, my neighborhood village was Dutchtown, nestled along the fast-moving Genesee River near one of the Great Lakes—Lake Ontario. It emerged in the early 1800s as a vibrant settlement of immigrant German-Catholics. They came here to America with absolutely nothing except a dream—and the strong work ethic to achieve it. At the heart of their collective dream was the vision to build family—and, with family, community.

The name Dutchtown was actually taken from Deutschtown, meaning Germantown. Over the decades, other ethnic groups that moved into the area found the word Deutsch difficult to pronounce. So Deutsch became Dutch, even though few came from Holland. The vision for life, the quality of character, and the strength of religious conviction of these hard-working immigrants that became Dutchtown was the soil in which my family took root. What character you see in me is that of the immigrants of Dutchtown—including your grandparents you’ve never met. Their traits became my traits, passed down to you. In that way, you and Dutchtown are one.

The German Catholics who settled along the Genesee River provided the reliable manual labor for the new mills using the river’s falls for power. Several generations later, I grew up with their children less than two miles from the river. At five, I stood at the falls with Nanny, my mother’s mom, your great-grandmother. I think I called her Nanny because my older brothers called her Nanny, though I have a vague memory of someone telling me that I couldn’t quite say Grammy. For a little boy, the falls were awesome; I felt a bit uneasy looking down and out at the river. The gorge struck me as huge, with the river looking kind of greenish brown, swiftly moving as it loudly plunged over the falls. It was just this magnificence and power that drew venture capitalists to build the mills.

I grew up in my first eight years on Rugraff Street, one of many very narrow streets in the neighborhood, in a single-family dwelling built about 1880. My old home is now boarded up. (You can walk down the streets of my Dutchtown neighborhood using Google Maps Street View.) My neighborhood was so physically tight that our front lawn was only a few feet from house to sidewalk, and there was barely a single car width between houses where the driveway was. When I was about six or seven, your grandfather would sit on the front steps of our tiny porch while he watched me mow with our push mower. It only took a few minutes even as a young child.

Our living area was about six to seven hundred square feet, if that, not including the cellar (the old name for basement) and an attic with a low lying roofline—perhaps about the size of your Grampy’s lower-level living room and kitchen, but much narrower. By suburban standards today, the house was tiny—but as a kid who knew no better, and an entire neighborhood of homes of similar size, I never thought anything about it.

Turning left onto Jay Street from Rugraff to go to my friend’s house on Ries Street, which was close, I’d sometimes imagine walking to the river. I remember feeling that there was this invisible line shortly beyond Ries Street that I could never cross alone. When Nanny took me on the streets near the river, it always seemed so busy . . . scary busy, with lots of cars. I don’t know if my parents or Nanny told me that I was never to go past Ries Street or if I just knew that the river area was too dangerous. But I never ventured beyond Ries. In whatever way I came to think that I couldn’t go there, it was that area along the river that had become the industrial hub of the city.

Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy eventually joined the German settlers around the Genesee. Dutchtown expanded. The region grew into the mixed ethnic community of Rochesterville, which, in time, became the City of Rochester. The neighborhood close to the river kept its name Dutchtown; I’ve always thought of myself as growing up in Dutchtown. These resolute immigrant workers—now citizens—made Rochester into an industrial giant. With the invention of the automobile, and as companies around the river expanded, they branched out or moved. Many of those early historic buildings along the Genesee yet remain. Your immigrant ancestors built these industries into national and international companies, like the Genesee Brewing Company and Bausch & Lomb. Your grandfather worked at one of those giants—Eastman Kodak Company—as a tin knocker, shaping metal parts for production-line machines. And your uncle Herb worked his entire life as a chemist there at Kodak.

Besides working at the companies that grew into large corporations, the immigrants set up small, family-owned stores. They had bakeries and butcher shops and corner stores within walking distances of one another. Along with their main jobs in these growing companies, these very small businesses became the economic backbone of our neighborhood. Neighbors relied on each other spending money at their small shops in order to survive. They also relied on each other to keep their word and pay their bills. And they did. That pattern of mutual reliance and keeping one’s word continued into my childhood.

