MY FATHER’S TRANSFORMATION
My father was a cross between Tony Soprano and Archie Bunker.
We can create boundaries to protect ourselves and, at the same time, encourage positive growth. We can embrace inclusivity, collaboration, and creativity. Letting go of destruction and exclusivity can be a shift, a flick of a switch, and sometimes it requires decades of pushing.
As a warrior child, I began challenging my father’s notions as early as age 3. The warrior way, scientific way, and wise way are all part of me. The *wise woman way is healthy, and my work is to allow it more space by simply asking “what” instead of “why” and allowing “how” to unfold. The wise way is a beautiful healing technique, but it wasn’t the technique utilized in assisting my father’s transformation.
His transformation from bigotry to inclusion through repeated exposure was motivated by the threat of never seeing his favorite daughter and his beloved and first grandson ever again.
My father was forced to at least witness the variety of people in our lives. He thanked my spirit brother for protecting me when I traveled far out on the flimsiest of limbs, and at the same time, my father learned and accepted that my spirit brother is gay. He changed the diaper of my spirit son, who is African American, and went out of his way to serve our beautiful child. When my friend, who is German American, offered my father, who survived WW2, her explanation of our unusual clothing choices, tension melted from his shoulders. No, we were not devil worshippers; we were just creative and different and needed to be able to identify each other. As an immigrant, my father understood the need to feel safe and seen within a community. He began to appreciate skin tone, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the individuality and creativity of my many chosen family members.
I introduced my dad to his kind neighbors, who I’d taken to visiting while my son spent time with his Papoo. My dad discussed gardening tips, same-sex marriage, pride, exchanged recipes, and shared dishes with the couple next door. Years later when one of his neighbor’s body was taken over by AIDS, and no family or friends came to help him, my dad stepped up and provided home hospice care until his dear friend and neighbor, passed.
My passion for music, in particular Billie Holiday, led to discussions of systemic racism. His desire to understand how her family could “allow” her to experience such suffering led to an understanding of post-traumatic slave syndrome and the pervasive and heinous ways black women are systematically maligned in American culture. While watching Lady Sings The Blues, my father’s eyes welled up with tears of compassion for families who’ve suffered such extreme oppression and separation.
By the last decade or so of his life, my dad genuinely took an interest in how people from different perspectives experienced the world. He was imperfect, and his transformation was not into sainthood, but he was able to see the intelligence, strength, and worthiness in women and men of all types. My dad came a long way from taking my books out of concern that I would become too intelligent to “make a good Greek wife.” He became accepting and even a bit celebratory. It was a decades-long process, but my dad was finally able to love humans he had previously hated. Together we employed the wise way to heal the guilt and shame leftover from his previous thinking. He embraced and felt gratitude for the process as it led him to a spiritually, healthier place. My dad learned to love others and himself, more unconditionally. Being a grandfather was pure bliss for him; his grandchildren miss him dearly.
We’re all exposed to misogyny, racism, LGBTQI hatred, antisemitism — so many forms of xenophobia. Eradicating hateful conditioning is work we all have to do, and there are perhaps as many techniques for overcoming separation as there are people.
My response to my father’s bigotry was not that of a **pacifist. I set sharp and clear boundaries; we argued, and I avoided him. The self-defense technique of a creative, sensitive daughter happened to work out well in the long run because of his love for his artistic, wild, “deefferent” daughter and grandson.
*Susun Weed: Healing Wise
**A pacifist turns the other cheek and is not one to utilize self-defense techniques.
My mother was six months pregnant in this photo.
My father thought the tourist photographer was FBI.
