God Only Knows

On Father's Day

Last week, during a middle-of-the-night bathroom visit, I said to myself, “If you put your brains in a bird, the bird would fly backwards.”

I’d forgotten to replace the roll of toilet paper when I used the last of it before bed.

“If you put your brains in a bird, the bird would fly backwards” was something my father said to me all the time to express how dumb I was.

As an adult, I now realize it’s just one of a million things he drilled into my subconscious as a child, beliefs about myself and the world that I’m still trying and often failing to undo.

Most of them have programmed me to self-destruct.

God only knows what I’d be without you.

We danced to God Only Knows at my wedding 20 years ago. I’m thinking about this, of course, because Brian Wilson just died.

What a strange song choice on my part. It’s both profoundly perfect and inappropriate.

“I may not always love you.”

Even then, I didn’t always love him.

He was mentally ill—cruel and scary.

About a decade ago, I was at a conference with a woman whose partner had gone to high school with my high school boyfriend (we went to different schools).

We were talking about families and I was telling her how unstable my father was and that I was his primary caretaker.

“I thought your Dad was a cop,” she said.

I imagined how this impression might have happened as mentions of my father traveled through the whisper network of teenagers from my (or my sister’s) high school boyfriends through this other man I didn’t know to this woman sitting next to me decades later.

“Well, he often threatened to kill people and he loved guns,” I said with a shrug.

My father and I had long periods of very low contact. I always felt that it was inevitable I’d sever our relationship and he would be a stranger to me, but it never happened.

God only knows what I’d be without you.

Another piece of programming he cemented into my subconscious: “You can want in one hand in shit in the other and see which fills up faster.”

It was usually said in response to me expressing any want/wish/desire for …anything. It was a foundational part of my training in not knowing what I want. It taught me that what I want doesn’t matter.

I’ve become skilled at not wanting. Which is a pretty big problem when it comes to having a vision for and directing my life.

I’ve also been ruminating on this essay from Mitch Horowitz’s substack all week on the power of a single wish. I want to marshall that power but it hinges on awareness of your wants.

If you should ever leave me, the world would still go on, believe me. But it could show nothing to me. So what good would living do me?

It’s always excruciating when a parent dies. I get that. But there are extra layers when the parent was abusive.

I felt relief when my father died, and not only because he had been suffering intensely for four years after a devastating stroke that left him unable to even sit up in a wheelchair.

I wanted the long drama of our tortured relationship to be over. I wanted to know what I would be without him.

Even from his nursing home bed, he was cruel to me. Only a few weeks before his death he had been attacking me, blaming me for the fact that he was there, criticizing me for not arranging for better and different care for him, in spite of the fact that spent untold hours for years advocating on his behalf, dealing with Medicaid, responding to his requests, talking to his doctors and therapists.

I said, “If you’re going to talk to me like this I’m afraid I have to leave. I’ll come back tomorrow.” And I did leave. It was the last time I saw him in the nursing home and I still feel guilty about this, and many other things.

I’m watching the TV show Sirens right now, and it’s surprisingly affecting for me. It’s the story of two sisters with mentally ill and negligent parents who are coping with the aftermath of all that in different self-distructive ways.

One of the sisters has totally detached from her father, with valid reasons. I cheer on the fictional young woman and regret that I was never able to do it.

My father’s was the sort of mental illness that alienated everyone he knew. He had no relationships with his five siblings. After their divorce, he had no contact with my mother.

Throughout his life he would have these intense short-lived friendships with people, only for them to end abruptly.

We had no funeral or memorial service. Who would come?

But I now understand the absence of these rituals has left me with guilt, grief, and sadness that never resolves. It only flares up and quiets down.

I wake up in the middle of the night seeing his face, wildeyed with fear, in the ICU. There is a part of me locked in that room, gowned, gloved, masked, watching him die, helpless.

He’d lost his ability to speak. Would he have continued to hurl accusations and abuse until the end or could he have said something that would have been a comfort to me? God only knows.

I told him I loved him, repeatedly. I did love him even though I didn’t want to love him.

It was always extremely difficult to buy him a father’s day card because he was so conspicuously and painfully not a golf dad, a tie dad, a grill dad, any of the kinds of dads these cards are made for.

The best I ever did was the year I found one that said, “There’d be no me without you.”

When I wonder God only knows what I’d be without you it goes both ways.

With a different sort of father I might have been more confident, less afraid, less depressed, less desperate for other people’s approval.

But also I might have been less emotional, less empathic, less resilient, less wise. Less myself. I try to find gratitude for being the weirdo he made me.

His mental health was always worse in the summer and so is mine. I’m not sleeping great. I have lost all interest in cooking which is extremely weird for me.

I think I’ve become pretty numb to father’s day but maybe it’s getting to me as well.

I don’t want anyone to worry about me—I am extremely good at navigating the dark places and my support system is top-notch.

I shared this for a few reasons. First of all, it’s because it’s what I’m actually thinking about these days.

Secondly, I know I’m not the only one around who isn’t watching their retired Dad man the grill as the happy extended family frolics in the back yard this year. And I think it can feel better when you know you’re not the only one.

And finally, as someone who works in media/content/marketing, I am absolutely awash in both AI content and content about AI content.

I just felt the need to write the absolute most human thing I possibly could and share it with other humans.