Your grandparents routinely sent your uncle Herb and me to the corner store—a kind of tiny, 1950s-style 7-Eleven. One practice of our Catholic faith was to eat something other than meat on Fridays. My parents bought fish fry for supper from the small beer joint on the corner of Rugraff. I’ve hated the smell of fish ever since I can remember, so I always had grilled cheese sandwiches instead. Your grandmother used our tiny front parlor to cut and style hair. It’s unheard of today, but your grandmother used our kitchen sink to wash and rinse the hair. Even we kids kept the local economy going. At lunchtime or after school, a bunch of us grammar school kids would go to Pat Grassi’s five-and-dime store right across the street from the church to buy small toys and baseball cards. Next to Grassi’s was the soda fountain shop where I first combined root beer with chocolate, not vanilla, ice cream—a combination I love to this day. As small as so many of these family businesses were—including your grandmother’s—they were woven into the neighborhood fabric and brought in enough money to make ends meet or supplement a spouse’s income from the factories to survive. Beyond surviving, buying and selling from each other in the same neighborhood created mutual dependence and lasting friendships. That’s how ethnic neighborhoods, including Dutchtown, eventually became melting pots. And that integration is how they built their village.

Over the decades, the immigrants also planted churches as the spiritual cornerstones of their neighborhoods. In the mid-1800s, the Catholic Church organized about sixty of these poor churches into the Diocese of Rochester—the diocese I grew up in. Going into the early 1900s, one visionary bishop led the way to strengthening faith in the village. He built even more churches, along with schools, charities, and seminaries. With a vision for both spiritual solidarity and the education of these immigrants’ children and grandchildren, he combined schools with churches. Catholic faith and education became powerful forces among the people—with both a church and a school becoming the cornerstone of each neighborhood.

Dutchtown’s cornerstone was Holy Family Church and School. Your grandmother saw to it that we were all very active in that parish at the corner of Jay and Ames Streets—the very heart of Dutchtown. The three of us kids went to Holy Family School—grades kindergarten through eighth. And we all went to Mass regularly; our parents and the nuns saw to it. In fact, the sisters formally walked us from school to church for Mass every school day. I would not have been able to go to college without the nuns’ unwavering commitment to a no-nonsense approach to education. Their academic training was superb.

Catholic faith permeated the immigrants’ lives. They exercised daily religious rituals. They kept a hold on the unquestionable belief that God existed. Catholic women, in particular, believed that Jesus’ mother, Mary, performed miracles for her people. Small yard shrines to Mary dotted the neighborhood. Parents were gripped by a determination to have their children get a good Catholic education. And faith was the foundation for values. They lived with integrity; the word honor meant something to them. They exercised their values in doing business with one another. And they all worked long and hard to eke out a living. It was even a matter of pride to provide for themselves and their families; it was certainly your grandfather’s pride. Putting all these ingredients together: dependence for survival on one another; common religious beliefs; common values; extraordinary hard work; and visionary Catholic leadership—and you have a potent formula for transforming a group of struggling immigrants into one strong, cohesive village.

Besides my parents, my Dutchtown neighborhood raised me—deeply shaping you through me. Your grandparents sat on the front steps evening after evening talking with good neighbors. They all shopped at the same stores. Neighbors came to your grandmother’s little parlor to get their hair done. And our family went to church with neighbors. I knew neighborhood mattered. Neighbors were important to my parents and so were important to me. They were like extended family. They graciously invited me as a little boy into their homes to eat with them. I sometimes ate lunch with the neighbor directly across from us, Virginia. I also ate lunch with an elderly woman kitty-corner from our house. I was once (maybe twice!) rightly reprimanded by our next door neighbor; she was stern but gracious. I had this intuitive sense of being quietly watched by all of them, extending my parents’ eyes and ears beyond my house out to the streets. One neighbor—I have no idea who—snitched on me when I threw a snowball across the street at a girl. My father sternly called me in to reprimand me for it, saying you never hit a girl—never. The nuns extended the oversight of our parents and neighbors into the classroom. The word disobey is not often used today; the politically correct term is listen. But in my day, if you disobeyed Sister, it was the same as disobeying your parent. Either way, you were punished.

