I've written about my mother more than once on this blog, but seldom about my father. It's because, I suppose, my relationship with him was more complex and problematic.
But today I was catching up on the 2nd series of HBO's In Treatment, and watching a character called Walter, a high flying CEO, talk about having just gone to Rwanda to try to convince his daughter to come home. He felt that they had a special relationship, they spoke every day, he was so proud of her. But she'd started emailing her mother instead of him, so he suspected a problem and took six flights to go and get her to come home.
She was furious that he had come, and refused to leave, then sent him an email once he left the camp she was working and living in, which he read back at the hotel in Kigali.
The email said that he was domineering, obsessive, the cause of all her anxieties, that it was impossible to grow or thrive around him, that she had to get away from him and now he was ruining her only chance to free herself from him.
In Treatment is never an easy show to watch, but I am fascinated by psychotherapy - I intend to make it my second career - and watching the characters go through the process of self-discovery is gripping. But there are times when the show reaches in and rips my heart out, especially when a scene resonates with my own life.
And this one did.
It reminded me of the time my father came to get me from Johannesburg.
I grew up in a podunk town in South Africa and I moved to Jo-eez to study. After that I was a bit lost, couldn't find a job and ended up taking an admin position in one of those pyramid scheme places. It was a crap job, but it paid. I became good friends with the other admin - let's call her Cassie - and she found us rooms to rent in a flat.
We inherited the third tenant, who turned out to be a bit of a weirdo. He'd shower in our bathroom instead of the en suite in his room, and then walk around naked. We just ignored him, and made sure we were never home with him without the other one present.
So one day I come home from work and, sitting on the stairs in front of the flat are my father and my cousin. It was late, and they totally freaked me out.
My father looked like he was at a funeral. My cousin looked exhausted. They had driven 8 hours to get to where I was.
They took me out to dinner and I was completely stunned. Why were they there?
My cousin told me that he had come to the flat a few weeks before, when he was on a business trip. This was long before cellphones and we didn't have a landline in the apartment. He hadn't left a note or anything, so I had no idea he had even been there.
My cousin said that our flatmate had let him in and told him that me and Cassie were smoking (that was true), taking drugs (that wasn't) and that we took turns to use our shared bedroom to sleep with random men (that definitely wasn't).
My father didn't say a word throughout the whole thing. He just sat at the table, crying softly, refusing to eat.
Instinctively, I knew that this was a defining moment in my life and that, if I went home with them, I would regret it for the rest of my life. I would be like a broken colt, forever tamed, forever a pet.
I explained that our flatmate was a bit nuts, told them about the naked thing, said I did not take drugs (that experimentation came much later) or sleep with random men and that, in fact, I was starting to date a really nice young guy who was an architecture student. He worked nights at a local record store and, if they liked, we could go there together and I could introduce him to them.
(He's the only guy I ever broke up with, and it broke my heart, but that's another story.)
Frankly, I have no memory of the rest of the whole thing. I was so stressed out until I started therapy at 25 that huge swaths of my memory are a complete blank. My first therapist told me that that's a sign of the brain's way of coping - repression.
What I do know is that I didn't go home with them.
Oh, and one more thing. My father refused to overnight in a hotel so he made my cousin drive them back home and I was worried that they would have an accident because my cousin was tired.
Oh, there's another thing too. I thought my cousin was a total Fuckwit.
He is one of those men who likes to give other people advice in hushed tones. Until then, I had thought that he was a good person for people to seek out when they needed mentoring, because his calming demeanour and Catholic-inspired advice may really be of help. But I saw another side to him in that moment.
He didn't just deal with drama, he created it.
At no time had he given me the benefit of the doubt. He hadn't told me he had visited, he hadn't told me what Nutjob Flatmate had said, he hadn't asked for my side of the story.
Instead he did the worst thing he could possibly do under the circumstances: he told my father.
My father, the man who told me that I would get raped if I went to the beach with my friends to watch the boys from our school surf on a Saturday. My father, who managed to find a reason to get overemotional and cry at every family gathering, subjecting us all to some ridiculous speech about how he loved us (yes, yes, it sounds sweet, but wait till you've heard it for the 10th time). My father who, after watching an episode of McGyver where Richard Dean Anderson went into Russia to rescue a young girl, came into my room in tears to tell me he loved me.
Now that I think about it, that was one of the very, very few times I ever challenged him. I asked him to tell me what subjects I was taking at university at the time, and he couldn't answer the question. Yeah, he really loved me.
My cousin reported this utterly implausible rubbish to my father, a man who watched cop shows and believed that the carnage of the streets of New York was just outside our door. A man who shook with fear at the thought of his daughter on a beach with 15 year old boys in broad daylight.
My cousin was a pathetic little tattle-tale.
Unbelievable.
As I write this, I realize that he deserved to have the hell of driving 16 hours with my father sobbing next to him. He caused the situation, and it's absolutely right that he should suffer the consequences.
The only regret I have is that my mother may also have believed the ridiculous accusations made against me, and been really worried. And even if she knew in her heart it was all bullshit, she would've been worried about the 16 hour round trip, just like I was.
So I guess I am most angry about what this trumped up drama did to my mother.
But I also know that, when they got home and she saw that I wasn't with them, her heart must have leapt. She brought me up to fight, to get free of the tyranny of my father's strict and sexist attitude, and she must have known that my refusal to capitulate was a victory not only for me, but for her, too.
I didn't write my father an email saying the things that Walter's daughter wrote. But each and every one of those words rings true to me.
I ran away, like so many daughters do, to get free of my overbearing father. It's not a particularly original life story. Men of my father's age were "of their generation" (part fact, part excuse), but I suspect that, until we have more gender equality in our society, girls will still feel they have to run, even the ones who are young today.
Young women in my family have run into the arms of other men (marrying far too early), into the arms of volunteer organizations accross the country and even, in one case, into the arms of an aeroplane that took her to study half a world away.
Perhaps there are some boys who have to do this too. But I think it's mostly girls - and gay boys.
We have to find a way to escape, to get out of our father's negative shadow, so we can find the sun, and blossom.
To read more in the Memory Lane series, click here.
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