Breaking Away : What Happens When a Son Determines to Live a Life in Opposition to His Father?

WHEN I REMEMBER MY FATHER, IT IS USUALLY IN A KIND OF daydream, a waking vision that repeats itself. In my memory, he is sitting at the kitchen table of our home, enveloped in cigarette smoke, beads of sweat glistening on his bald head. He is drinking a can of beer, alone, wearing white boxer shorts and a white cotton T-shirt. It is the summer before I left for college.

I have stayed out late, hoping my father has gone to bed. Since he has not, and he is drunk--I know this from the dull expression that covers his blue eyes like gauze--I cannot slip silently upstairs. We talk. We argue.

A lawyer, my father loves to argue, yet he is cynical, he believes in nothing. When I become exasperated, he says calmly, “You will understand me when you’re older, perhaps when you have children of your own.” Or: “I treat you like I do because I want to motivate you. I want you to be independent.” And: “You seem to be doing well. I must be doing something right.”

I am furious. I have heard this before, and I’m prepared. “Everything I do, everything I become, is in spite of you, not because of you,” I tell my father. “I want to be what you are not.” My adolescent words are weapons calculated to hurt, arrogant and unoriginal. They are true nevertheless. They remain true today.

A STAGGERING NUMBER OF AMERICAN MEN HAVE DIFFICULT or unsatisfying relationships with their fathers. As boys, they learned little from them; they were at best a benign influence. As adults, they have fashioned an uneasy coexistence, a relationship shaped by silence and unspoken distance. They founder, vaguely dissatisfied, in a nether world between intimacy and rejection.

I am different only by degree--my father is alive, but I have neither seen him nor spoken to him in more than a decade. What other men experience as dissatisfaction in my case turned to poison. Yet the common wisdom about fathers and sons frightens me, for I hear so often that history repeats itself, that I am destined to be like him. Now, at 35, I want to be sure that this does not happen. For me there is an urgency to being different from my father, a determination not to fail at it, that creates its own sort of tension.

I take solace in the stories of men who defy the common wisdom, of men whose lives are very different from that of their fathers. I am not talking about ordinary teen-age rebellion, but rather a fundamental break with their fathers’ politics and worldviews, with how they treat their wives and children. Adam Hochschild’s father ran a mining conglomerate; he founded a muckraking magazine known for its exposes of corporate malfeasance. Shepherd Bliss and Mario Velasquez were groomed to become military officers; one became a leader of the men’s movement, the other worked for the opposition in his country’s bitter civil war. Raised a communist at the height of the Cold War, David Horowitz became an outspoken conservative. John Robbins, heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream fortune, wrote a book attacking the “Great American Food Machine.”

To varying degrees, these men and I face a similar paradox: We loved, or still love, a man whose essence we reject. We have staked our lives on that rejection, fought a kind of revolution that lingers in our hearts and minds. But we are tied to our fathers by genetics and memory: No matter how cold or critical or even brutal these men were, they were our fathers. Our relationship to them is a private koan, irreducible and ultimately unknowable to anyone other than ourselves. “Why do you still see your father?” friends would ask me, years ago. “Because he is my father,” I would answer, knowing that was not enough.

I think of all this now for a simple reason. In the fall of last year, I became a father for the first time. Now I am forced to ponder the paradox from a different perspective. Now I must try to imagine what a father’s love should be.

FEW MEN CONFRONT THE PARADOX AS DIRECTLY AS MARIO Velasquez. He grew up in El Salvador, the son, grandson and great-grandson of military men. His father, Col. Mario Velasquez Sr., was a hero of El Salvador’s 1969 war with Honduras and ran for mayor of San Salvador. Mario Velasquez Jr. was a member of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which fought a guerrilla war against the Salvadoran government.

“(My father) tucked me in, he kissed me, he gave me everything I wanted,” Velasquez, 38, remembers. “My dad taught me great things--he taught me how to make a paper plane, how to build a house. We built our beach home together. When I buy a house, I will know how to put tiles in with my own hands, how to do woodwork. I have leadership skills I learned from my father.”

