My Daughter and Me

I don’t know what happened to my daughter and me. I think it’s my fault, but I don’t feel that, if you know what I mean. Maybe it’s just too hard to imagine that I have completely alienated her.

I want to fix it, but I have been spectacularly bad at that for decades. Not her early years, perhaps, or so I want to believe. Those seemed pleasant, idyllic, even; ballet, Indian Princesses, Laura Ashley. I worked too much, and the tension between her mother and me didn’t bring out my best side, but I loved my children, and I thought I was a good dad.

I wasn’t that great, obviously, as I missed something terrible happening to my daughter. Many years into her adulthood, she told me that when she was nine she started having anxiety attacks. An elementary school teacher told her class that when they heard an airplane overhead there was a not insignificant chance it was a Russian bomber coming to drop the big one. This was a good while after the Cuban missile crisis (when such a scenario was indeed possible), long after the duck-and-cover drills of my own youth, so I don’t know where this guy was coming from. It was California in the seventies; he was a little off the grid, I think.

But he made a big impression on my daughter. She didn’t tell me she was suffering. I don't think she told anyone. But I should have seen it.

She has struggled with anxiety ever since. She is so smart and talented, though, that for years she could, as far as others were concerned, power through it; or at least coexist with it. She was a drama star in high school, college and graduate school in New York. She even acted off Broadway for a few years before she came back to L.A. to try film.

That’s when the wheels came off. They had been wobbly, but she could keep herself on the road. As a struggling actress in L.A., she crashed through the guardrails. Multiple guardrails.

I need to say here that I divorced her mother when she was fifteen. I wanted to tell her before she went off to ballet camp in Boston that summer, but her mother told me not to spoil the camp for her. She came home from that trip with a t-shirt for me that said “World’s Greatest Dad.” That claim to fame obviously didn’t last too long.

My divorce from her mother was the beginning of something like my divorce from my daughter. I wanted to spend time with her, but she felt her mother needed her more. 

So the years went by with occasional visits and phone calls, but not much more. 

Then her anxiety began taking a more serious emotional and physical toll. I wanted to help, but my suggestions (especially for treatment) weren’t well received, particularly by her mother, with whom she was living. To her mom, my role was to send money and shut up. I did that for a while, but when my daughter kept getting worse, I thought a change of course was warranted. Her mother didn’t, and neither did she. So that was that.

There ensued, as anyone could have predicted, bitterness and disillusionment as a result of my failure to play my designated role. These led eventually to estrangement. Which apparently is where we are now.

I know I’ve screwed up, but I’m not sure exactly how. I’m certain my ex wife could tell me, but she has refused to speak to me since our divorce. Literally. Thirty five years now. So there’s been no concerned-parent collaboration about how to help our daughter. None. Zero.

I hope she, both of them, know what they’re doing. I don’t like being shut out. I miss my daughter. But more than anything I want her to find a way to get better.

***

(Afterword: After I wrote this, I looked back at this blog and found I had written almost the same piece five months ago. This proves two things: I’m quite disturbed by this estrangement, and I don’t have a very good memory.)

One of Us Must be Wrong

 Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.

        —Dire Straits, “Industrial Disease”

We’re a little too sure of ourselves these days. Some call it polarization. I call it laziness. It’s easy to have opinions, harder to be informed.

“I’ve done my own research,” is a common rebuttal when confronted with an uncomfortable truth. There is little point insisting that reading around on the internet until you find opinions or “facts” you agree with is not research. They know that. They don’t care. It’s not so much that they believe the absurdities they’ve dug up, it’s just that they don’t want to think about it. They know what they believe, and that’s that.

According to a new poll by CNN, half of voters think that elections now don’t reflect the will of the people. And they think a future election will be overturned for that reason.

So we’re not talking about the isolated views of a drunk uncle at a family gathering. This is half of us.

We’ve been here before: the sixties, both of them, in two centuries. It wasn’t pretty either time (the first far worse, of course), but we recovered. We’ll recover from this paroxysm too. Survival is a basic driver of all species. I thought we’d evolved beyond survival of the fittest to something more communal, but maybe not. Maybe only the most brutal will come through this crisis. Maybe the weakest will have to die, at least politically. We’ll see.

The root of the problem we’re having once again (or still) isn’t ideology, it’s a lack of empathy and humility. Empathy helps us see things from the points of view of others. Humility helps us accept that we don’t know what we don’t know…and that we may be wrong about what we think we do know.

In a life or death struggle, empathy and humility probably aren’t going to defeat your enemy. Maybe that’s why they don’t seem to be as deeply programmed into our behavior as fight or flight. They are the idle pastimes of philosophers, pointy-headed pedants in ivory towers, not the stuff of doers who make things happen.

That may be true. The problem is that without empathy and humility, the doers are making the wrong things happen.