Fathers And Sons

[Sane Man]

I'm wondering what is it with father's and their sons, and if anyone else can relate.

Many fathers take the view with their sons I think that they have a plan for them when they get older, and if that son doesn't do his fathers wishes, then he disowns him. This is a view my father has taken with me and I'm wondering what the hell kind of parenting is that?!

Oh what? So I didn't become your personal slave and decided to have my own thoughts and life, and now you're going to hold it against me for the rest of my life? First of all, it's not your choice, and second is completely selfish and rude to think that way. One of my father's gripes with me is I believe he holds it against me for not giving him grandchildren. Well sorry, I've been a little busy with this suicide/depression thing, you know, going through hell with attempts and all sorts of shit like that, but what the fuck would you care? He is not a bad man overall and has done much good in his life, but he doesn't take suicide/depression and the people that deal seriously at all and that majorly pisses me off. He'll say some stupid bullshit comment like, "I don't know, I think I had it pretty tough back in 1980" referring to the recession with Reagan in the '80s. "Oh, you're comparing A FUCKING JOB SITUATION TO SUICIDE???" What a fucking asshole. I've dealt with tough job situations, and I've dealt with suicide. But, ya I'd have to say the ol' suicide problem is probably about 1000 times worse than not finding a job, ok?! Totally out of touch with empathy or priorities, but that's my dad.

So, our relationship sucks, my dad and his dad never got along, my grandpa's dad used to like to get drunk and throw him down the stairs. My grandpa on my mom's side of the family never got along with his sons either. This actually made me take the view when I was younger that I vowed never to have a son, just so I wouldn't even have the opportunity to do to them what you did to me. I mean, why have children if you're just going to be a selfish ass to them? And you'd think if your father sucked, than maybe you wouldn't, but what do I know.

 

[Dante]

My dad grew up with all kinds of pressures from his parents, if he didnt do good enough, they would lie to their friends saying he did, and then pressure him to do better, he decided not to repeat this mistake with us and ended up overcompensating, making, strangely the exact same environment.

He had no "plan" for us, and never encouraged us to succeed in case we felt pressured, this actually came off as him having no expectations of us because we werent good enough, which itself was intense pressure to succeed. He tried to compensate by doubling down, which only made it worse. The pressure growing up was insane, I have good grades at school without trying and a degree in Mathematics and Computing, but I still feel like i failed because I didnt get high enough grades.

All our parents screw up, and this seems to be especially the case between father and son, they see the mistakes of THEIR parents and try to overcompensate, or they see their OWN mistakes and think "my kid will be better" and make them into some kind of surrogate for their own lives, kind of a 2nd attempt, but either way they see their kids as an investment of their time and effort and love, an investment they want to see come to something worthwhile, something THEY consider worthwhile.

Inevitably the child will resent their father for fucking up as a parent so badly and their father will resent their child for feeling that way despite the father's efforts, and often for failing the expectations of the parent, not because they feel the kid wasnt able, but because the kid didnt try and so threw away the plan the father had for him since the childs birth.

Luckily my dad had no plans for me, so after we got out of the parenting phase, MOST bad blood faded away, but seriously, he SUCKED at the human side of parenting, worse than most, but he did the obligation side better than most, so... I dont know. Parents suck because they are trying to program a human being by trial and error, balancing so many variables, most of which they dont know or understand, they are destined to fuck up. The best parents KNOW they are destined to fuck up, the worst ones put all the responsibility for fucking up onto the kid.

 

[Gonz]

I was pretty much nothing but a dissappointment to my dad from the moment I graduated high school onward.

Even before that, I wasn't really someone he understood, but I was in the honors programs in school, and won a number of scholastic awrards, so he had something to brag about and that was good enough even if we weren't that close.

But then I went off to college and my anxiety disorders reared their ugly head, and I started failing at life, and I can't really blame my parents for not understanding why I kept fucking up over and over again when I kinda did my best t to the reasons because I was fucking embarrassed.

Eventually, around age thirty, after thoroughly ruining my reputation within my family, and being nothing but a giant fucking disappointment, I admitted to and tried to explain my panic attacks. It was kinda taken mostly as me making excuses.