Admittedly, Hon, I felt the tense insecurity of spiritual doubt at a tender age. I struggled to find my way through my own parents’ deep emotional instability. And I fought the horrific damage of the trauma perpetrated against me. Still, without question, my small but tight-knit neighborhood had been wrapped around my traumatized identity like a cast on a broken leg. My identity had been forged in the midst of and surrounded by Dutchtown’s singular vision for living life. The collective strength of these determined families became my strength—and helped me keep my youthful sanity. Trauma or no trauma, Dutchtown’s quality of character, strength of values, and depth of world view—including its rigorous work ethic—became the stuff out of which my own character and vision for life had been forged long before I had a choice. And through me, Dutchtown forged your character.

As I said, you and Dutchtown are one.

Shattered Dreams

In his twenties, your grandfather played center for a semipro football team. Sons do identify with their fathers, and so to this day, I love throwing the pigskin—which is how I broke my pinky—even though I never saw my dad play.

When your brothers were young, I had to make deals to throw the football. Matt wasn’t thrilled to throw either the baseball or football even though he had been in Little League. Like your mom and me, he was drawn to music. And for some unknown reason, Paul loved baseball.

When I was about six, with a slight tone of condescension having been a football player, your grandfather told me America’s pastime, baseball, was a slow, boring game—and you didn’t even have to be an athlete to play it. He said that about golf too. I’ve grown up not liking either game just because he didn’t. In more recent years, however, I’ve played golf with my good friends as well as Paul and your husband. And I’ve learned to enjoy the challenge. But I’ve had to work at enjoying it because of your grandfather’s imprint. I put the game on my terms to make it my own, like figuring out something of the science of the golf swing and learning how to swing the club with my damaged body . . . not to mention the arduous and time-consuming task of just connecting with the ball.

A father’s spoken word in the family is a bit like God speaking. God speaks, and whatever he utters is instantly created, like Let there be light—and there was light. My father spoke the word Baseball is boring—and it became so in my mind. He declared, Golf is boring—and it was so. I don’t like long sleeve shirts, he told me, because it was dangerous to wear long sleeves around machinery—and to this day I prefer short sleeves even in the wintertime. My father also told me that he didn’t like jewelry on his body, especially rings on his fingers, because, as a tin-knocker, there was some risk of the ring getting caught in machinery and tearing off his finger. In fact, that happened to a friend of his, and decades later, to a friend of mine. As a result, I want my hands, wrists, and neck free of any jewelry, including rings. All these things became so within me simply because my dad spoke the word.

Needless to say, then, Paul sure didn’t get his love of baseball from me. Perhaps from your mom. I’d break from work to come home in the afternoon to play with him and Matt before having to go back to the office for evening appointments, and Matt would typically want to play inside while Paul would want to go outside to throw the baseball. And me—I‘d want to throw the football. I did manage to cut deals. With Matt, I’d spend time inside playing, like with Legos, and sometimes he’d go out to throw the football with me. I’d bargain with your brother Paul for fifteen minutes of throwing the pigskin in return for a half hour of throwing the baseball. At our neighborhood Turkey Bowl at Thanksgiving, Paul, now in his thirties, loves to be quarterback.

Football was big at St. Thomas Aquinas High School; we even had our own stadium. I really wanted to try out for the football team—I had a passion to play because my father played—but my mother blocked it while my father stood by saying nothing. When I was little, my father told me that he promised my mom that if he got injured again playing football, he’d stop playing. He did break his leg—and kept his word to his wife; he gave up his first love. I guess my mother didn’t want me to get injured like he had, and my dad felt he couldn’t stand in her way given the deal he had made with her years earlier. As a teen, I hadn’t put that together; all I knew was that I wanted the choice. That’s why when your brother Paul briefly explored the possibility of playing football and your mom expressed a concern about him getting hurt, I jumped in and said it was up to him whether or not he played. He finally chose not to. But the real issue there wasn’t Mom’s concern about Paul getting hurt—certainly a more than valid concern—but my own residual resentment that my mother blocked me from trying out. I don’t know if I would’ve made the team. Looking back, I think it was a virtual certainty I wouldn’t have. Nevertheless, I sure wanted to try. Admittedly, I was short, like my dad, and probably not fast enough, but I did have a decent pair of hands. And I was my father’s son.