His father also beat him, at times until the boy almost fainted. And in the late 1970s, Velasquez Sr. helped form the death squads that tortured and killed thousands of civilians. “The man that was my hero, the man I admired the most, the man I wanted to be like, was a criminal,” his son says.

Later, Velasquez tells me, “I loved my father very much. And I miss him. I wish he was alive today. I’m envious of men that have good relationships with their fathers. But my father was a monster. When he died, it was a good thing for the world.”

For David Horowitz’s father, an ardent Communist in New York, politics was a prism through which to view the world. Like a fundamentalist religion, communism was a source of Truth, a way of knowing. (The father once told his son that the saxophone was “not a real instrument.” Years later, Horowitz learned that Stalin had banned the sax from the Soviet Union.) During the McCarthy era, Horowitz’s father was blacklisted from teaching school and abandoned by the party. He never recovered, withdrawing from the family, taking long walks alone, sulking for entire days at a time.

Even when Horowitz was young, he and his father fought about politics--about the Soviet invasion of Hungary and whether the New York Times, “the bourgeois press,” told the truth. Later, David became active in the New Left, which he saw as an attempt to redeem the mistakes of his father’s generation of leftists, particularly their support for Stalin. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Horowitz came to believe that his generation was repeating those mistakes. His politics drifted steadily to the right, until he became a prominent supporter of Ronald Reagan.

Still, Horowitz believes that his real rebellion is personal. Communism had been his father’s armor, a source of protection. Once he told his son, Horowitz recalls, that he was “scared of life.” Horowitz believes he has rejected the bitterness and fear that circumscribed his father’s life.

More than 30 years later, Horowitz, now 53, vividly remembers the discovery that he could not rely on his father. It was “exhilarating and frightening. He was irrational, I felt. He couldn’t tolerate any distance. He couldn’t tolerate any independence. He became sort of useless as a guide.”

Torn between exhilaration and fear--between embracing freedom and dreading its consequences--a man can distance himself from his father and still follow him. Having rejected his father’s politics and a military career, Mario Velasquez swung like a pendulum from an authoritarian father to a totalitarian party. “You grow up privileged, which means people don’t trust you. They don’t know whether you’re a potential agent,” says Velasquez, recalling his days in the FMLN. “A very weird relationship develops, because these party structures become like your father. You’re trying to please them and you’re trying to conform. My father demanded for me to please him, for me to conform.

“I was once asked to sign a piece of paper saying I will execute my own father. I said, ‘I’m not going to do that. That is sick, man. Why don’t you execute him yourself? I won’t object, OK. But don’t ask me to do it.’ ”

Eventually, a disillusioned Velasquez left the party too, and began working for Medical Aid for El Salvador, a Los Angeles nonprofit agency that helps war victims. Now that the conflict is over, MAES is raising money to build a rehabilitation center for wounded guerrilla veterans. Velasquez, the organization’s executive director, says that he does this work, in part, to make amends for his father’s sins.

Like Velasquez, Shepherd Bliss grew up in a military family, the son and grandson of Army officers. (Ft. Bliss, in Texas, is named for the clan.) At dinner, Bliss’ family ate in silence, lifting food to their mouths as though performing a military exercise--with each bite they traced a right angle in the air. His father was domineering and sometimes violent, a drill sergeant by nature, if not rank. For a time, Bliss followed him, joining the Army in the mid-1960s. He was commissioned an officer but became involved in the anti-war movement, organizing inside the military. The Army was happy to let him go.

By that time, Bliss had been influenced by a number of men, including the poet Robert Bly, who went on become an architect of the men’s movement in the 1980s. Bly and the others showed him another vision of what it means to be a man. Bliss’ rebellion became his livelihood. A Berkeley psychologist, Bliss, 47, now works full time in the movement, teaching men’s studies and leading men’s groups.

