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I am taking a psychology of personality course presently.  We are discussing Freud’s theories regarding early childhood emotion and how he felt it was a learned trait.  This course is …I’m loving it…but it’s certainly bringing out some deep and long forgotten issues for me regarding family.  It’s also making me see my father in ways (technical and psychological ways) in which I never truly did before.  I knew…but I never really truly knew….  I wrote the following in response to a classmate that felt that emotional response is not learned during childhood and if it is it can be erased by someone’s love.  I miss my father, I wish my father had seen me enroll and prosper in college.  I wish I had said so many more things….

I have to say…..my father grew up in a non-emotional home…while he truly tried…he could not show emotion.  What I mean by this is……he loved me…I knew it by his actions not by his display of emotions.  We’ve all met those people.  They act tough on the outside at all times but then …

gah.. let me give an example.  My father never told me he loved me.  Never.  Those words never came out of his mouth.  He also never hugged me, kissed me, etc.  When I saw him after 9 years of absence, he gave me a high five.  A high FIVE?  From my father?  I believe he did this because he was not at all comfortable with sign’s or shows of emotion.  And trust me he had 3 children who wanted his love.  He had people in his life who loved him.

However…..he did buy me my first car.  He also, years after our long separation, sat with me one evening scrolling through a cookbook catalog.  I pointed out something I was interested in briefly.  By the time I got back to FL from PA….that cookbook was on my front step, delivered by amazon.com.   My father also left me a coveted bookcase in his will.  Something he knew I cared deeply for as it was from my childhood bedroom.  However…..he never hugged me.  Surely you know someone like this…..   I believe strongly that he could have changed, but I also believe strongly that he was raised this way and he had a wall that prevented him somehow from physically showing any sign of love.  It was foreign and uncomfortable to him.  I believe if I could go back in time I would find that his mother (who was schizophrenic) never hugged him or told him he was loved.  She was too mentally ill and busy naming the flies that landed on her screen door to bother hugging him.  When my mother met my father in high school he bashfully admitted to her (they were both in the tenth grade) that he washed his underwear in the high school bathroom because his mother would not wash his clothes and thought that if water touched clothes the evil spirits would kill her.  

He had quite a difficult childhood as you can see.  I did not have him in my adult life for 9 years.  From age 19 to 27 for me.  When I was 27 and met him my son was 5 years old.  He brought my son a fishing rod and introduced himself as “Rick”.  He never said he was “grandpa” but he spent 2 hrs in the front yard teaching my son how to cast that fishing rod.  He also never hugged my son, but asked me about him with much interest every time we spoke.   

My father never hugged me.  Never hugged my son.  His emotional trait was never allowed to grow or prosper and he kept people at arm’s length in that area.  But it was not because he did not care, but rather I think it was because no one ever truly emotionally loved him as a child so he had no true example of what to do openly and freely.  I know that people took an interest in him (my mother married him!) and cared for him….this did not erase his childhood neglect.