There’s not much question that football made your grandfather feel like a man, and, I have to admit, there is something testosterone driven about the game that I love: the competition, the body banging, and the heroics of hanging onto the ball even though you know you’re going to get hit. I remember neighborhood games with Uncle Herb as quarterback and me as receiver. We made a great team. I’d go out for a pass, and as I grasped the ball, I could see the opponent out of the corner of my eye coming to nail me. I felt it was my duty to hang onto the ball no matter what—and I usually did. It felt so satisfying to drop to the ground with the ball in hand.

When your brother and I play a game of Ping-Pong, which, I know, doesn’t strike one as exactly high testosterone, he and I will nevertheless mentally suit up as gladiators entering the arena. Son against father, man against man—it is all so oedipal and so primal. He wants to crush me and I him. He wants to be the bigger man, shrinking his old man down to size, and I want to keep the young buck in his place. I am the patriarch, the four-star general, and he will never defeat me. At best, only match me. A well-placed shot, knocking him on his heels, is deeply satisfying. The primitive longings for dominance and the instinctual use of aggression to secure it grants deep psychic meaning to the whole encounter. All of this is your grandfather in me.

When I was seven, out of the blue my dad blurted out, Frankie, I don’t know why God took my legs. Now, I’m nothing but a d--- cripple. I recall the moment vividly. This was an extraordinary peek into your grandfather’s shaken faith—even shock and desperation—as well as his loss of identity as a man. As you know, he had multiple sclerosis. What you don’t know is that he had contracted this horrific disease as a young man, perhaps in his mid-to-late twenties, and not long after he stopped playing football. While I do recall him driving the car twice when I was little, I don’t ever remember seeing him walk. As I got older, I saw him lose the complete use of his legs, then his arms and hands—until he became a full quadriplegic. The process was slow and torturous.

Your grandfather’s self-deprecating comment about being nothing but a cripple, which he blurted out on impulse, also revealed his lack of savvy. After all, what father declares himself virtually worthless to his seven-year-old boy? But he did. And it became another one of his words spoken into my mental universe—permanently imprinting my psyche. What was I to do with that? My own father felt emasculated. And he obviously felt the emotional pain of a good God, who is presumably all powerful, standing by doing nothing to help. If you think about it for a moment—which I did as a kid—how does anyone stand by watching someone else be harmed? How would any victim feel as he stared into the eyes of the person who stood by doing nothing? Though lacking savvy, my father’s impulsive, self-effacing comment was much more his crying out into the universe—crying out to and through his own little boy. Like a driver stuck in a burning car screaming to those around to smash the glass and pull him out, my father was desperately screaming out to God for rescue.

This was not the first time I caught a glimpse of your grandfather’s desperate fear, even terror. It was at that same age of six, when he told me what he thought about golf, that he came home from work one evening very upset. He exclaimed to my mom, I got laid off. They told me I couldn’t work anymore ’cause I was falling too much. My foreman came in and told me to clear out my locker. I didn’t even get any notice. G--d--- that Bill Hansen. His terror ran through me; I just stood there staring at him. In the few moments of silence that followed, the terror between him and my mom was palpable. I froze. Your grandfather—a manual laborer like so many before him—desperately wondered how they would ever make enough money to survive.

This watershed moment crushed your grandmother’s dreams. The onset of that dreadful disease and their ensuing financial crisis had broken her. But unlike your grandfather, she never blurted out anything about her emotional pain. In fact, she never discussed anything about what happened to the family . . . or its impact on her. Instead, she turned to alcohol to numb herself, driving herself into a deep depression from which she never escaped. Actually, I don’t know if your grandmother began drinking because of her shattered dreams or if she had been drinking long before your grandfather’s illness. And I don’t know if she had been already depressed before he became ill or as a result of it. But clearly, after the dream-shattering news of his MS, your grandmother abused alcohol—horrifically abused it—and did so when I was very young. Typically, there were several cases of beer in the cellar, and she’d routinely be out cold on the living room davenport.