Fathers are a central concern. “I think it’s one of the deepest problems, a lack of that father-son connection,” Bliss says. Although he readily acknowledges that his work springs from his own life, he does not describe it as a battle with his father. He says instead, “I am in rebellion against traditional masculinity.” Despite his disclaimer, Bliss has devoted his life to understanding what it means to be different from his father. And still to love him: The two men maintain a relationship, though a sometimes difficult one.

Like the other men whose stories so appeal to me, Bliss is in essence trying to destroy his father’s world. Despite their political overtones, these rebellions are at root deeply personal, their difficult work never-ending. All these men have left their fathers behind, all are leaving their fathers behind, none will ever leave his father behind. How else do you love a man who was responsible for torture?

WHICH STORIES SHALL I TELL ABOUT MY OWN FATHER? SHALL I begin by comparing him to Velasquez’s father, noting that he never tortured or killed anyone? But then, neither did he tuck me in or teach me to fly a paper plane or build a house.

I hesitate, not because I want to protect my father but because I have so many stories to tell. The truth of our relationship lies in the steady accretion of tension, fear and loathing, in the knot that twisted my stomach when he was home, in the bewilderment of never knowing what boundary I might suddenly cross. Shall I describe how I fell and cut my knee while walking across a stone bridge, and he screamed at me for being clumsy? Or the time I got sick in the car when he was smoking a cigar, and he screamed at me for getting sick?

As a boy not yet in his teens, I lay awake at night, listening through the thin wall of our suburban home as he yelled at my mother. I lay very still, as if by stillness I could quiet the storm. As a teen-ager, I stood beside my oldest brother in the upstairs hallway and confronted him, demanding that he control his wrath. He did not challenge us, but another time I stood there alone, and he dared me to fight him--I could not hit him, he was my father--then kneed me in the groin. Still later I taunted him, running into the yard and laughing, daring him to catch me.

My father drank--once I saw him drink two six-packs of beer in an hour. He denied any suggestion that he was an alcoholic; to prove us wrong, he would stop drinking for a week or two, then return to his old ways. I saw my father as a hypocrite. We were Catholic, and attended Mass every Sunday. He would pray piously, listen to sermons about social justice, take Communion and return home unchanged. He would curse relatives privately, charm them in person and curse them again, all in a day. On weekends, if someone from his office called, I had to lie and say he wasn’t home.

My father always seemed old to me, though he was not quite 29 when I was born, six years younger than I am now. His world seemed small, his concerns narrow, his life devoid of friendships and joy. I struggle to remember joy--there must have been joy--but come up empty. What I remember is negotiating a minefield.

My three brothers and I all handled my father differently. One withdrew into silence, one became the family clown, the other a peacemaker. I argued. My father and I fought over matters of principle, such as whether to sue my employer after I injured myself on the job; we fought about trivial things, like the tattered overalls I wore one Christmas morning or a glass of milk I did not want to drink. I became a lightning rod for my father’s anger, which was all out of proportion to my sins, real and imagined. Like bookends, our attempts at reconciliation bracketed our battles, with my mother as diplomat, urging us to talk. My father and I spoke for hours on end, over many years, in the hope of negotiating a peaceful coexistence. We failed.

And then, when our family faced its greatest crisis--my mother’s cancer--he left. In the 11 1/2 years since then, he has not spoken once to any of his four sons. Occasionally, we hear vague details of his life from acquaintances. Although he was the one to leave, we have chosen not to pursue him.

I measure my rebellion in my soul. I measure it in the quality of my friendships, in my treatment of my family and my attempts to be strong and gentle, my involvement in the larger world. I sometimes imagine that I am as different from my father as any son can be, yet being a new father, I hope I have succeeded.

THERE IS AN ENTIRE LITERATURE OF FATHERS AND SONS, IN WHICH sons embark on journeys, often literal as well as metaphoric, to understand their fathers. It is a literature of reconciliation, a literature of knowing, in which knowledge engenders acceptance and then forgiveness. Sons sue for peace. At best, fathers wait--”He sits there behind the door . . . lonely in his whole body, waiting for you,” writes the poet Robert Bly. These stories take place even at the extremes that intrigue me, where a vast gulf once separated father and son.