So yeah, my entire adulthood, my relationship with my parents (especially my dad) was very... not good. They were disappointed in me. I felt that they didn't understand, but that trying to explain myself to people who looked at me the way they did was too humiliating to even attempt, so I just let them think poorly of me because anxious avoidant habits can easily look like irresponsible hedonistic habits in the right light.

But then, around 32 or 33, things started to change a bit. Two things happened. I finally started telling hem about the panic attacks, how long I'd been having them, how frequently. They honestly kinda treated that as me making excuses for a couple of years which was frustrating (but, in hindsight, understandable in light of my previous behavior).

So the things that happened: aftr a couple years of telling them about the panic attacks they paid for me to get a full work up at a psychiatric clinic, including brain scans and everything (I think from their perspective they were "calling my bluff").

But after a couple days of tests and questionnaires and scans, a psychiatrist sat down with the three of us and basically said (I'm paraphrasing here) "You're son is all fucked up, here's a bunch of charts and graphs that show how fucked up, here's a bunch of pamphlets explaining the nature of his fucked-upedness." When asked, he told the them that, yeah, he would back a disability claim and his findings were part of the later claim I made (dismissed because diagnosis is not enough, you need a history of treatment which I could not afford).

Around the same time, my mother started experiencing panic attacks due to claustrophobia. My father got to witness them firsthand. Both of them were like "So these things that happen to mom once every few months, happen to you you a few times a week?" And between that and what the psychiatrist had told them, they started to become a lot more understanding.

Then my (paternal) grandfather's health started to fail. My dad really stepped up when it came to taking care of him during the last couple years of his life. His relationship with his family involves, let's just say, a lot of angst. And all that came up during the time when he was taking most of the responsibility for caring for his dying father.

And during that time, I became kind of his sounding board for his frustrations, and his support for dealing with all this largely because, out of all the immediate family, I had time on my hands. I mean, it was just easier for me to make time to spend with him during the chaotic hours he kept because I didn't have a steady job or kids or anything, so I was just more available than everyone else. Like, we started having lunch together every day, and hed'd bitch to me about how the rest of his family was acting, try to make decisions without shouldering any of the responsibility that he was taking on, and about how much it hurt to see his dad like that. And, with all my free time, I became the person he could call to get shit done when he couldn't be there.

So we bonded a lot during that time. And I think he maybe started to see that, even if I was a fuck-up at dealing with day to day life, there were other ways where I could be dependable. And our relationship started getting a lot better.

My relationship with my mom too but, I guess, on a smaller scale because it had never deteriorated as much as that with my father.

And then, just a couple weeks after my grandfathers death (literally the last time anyone in my family ever saw Jessica was at his wake) on my grandfather's birthday, while I was at my parents's house, Jessica died.

I started living in the little trailer on my parents' property, and they went from just starting to accept and understand my mental illness, to seeing me completely break down. They've both done their best to be there for me. Thread is about fathers, so point out again that though the journey was similarish, my relationship with my mother was never quite as strained as that with my father, so the turnaround on his part is more of a surprise and has it's own meaning. Now we bond over food and comedy and weed. I think, once we set aside all of our mutual expectations of what a father and son owe to each other, we found that we actually do just like and care about each other as people, which is gratifying.

 

[Aurelia]

I assume maybe with the whole recession thing he meant that he wasn't able to afford basic needs, like food. And yeah, that does suck. But telling your kids, "Well, I got over this, so you can get over this," is still fucking retarded. There's no sense in comparing people and the difficulty of situations. We're all different.

 

[Sane Man]

I assume maybe with the whole recession thing he meant that he wasn't able to afford basic needs, like food. And yeah, that does suck. But telling your kids, "Well, I got over this, so you can get over this," is still fucking retarded. There's no sense in comparing people and the difficulty of situations. We're all different.

One of my points with this is people who have never dealt with suicidal thought a day in their life(My father) compared to those who have not only dealt with once, but on a regular basic(Me). I don't really like 'comparing problems' because that can give a distorted view, but some people just have no sense of scale, priority and what's more important. Another example would be my father telling me about retirement, when I'm just looking to make it through another year. I obviously would not be thinking of retirement if my focus is on daily/weekly mental health, that's what I mean. He doesn't take it seriously enough.

That said, I know mothers/daughters have riffs too. I think their equally crappy, but different.