I don’t really know, but I do wonder if my birth into my mom’s world was the cause of her depression years before my father’s MS. I do have a vague memory of someone telling me that she really didn’t want me—that is, she hadn’t wanted another son—and had gotten a doll in preparation for a daughter. Could I have fabricated that vague memory? Perhaps. But she did have a doll with a gorgeous white dress propped up on the pillows of her bed. My vivid memory of that well-dressed doll combined with the unclear memory of someone telling me she hadn’t wanted me could’ve been my attempt at putting the pieces together of how my mother emotionally abandoned me. The fact is, Kid, I have no memory of my own mother hugging me, kissing me, reading to me at night, playing with me, or comforting me when I got hurt. It’s not that I don’t remember. It’s that it never happened. So whether someone told me or not, this was the interpretation I had given to my earliest experiences—an interpretation that captivated my little-boy imagination: my own mother didn’t want me.

Mother’s Confusing Love

Our kitchen sink served several purposes, from washing dishes to cleaning and rinsing people’s hair for my mom’s business to bathing me as a toddler. I can see myself in the sink looking out into the kitchen area. I was small enough to fit into it and tall enough and strong enough to sit up without falling over. From my vantage point in the half-filled sink, I could see the circular fluorescent light in the middle of the kitchen ceiling over our supper table and the edge of the sink in front of me. Your grandmother left for a moment to get something. As I looked out, I couldn’t see her, but I sure could feel myself swaying a bit. Looking down as my upper body was ever so slightly wobbling over my butt, I could see the alternating red and green squares of that now outdated vinyl-asbestos tile flooring. It felt as if I was suspended by a piece of string from the top of my head. All I knew as I sat there was that I felt like I was going to fall over the edge. Do you remember the cable cars at Hershey Park? I’d get the same feeling when I was up in one of those, with the car gently swaying from the end of a cable. That’s why I was never thrilled to go up in them . . . or ride the Flower Wheel.

As a toddler, I comfortably sat on a small pink toilet seat secured onto the adults’ toilet seat so that I could go potty. We didn’t have a separate potty chair like parents do today. For that matter, we didn’t have a refrigerator either until I was about seven; we had an icebox. It was a brown, wooden container that was twice as high as it was wide with a shelf in the middle. It sat on our gray back porch near a small opening in the outside wall with a white access door where the milkman delivered our milk bottles. The iceman would come with huge blocks of ice on his open-bed truck—no longer horse-drawn wagons—and, with giant metal tongs, grab one and lug it into our house, gently placing it in the box. I was always amazed that the blocks of ice didn’t melt sitting in the open summer sun as the driver worked his route.

We also didn’t have an electric washer and dryer. Instead, your grandmother had a hand-cranked wringer washer where she manually scrubbed clothes and then twisted them good and hard to get as much water out as possible before running them through rollers to squeeze out the remaining water. She’d then put the clothes out to dry on a clothesline in our small backyard. In fact, from that little toilet seat—with the bathroom door cracked open—I could see your grandmother carefully squeezing the clothes through the rollers. When I was done, I’d call her into the bathroom to wipe my bottom. She did so dutifully, though I never saw her smile at me.

My mom saw to it that I had decent clothes for school, darned my holed socks, put patches over holes in my pants, went for conferences with the nuns about my school progress, and made my lunches, including banana sandwiches with mayonnaise and bean sandwiches with ketchup. I don’t recall this, but your uncle Herb assures me that these strange sandwiches were actually his ideas—so I can blame him for a few of my eccentricities. For my birthday, my mom would make me chocolate mayonnaise cake, double layered, with bananas between the layers and chocolate frosting. It was to die for. The mayonnaise made the cake rich and moist. As you know, to this day I love having that cake for my birthday—and it continues to be one way, however small, to connect to my mother. At Christmas my mother made long rolls of butter cookies, and, as much as I like your mother’s cookies, I’ve never tasted a Christmas cookie since that even comes close to the rich, sugar-laden taste of those butter-filled delights.

Talking about Christmas, my parents made a grand effort to celebrate it for the sake of us kids. They saw to it that we always had presents, whether before or after my dad was laid off from work. And your grandmother found creative ways to get me out of the house so that Santa could sneak in to leave them. One Christmas she had Uncle Herb take me on his paper route with him. I actually felt privileged that he thought I could help him; little did I know. When we got home after delivering the papers, there was a large box of presents—it rose to my chin—with a note from Santa. I was so disappointed to have missed him, but I wondered why his handwriting looked so much like your grandmother’s.

