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*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico

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This September 3, 1963 letter is — of course — a private one my father wrote to my mother just after she and we kids arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico while he stayed in Alaska and worked.  It describes that immediately after they received title to 120 acres of the homestead, they mortgaged it.

This letter is telling because it describes my father’s thoughts as they parallel all the confused, “mixed up” statements my mother makes in her ongoing letters.  He is her husband.  He appears to participate with her in all of it.  My father writes in this letter about the homestead, more than four years after they first moved onto it:  “But after all the wondering, worrying, fretting, back-and-forthing, this is it!  Either that’s our home or it isn’t, and now’s the time to decide.”

Reading this letter does not help me one single bit in understanding my father!  That disappoints me, but it’s a fact.  Their marriage was none of my business.  The decisions they came up with over time directly affected all of their children, as any parental decision is likely to do.  But here I feel as if I am still trying to peer though a closed door without a window to see anything about what’s really going on past it — no different now than if I was trying to understand their world when I was a child myself (though it certainly never occurred to me to think about trying to).

How does one judge ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’?  Even to me now their problems seem so strangely proportioned.  They are not talking about what color to paint the house they’ve been living in for 20 years here.  It seems that chaos was so ‘ordinary’ in our lives that nobody, certainly not my parents, ever noticed they were in the thick of it.  Perhaps it’s like thinking that living in the center of a tornado was normal.  Our family reality just WAS, without question,  in part because there never was any other reality visible within our world to compare our version of life against.

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This letter belonged to a private conversation between my parents.  The contents of it related to decisions that of course affected all of their children.  Yet, 46 years after it was written I still feel like a voyeur reading it, let alone transcribing it, let alone publishing it here on the world wide web.  Obviously it survived.  Obviously it somehow found its way into my house, into my hands, onto this clipboard of mine sitting here beside my computer at this moment.

But I ask myself the questions, “What is your purpose in doing this, Linda?  What do you hope to learn, think you might be able to come to understand about your parents, about their thinking, about their relationship, about the way they made their decisions together — and about how they observed their lives separately and then combined their two separate selves to create a marriage and hence created THE LIFE of their children?”

Do I see in this letter, for example, any of the mental, emotional, verbal and psychological abuse I suspect — no, I KNOW — went on with my mother as perpetrator and my father as victim — during my childhood?  It seems that they so shared their reality that there wasn’t a separate ‘her’ and a separate ‘him’.  I could say that was ‘ordinary’, but I also know long after I left home my father divorced my mother after staying with her for more than 30 years.

Was my father such a ‘giving’ man and such a ‘giving in’ man that he simply found a way to let her push him, push at him, for all those years and he just kept moving in whatever direction the force of her force — forced him?

Reading my father’s letters leaves me feeling as if I am standing dangerously close to an erupting volcano.  I am completely cloaked with soot and ashes.  I see the roiling lava swiftly approaching me where I stand.  Yet my feet are so fixed in place that I cannot move to safety, even if I had the thought to do so.

The air becomes so dark with smoke that I can no longer see my hands in front of my face.  I hear a deafening roar, and a cracking, breaking sound.  The earth begins to quake beneath my feet and I crumple to the ground and I cannot get up.

Unlike my mother in her childhood story of a city devoured by flames, I am completely alone.  My only hope is that my father will love me enough to save me.  He never did.

This September 3, 1963 letter shows me why he never could.  It unsettles me to realize that my father was absent to me because he absolutely shared my mother’s reality.  There was no ‘other dad’.  Just this one.  He did not exist in my world, only in hers.

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So what can I make of it when father writes this in his letter?

“I enjoy the notes and post cards the kids have sent.  I love them all (the kids, I mean), and not just as a group but each one for himself and herself.  It all seems so familiar, writing something like that, only difference is there’s one more now.”

I do not know!  The very old, often beaten into me by my mother, thought pattern arises — “We would all be fine if it wasn’t for Linda.  Linda is the cause of all the troubles in the family.  She’s more trouble than all the other children put together.  ‘Trouble’ should have been her middle name.”

Yes, my left intellectual brain knows now that I was my mother’s dissociated imaginary enemy.  But that fact does not always comfort me.  I have to reach for it — like I would have to reach for an umbrella before I wandered out into a soaking rain.

Mental illness.  Illness that affects the mind.  This letter is in the thick of it, and it’s an effort at this moment as I transcribe this letter not to feel sucked right back into it!  Crazy.  Crazy making!  “Stop this train!  I want to get off!”

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Letter appears in context with  *1963 – Mother’s Letters

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