In “Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son,” Adam Hochschild describes his fear, as a boy, of being alone with his father, an austere and formal man. Though his father never hit him, Hochschild felt a pain in his stomach: His father literally made him ill. Hochschild also describes his rebellion--his father was chief executive at a mining conglomerate, while he became a journalist and co-founded the radical magazine Mother Jones.

It was Hochschild’s sons, now 16 and 21, who set his father free. Harold Hochschild laughed with his grandchildren, he read them books and told them stories. Slowly the son began to see his father in a different light. “I was very lucky that my father lived for such a long time, so I really was able to make my peace with him at the end, instead of having to make my peace with a ghost,” Hochschild, 49, says. “For that reason, I came to realize that there were a lot of good things about our relationship, especially in the later years.

“He wasn’t only the person I’d remembered as very strict and forbidding, that I was quite frightened of when I was young.”

Hochschild, who is Jewish, also saw how circumstances had limited his father’s life. Harold Hochschild had grown up amid anti-Semitism and was terrified of his own father. He had spent the first years of Adam’s life, during World War II, in the Army. He had lived in a world that defined fatherhood solely as supporting one’s family. And Adam noticed important ways in which they were similar. The radical journalist was not as much a rebel as he had once imagined.

Hochschild believes in the drive to reconcile with one’s father, and he suggests that I will someday want to contact mine. “If he died and you hadn’t seen him, I think you’d regret it all your life. I think that need, to have a connection across the generations, is so deep, going in both directions, that no matter how bad he was, you would always feel something missing.”

John Robbins’ rebellion itself became an instrument of reconciliation. As a boy, he had experienced emotional neglect rather than abuse from his father; possessions (and ice cream), instead of time and love, were the family currency. When he told his father he would not take over Baskin-Robbins, he did not imagine that he would write a book, “Diet for a New America,” advocating changes in the food industry radical enough to destroy the company his father built. Robbins knew only that he needed to find his life’s work, and to do that he must escape the shadow of an enormously successful man.

Robbins’ renunciation opened an abyss between him and his father. By the time his book was published, in 1987, his father was overweight, diabetic and had high blood-pressure and cholesterol levels. After reading his son’s book, the retired ice-cream maker gradually improved his diet. He lost weight, his cholesterol and blood pressure fell, and his blood-sugar level stabilized. “He’s delighted,” says Robbins. “I’m delighted, too, because this is a man who gave me life--he’s my father. I can give him something that has real value to him.”

THERE WERE TIMES, IN MY early 20s, when I lay awake at night and imagined ways to kill my father. Could I fly across the country and return without anyone knowing I’d been gone? Could I devise the perfect alibi? I did not imagine the crime itself, but the fantasies were strangely cathartic.

A decade later, I am no longer angry at my father, which, I suppose, is a type of forgiveness. With time having passed, I can paint a more sympathetic portrait of him, if not an exculpatory or flattering one. I see how much he resembled his own father, an aloof and judgmental man whom nothing seemed to please.

My father went to law school at night (his father was also a lawyer) but worked for a large insurance company, where he had little control of his life and little camaraderie. Work defined his life and stole his time, giving back only money.

My father had a deep well of loneliness within him. On summer nights, when I found him sitting alone in the kitchen, I occasionally heard him talking aloud, urging himself toward unknown challenges: “Come on Clancy, you can do it. Come on.” We had moved to that house in 1967, when I was 10. Though it was only 13 miles from our former home, to my knowledge he kept in touch with no one.

I realize also that alcohol shook the landscape of my childhood, making it impossible to know where I stood, or where I needed to be.