Another year, my mom had your great grandmother Nanny walk me to the liquor store to get a bottle of wine for Santa. Nanny seemed to like spending time with me. Besides taking me to State Street along the Genesee River—the heart of Dutchtown—she would sometimes take me by bus to the broader downtown area to the Sears building for lunch. You can blame her for introducing me to ketchup on eggs, ham, and fried potatoes—a habit that has stayed with me and earned my reputation as an eccentric ketchup lover . . . as well as influencing our dear Dylan at the tender age of two who now always wants bup bup on his chicken nuggets, to your frustration, I know. Nanny was always kind to me, and I returned the kindness as a young adult by visiting her whenever I had a chance. I also stayed with her all night as she was dying. When we got back from the liquor store, I was again disappointed; Santa had already come with the presents.

Yet another time, your grandfather drove me around town to charge up the car battery while your grandmother set out the presents. This was one time I remember your grandfather being well enough to drive. I sat there on the front seat watching my dad, wondering to myself why we had to drive around to charge up the battery since the car had been driven before and the battery would’ve already been charged. I don’t know why, but I never asked him. Once again I had missed Santa.

From these few vignettes, it’s obvious that your grandparents had vision for family—and my mom in particular kept family going on the home front. But, tragically, she was devoid of affection. One afternoon I was desperate for attention. I’m not sure how old I was, but I was playing on the sidewalk and fell down. I wasn’t hurt, really, and I don’t even remember what I was doing. But I was unwilling to get up. I recall the moment vividly because I really wanted to see if my mother cared enough to come. I was testing her—and I knew it. George was an older boy who lived a few houses down the street from us and saw me fall. He kindly came over and asked me if I was OK. I told him that I wanted my mommy. I stayed on the sidewalk, hoping she’d come out, pick me up, and hug me, and then tell me I’d be OK. Instead, she came out, walked over, looked down at me—not even bending over to help me up—and coldly declared that I was OK. She didn’t smile, but instead turned around and walked right back into the house, leaving me on the sidewalk. On her face: stone-cold disinterest. I’ll never forget the look. There was no tenderness, no hug, no touch, no warmth—and no help getting up. Nothing. Hon, I know you’d never treat your Dylan that way.

Whether for something small like falling down on the sidewalk or something much bigger, your grandmother offered no comfort. Your uncle Ron, being the middle brother and four years older than me, always managed to get out the door ahead of me going to school in the morning. Typically he’d go out the back porch door scooting by the icebox while I scrambled to catch up to him. This one winter morning I came running through the kitchen to the back porch to do just that. As was my habit, I hit the storm door metal frame with my left hand and slid the hand down to the door handle to push it open while my right hand hit the glass at the same moment, opening the door. Except this time the door didn’t open. My left hand slipped past the handle and my right hand smashed through the pane of glass. I found myself standing there with my right arm through the glass pane up past my elbow.

I stared at one large triangular piece sticking through my winter jacket into my right arm. Instinctively, I grabbed the dangling glass with my left hand. I could feel the urge—I just wanted it out of my arm. So I yanked it out. Now my left hand was bleeding. I didn’t feel any pain, but I was scared—not because I was injured but because I had broken the window. My mother pulled my jacket off and put my arm under cold running water in the kitchen sink. She stared at my arm as the blood mixed with the water while I stared intently at her wondering if she was mad at me. Her face looked blank. I asked her, Is Daddy going to give me a lickin’? She said, We’ll see. She called a neighbor to ask for a ride to the hospital. The next thing I knew, I was riding in this neighbor’s car. I felt scared. I could hear the question, Did his arm get caught in the wringer? I don’t remember the answer. I do recall staring down at the blood-soaked towel around my arm; I felt mesmerized. I noticed the contrast among the colors: the bright-red blood, the white towel, and the green car seat. I was shocky. I was sitting in the back seat of the car next to my mother, but she was not holding me . . . or even bracing the towel around my arm. Neither her hands nor her arms touched me.

