Le Mort du Pere

Until about a week ago, I had made a solemn, eternal vow I would never, ever, ever in my life write a blog. Admittedly, that promise hadn’t been very long-lasting, just under a year, and I only told myself this because my English 11 teacher said that every single one of us would have a blog at some point or another; being the contradictory person I am, and not liking the teacher in the first place, I raised my hand in class and said I would never, ever, ever write a blog, specifically because he said I would write a blog. (Anti-self-fulfilling prophecy, I dubbed it.) He laughed, moved on with the lesson, and kicked me out of the class at the semester, thanks to a less-than-tactful letter in which I told him of our personality conflicts, his (in my opinion) subpar teaching methods, and my refusal to format the letter to his specifications.

With my amusing and complicated anecdote out of the way, we can get to some of the more important things. Like, why did I suddenly change my mind and cave to my disagreeable teacher’s prediction? Me, Bradley J., the one who sticks with his decisions to the end? (Okay, maybe I’m mincing words here. But I do stick with arguments until the end, at least until I can understand the other’s side, which Mr. L and I have not reached and never will.) I changed my mind for a lot of reasons. I was suddenly struck with the idea that I can get my voice into the world without having to go through the lengthy process of publication; I thought I might have something worth listening to, even if it is the rants of an angsty teenager with nothing better to do than sound ridiculously biased about everything in his life. But mostly I wanted to say something—without sounding sadistic about it:

I want my father to die.

How can that not be sadistic? What sort of cruelty could drive someone to that? Unless, of course, this is merely the sort of thing that nearly every teenager thinks at some point: I have been prevented from staying out another half an hour; I feel misunderstood and controlled; it is so obviously my parents being dominating, rather than concerned for my welfare or schoolwork, that I must blame everything on them and say terrible things I will regret in an hour or so.

No, this is not the case. I want my father to die. To summarize:

After a lifetime of various injuries, including but not limited to being hit by a car, having a forklift land on his head and break his neck, falling and breaking a hip, and developing an abcess of fluid in his brain that needed draining twice, he is currently in a wheelchair with a broken femur; a replacement hip; and memory, balance, and coordination problems. He has not seen our basement in over two years. Going up or down stairs, even if it’s a set of three, can take ten minutes. Helping around the house is impossible: even if he could do most of the stuff, my mother would prevent him from doing so.

My mother. Well, she’s a whole new can of worms. Even before my dad was confined, first by a walker and now by the wheelchair, she sought after people’s attention. More than once I remember her on the phone with the neighbors telling them how tragic her life was, even before I can remember the presence of a cause for this tragedy. Just last week, it seemed like she called every single set of parents on her roll (she teaches preschool out of our basement) and gave them each a half-hour sob story about how she didn’t know if the open house could happen now, because her husband is in the hospital, yes, he broke his femur, yes it’s so sad, and she was expecting it because he’s always so shaky and tries to do things without his walker, don’t know what he’s thinking, but the hospital might discharge him before Friday, and she has no idea what she’s supposed to do.

Admittedly, I can be easily frustrated by my dad, especially after the third time he’s asked me a question. My mother, on the other hand, is even more so. She is also much more vocal about it than I am. Most of the time, it seems like she doesn’t know how to communicate with people unless she’s yelling at them—I didn’t clean the bathroom to her standards; my sister hasn’t fed the cats while she does her laundry; why haven’t I taken the trash out yet, does she have to do everything around here—but my dad seems to be the focus for most of her anger.

In his own way, he deserves it. One of his favorite pastimes is saying or doing things to piss my mother off on purpose, something to be expected when you combine my dad’s personality and lack of real things to do in his infinite stores of free time—how many days in a row can you watch Crocodile Dundee or read Louis L’Amour without getting bored out of your skull? But when she yells at him for trying to do a load of dishes or sweep the kitchen floor, or even just get up and stretch his legs—that’s when she is going too far.

Even as I write this, I can hear something banging loudly upstairs in my dad’s room (my parents haven’t slept in the same bed for as long as I can remember, apart from a brief session when my dad wore a neck brace after the forklift incident) and my mom’s dulcet tones echoing through the ceiling. I don’t know what she’s yelling about, and I really don’t want to know; whatever it is, I’ve heard it before, over and over until I could probably quote what she’s saying.

I want my father to die. It would be a relief for him, I imagine, once he’s free of his mental challenges, once he can remember things clearly and walk on his own and do things without people getting mad at him. (I don’t believe in an afterlife, a heaven or a hell, but I think my dad does, so for him I stick to his canon here.) And my mother could breathe easier, soaking up people’s sympathy and free dinners every night and finally being free of her burden of a husband. After all those years of “being the only financial support for my household,” she could stop blaming things on my dad, hopefully coming to her senses a bit and realizing that she, too, has faults and might make mistakes on occasion—hopefully, but not very likely.

And, okay, I kind of would like to be rid of him as well. He means well and loves me in his own way, but constantly being treated like a four-year-old bothers me, not to mention getting in the crossfire of my parents’ verbal nuclear war. And if he did die, I would feel sad for him, of course, but not in the way most people would feel about their fathers. I remember very little about my father throughout my whole life. In some ways he has been like an uncle who lives with us: I saw him at home sometimes, depending on which shift he had at whatever job he had, and occasionally he would try some male bonding that ended with awkward silences in the car. But there’s never been a whole lot of interaction between my father and anyone in my family. (In fact, the only real pre-Junior-High memory I have of my father is when I asked him where babies came from, a conversation that ended soon after it began—he told me to consult the biology textbook my older sister gave me when she dropped out of college.) And if he were to die—or move to a care center where they can bathe him and my mom can get on with her life—it wouldn't make much of a difference in my life. I can't miss what I never really had. And I never really had a father.

So now, think of me as you will—evil, bloodthirsty son or misunderstood teenager—but know this: I have a lot to say. And I'm not done yet.