Still, I see only dimly the demons that haunted my father. And I choose to stay away. I know that even if I were to see him I could never get what I truly want--memories of a man teaching me about life. As an adult, I miss not my father but the idea of a father--a man who has known me all my life, a man who is older and wiser, who can help me to live. My father will never be that man. Though I do not see him, I have few regrets because I tried so hard to make peace with him. Sitting across from me at the kitchen table, he too sought to make peace. Though we failed, I am sure that in his way he loved me.

There can be tremendous sadness in the stories men tell about their fathers, including my own. The man who gave us life, the man we knew most intimately, failed us. If I do not say I love my father now, that is because I don’t know how to love someone and reject him, to know he betrayed me and to forgive, all at once.

THE ULTIMATE MEASURE of a man’s rebellion, I believe, is how he treats his own children. “Will my children feel toward me as I did toward Father, and he toward (his own father)?” Adam Hochschild asks in “Half the Way Home.” “Or have I broken that chain at last?” John Robbins uses the identical metaphor, of breaking a chain.

Becoming a father is always a leap of imagination and faith, but these men--and I--must cross a more dangerous chasm. As philosophy, the teen-ager’s expression of frustration and rage--my promise to be different from my father--is useless, for it does not help me live my life. To say what I am not hardly helps me understand who I am or want to be. It is like trying to paint a portrait by looking at a shadow. I cannot mend my image of a father.

Robbins describes his son, who is now a teen-ager, as his “best friend.” Hochschild has sought to cultivate a relaxed, informal relationship with his sons that is the antithesis of his relationship with his father. Velasquez, who is divorced, seldom sees his son.

Bliss chose not to make the leap. Among many reasons, he tells me, was a fear of “not knowing how to father, and not being a good father, not having good background and preparation.” It is, however, an explicit concern of his work in the men’s movement. “We’ll fashion a different kind of father,” he vows. “We’ll fashion a father that is vital, strong, clear, disciplined, but also tender with his children.”

To be this kind of father, I think, requires a different kind of love, for our fathers’ love was conditional, predicated on satisfying his expectations. “I had a great relationship with my dad,” Velasquez says, “when I did everything he wanted me to do.”

Horowitz had vowed not to feel threatened by his children’s rebellion. For him, their adolescence was a crucible. “I let them ventilate their anger,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to let them discover if what I’m saying is right--if my views are right, they’ll discover that in the world.’ I didn’t feel the need to exert all my parental powers to squelch their independence.”

But Horowitz did not leave them alone. “You have a responsibility as a parent,” he says. “It’s what I expected, it’s what I wanted from my father--a kind of guidance.”

MY CHILD, MOLLY ROSE, WAS born in September. Rose is my mother’s middle name.

At her birth, I carried her to the door of the delivery room, swaddled in blankets, to show her the world. I imagined doing this on a grander scale--taking her for bicycle rides, teaching her to read and to shoot a basketball, answering her ceaseless questions.

At home I stared into Molly’s eyes, which are large and expressive, a deep blue. My eyes are brown; Molly’s are her mother’s eyes, they are my father’s eyes. They are an underground stream that flowed through me and then emerged.

Alone with Molly in her room during the first week of her life, I sat holding her in a rocking chair, stroking the soft skin of her neck. She was so helpless yet so full of potential. I could not help but wonder about my father. Did he ever hold me and my brothers like this, in the first few days of our lives? Having done so, could I ever mistreat Molly, could I leave her?

At least four evenings a week, while my wife works, I put Molly Rose to bed. When she was 2 months old, I began a nightly ritual. I played a tape of lullabies and dimmed the lights, then carried her around her room to say good night to the giant felt animals on the walls: a monkey, a giraffe, a flying fish, a butterfly. I would turn off the light, lay her down, kiss her. And I would say, “Daddy loves you.”

My voice was like a deep bronze bell or a tuning fork, clear and unambiguous and true. Long before Molly recognized me, long before she understood words or even her name (and long before I was accustomed to being a father), my words calmed her. Like a lie detector, I imagined, she sensed the conviction in my voice. I realized that she will help me learn to be a father.