At the hospital a nurse told my mother that I needed to sit down, saying to her that I looked like I was going to faint. I sat on a chair by myself; my mother yet didn’t touch me. The nurse then helped me lay down on a table. After a little while, the doctor came in, telling me he was going to sprinkle some powder in my wound to numb it. The nurse gently but very firmly held my left arm. She smiled at me so tenderly; she was very warm. It wasn’t so much a thought as it was a feeling: I wish I could have you as my mommy. After the doctor stitched the wound, I looked over at my right arm, thinking, It looks like a darned sock. Mommy darns the holes in my socks. Wow, my arm looks just like that! The doctor told me he took some pieces of glass from my arm. He then said to my mom that I was fortunate I had my thick winter jacket on—otherwise I would’ve lost my arm.

Your uncle Herb, who being nine years older would’ve been a young teen, played checkers with me after he came home from school to keep me company—his way of comforting me. However small that act of kindness may seem, it strengthened my identification with your uncle way beyond banana and bean sandwiches—an identification that grew over the years, forever changing the course of my life. Tragically, however, your grandmother had not once comforted me throughout any of this childhood ordeal. To be sure, she cared. She had taken off my glass-torn jacket. Turned on the cold water and ran it over my arm to slow the bleeding. Contacted the neighbor for a ride. And stayed with me at the hospital. She cared. No doubt about it. Yet, sadly, she hadn’t once touched me to comfort me, nor smiled at me, nor reassured me. Not once. It was love—but love as duty. Duty without feeling.

Love as Feeling

My mother did what she needed to do in that emergency. She had done her duty. But, at the most basic emotional level—at the simple level of the five senses—she failed to love me. Doing her bare duty was not enough. I had no gut sense that she cared.

We now know that any caretaker doing only her duty to keep physical life going is not enough to make a child feel loved, let alone thrive. Years before I was born, a frightened and overwhelmed mother had left her infant at the doorstep of a large hospital. As word got out, many other frightened mothers left their unwanted infants at its doorstep. So the hospital administrators compassionately set up a ward to care for them. But staff became alarmed when some infants died for no apparent physical reason. They soon discovered that the infants who were held, hugged, and smiled at by the staff did very well. But those infants that weren’t—though no one deliberately neglected them—eventually gave up the will to live and died. How those infants reacted has been called anaclitic depression, or simply infantile depression. It is now recognized by my profession and the World Health Organization as a very serious attachment disorder. The fact is, babies need to feel that someone loves them. They need someone to gently touch and caress their skin. They also need sights and sounds stimulating their eyes and ears and brains. They need to see the joy of someone celebrating their existence by simply smiling at them. My dear grandchildren no doubt feel loved because they’re touched, hugged, and smiled at by so many. The staff at that 1940s hospital accidentally but tragically discovered that not welcoming newborns into the world with such sensory love severely traumatizes them—and even, at times, destroys them.

Infants who fortuitously survive the neglect of not being adequately touched oftentimes become unable to attach to others emotionally when they become adults. Or they seek the affection for a lifetime. When these infants become teenagers or young adults, they often act out promiscuously as a way to connect with someone without facing their fears of getting close emotionally. To this day—but typically only when your mom touches me—I can sense the inner craving for physical affection. Your mom’s touch sets up the contrast with the emptiness inside me. That emptiness of touch—which is an indescribable feeling—is nevertheless palpable. When your mom and I first dated, and we’d snuggle together, the warmth of her touch blew my mind. I took in her warmth like a desperately thirsty man yearning for water. I had never felt the warmth of touch except for a couple of extraordinarily brief moments in my childhood—one of them being the nurse at the hospital when she held my arm with such tender compassion. So even though I am very affectionate with you guys, and I’ve had years of warmth from your mom, it’s still easy for me to not hug or touch. It’s natural yet not to. And I usually don’t even consciously miss touch because I had gotten so used to not having it as a kid . . . until your mom gently caresses me and I sense the contrast of her warm touch with the cold inner emptiness. This is why, when I am in intense emotional pain, I cannot comfort myself. There is simply nothing inside me to draw on to do so. Nothing. And that’s also why, when I am in emotional pain, I am so grateful that your mom will hold me real tight—as I was grateful you stayed with me and held me tight when my brother Ron suddenly passed away.

