November 7, 2010

I am having a moment and it's a way that change feels as I remember all the troubled emotions that I felt towards my father. Today would have been his 78th birthday. Maybe there's only change and that's the way that people understand that every day must have joys and sorrows together.

I know my father was changing when he was getting older. He at least was able to defend my "being Julia" and to hope that I made the best out of the places I had been.

He, as some of you know, did not accept my transition for years. That's not what I am remembering now.

He made something that was indispensable for my feeling protected and able to foresee a future for myself. That was all the work he did to provide for me as part of his family. I know that the patriarchal model has fatal defects. For one thing I also tried to cling to a way of life that made me separate from the struggle for survival that so many had to face. That has proved to be only partly tenable. I have to make my own way or I will be only one more dependent, as they say in the military world.

I have held him responsible for destructiveness and anger, for supporting a system that hurts the peoples subjected to it. I think now that he did not ever know the social realities that made him who he was. But he never went to a "four - year " college the way I did. He never encountered feelings that I had. I can't make excuses. He could be cruel. But he also had a stability that did not rush from impression to conclusion without at least some degree of consideration. He was from his standpoint fair.

If he were here now, I would be very angry with some of his behavior and some of his attitudes. I would still need and want to redirect his attention to some of those aspects of life with others that he either ignored or never noticed.

I also am grateful for the need he imprinted in me to read, to understand, to make something of myself.

I hope that he finds in his place of repose the knowledge of the feminine that he avoided in himself. I think it would help him a great deal. He was not a natural hater, only someone who was convinced that some things were right and others were wrong. He thought from a kind of conviction that if only everyone behaved according to the rules that everything would be okay. He didn't see the injustice of the rules themselves (except occasionally). Maybe he simply did not believe in himself enough to stand up to the prevailing winds affecting someone of his circumstances. I hope he encounters something gentle wherever he is that will bring that to him.

I suppose most of you are gagging by now. I did have anger and resentment and disappointment with him, and he deserved "re-education."

He smoked. That's what killed him. I think his smoking was for the same reason that most people smoke. It was an escape from the stress of getting by in this world. If he caused stress, he also felt it. He was a smart man who had limits, some within, and some without. If I could take one thing from him, it would be his lack of artifice (by his standards). He could spot pretense. He was an individualist as far as what he advised and in a great deal of what he did.

I do not wish to remain stuck in father-worship. I have been seriously damaged by it.

I know that when I loved him that it was partly out of a wish to please him, to attain the perfection I saw in him.

Now I feel that I don't have to reject him for his existence. He was a human and that is what I wish to remember and to feel for myself.

For Jack Murray, I say, let it be. Be at rest, Dad.

For myself I wish to go on with gratitude for the gifts he gave me and the ability to reject without rancor what I have no need for.

I did what I had to do. I want him to know that. I wanted love and he gave destiny.

The good was change; the terror was pain.

I loved him, not for his manhood, but his beauty.