It confuses people that I can talk about my father’s truly atrocious parenting and abuse, and all the damage that he did to me, while also talking about how I love, respect, and even miss him.
It’s not Stockholm syndrome, it’s just family.
Few things in life ever really conform to a rigid good/bad binary. The complexity of life also includes that sometimes there’s a context where it doesn’t matter how a thing is bad. For all the damage my father did to me, I would not be here in any sense without his contribution. Some of my virtues flow directly from his vices. I would not be so well spoken if he was not so unreasonably critical. I would probably not be so well read if he had not made reading the only safe activity in my home. Yet, I wonder constantly what my potential might’ve been if I had felt safe expressing myself and taking creative risks as a child and adolescent.
Like a ghost in so many works of fiction, I see him and hear him both as I do things that honor him and as I do things that I am finally free to do without him. There are times when I smile at how he is manifested in me in some small way, and there are times so thumb my nose at him as I relish my freedom from him. There is a strange mystic way that he is literally a part of me, a biological continuity between him and I. It’s a strange phenomenon that we don’t usually think about, but when a child is conceived, there isn’t really a moment when a cell of each parent stops being itself. One cell of my father, living the entire time joining one of my mother, also continuous in life and being, and those who cells became me, and while each parent left out half of their DNA, they fed it back in decades communication and demonstration. I am a living continuous both of them, and the things that I hate about them becoming things I must work on in myself.
Now both of them as their living manifestations are gone, leaving only the five cells that became my generation of our clan, and then of course the many children with smaller pieces of them and us and others. The genetic heritage of a living person is not unlike the water in a river; bits go out to other places in drops, in evaporated molecules on the wind, and the water I paddle through today will become another river elsewhere on earth later, and rain along the way. We are in a sense just moments in that cycle, but there is a kind of unity to all of it and the true constant is change.