I do not know how much your grandmother held me in the first few months of life; I do have one photo of her cradling me in her arms. No doubt she did take care of my physical needs as the hospital staff had for those abandoned infants in their care, and as she had later on when I was a little boy. But such care was without affection. However much she did or did not touch me as an infant, what I do know is that I have no memory of your grandmother ever touching me as a little boy or as I got older. And frankly, the battle for my mind as a toddler and little boy gives me the evidence that, likely even in infancy, she rarely touched me with affection.

My mother showed her love toward me by doing her duty. But that duty I could not feel—not as an infant . . . not as a child . . . not as a teen. I just couldn’t. She had tightly wrapped around her a robe of emotionally ice-cold and silent indifference to my existence. Sadly, my identity formed around that terrifying emptiness.

Bedtime in the Attic

The small and otherwise sparse attic held our three beds. They were set only about two feet apart, or even less; I could reach out my right arm, and, if I stretched hard enough, touch Uncle Ron’s bed from my bed. The ceiling was low and pretty severely slanted following the roofline so that my older brothers especially had to watch out for their heads. This roof space was a scary place. As a little guy, it seemed so far away from my parents; it was like being in another world. The creaky dark-brown wooden steps up to this attic abode emerged from a very small room off the kitchen where I once slept as an infant and toddler, with your uncle Ron next to me in a big-boy bed.

I don’t know how long my parents let me stay in the crib in my brother’s room. But, after years of therapy, I recalled many memories, including being in the crib and climbing out of it. While it is a bit unusual to have memories that far back, I do vividly recall one time sticking my foot out between the crib slats, pointing it toward your uncle Ron. My good guess is that I was around two and my brother would have been six. I don’t know if I made noises or used words or was just thinking it, but he got my meaning and kissed my foot—a cutesy thing for an older brother to do. I also vividly recall one night when I got a very bad earache. I was lying on my stomach with my right ear pressed against the crib mattress trying to find relief—and crying because of the pain. From his bed next to our room, your grandfather scolded me to be quiet—so I stopped. No one came to find out what was happening to me. Decades later, it is that same ear that is now more severely damaged. The next morning I tottered out into the kitchen where your grandfather was sitting at the table eating breakfast. I pointed to my ear, and, once again, I don’t know if I made noises, used words, or was thinking while making noises, but your grandfather got the message that my ear hurt. He apologized for yelling at me. I actually recall being surprised, for whatever reason. But the fact is that I never did get another apology from him for any of his failings along the way until I was in college.

As a toddler, I sometimes played with an Erector Set in my bedroom, which, by the 1950s, had become part of American

Reviews for Faith of a Father

[harley0326 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Have you ever read a book that touched you so deeply, that after finishing it all you could do was cry. This book was one of the most powerful and touching books I've read in a very long time on a subject that is difficult to talk about. The author had real questions about if there really was a God as he struggled through trauma growing up. I'm sure it was very difficult to have an alcoholic mother who didn't seem to care about him and an emotionally abusive father. It's hard to feel like anyone cares when you feel unloved . I was so impressed how the author found scriptures that helped him through this difficult time in his life. He found his way to God and realized that his belief was in the truth that Jesus came back to life. With that knowledge how could he not believe that God existed? The book is a letter to his daughter but for many of us it is a letter of healing , forgiveness and hope. He explains that although there was a time he cried out for protection and a feeling of rage, that we must remember as victims it is not our fault. It is so easy to say "If I had done this differently , maybe I would not have been treated so badly." There is no truth in that and it is never the victims fault. " Courage, real courage , is no quick fix. It doesn't come in a bottle or a pill. It comes from discipline. From taking everything life hands you and being your best either because of it or in spite if it." That statement really hit home for me. Through everything I went through as a child I always tell people I would not change a thing. It made me stronger and gave me a deeper trust in God. I believe things happen for a reason. The author endured many traumas but I admire that he was able to find courage and with it came joy and hope. His love for God, his children and grandchildren is evident as he shares his story. He has given them a legacy that shows how no matter what you go through , God is there. He loves you and He will never leave you. The book is one I will return to often to give me encouragement as I strive to overcome my childhood trauma. Thank you for writing such a beautiful book that reminds us that God loves us and we are free. We don't have to live with emotional pain, but can be set free . I received a copy of this amazing book from The BookClub Network for an honest review.