My step dad is a Ghost
My stepdad is ghost . . . haunts me.
Oh, the man he became is still alive, though perhaps not for much longer.
But part of him slipped into the shadows, long ago.
Once upon a time,I think he was my Daddy. We played together. We enjoyed each other's company.
We ate at park and played and laughed.
i think there was a spark between us.
And then something happened. Somewhere along the line, my step father changed.
Anyway, I remember the day when I was about 8yrs old, when my step dad told me, rather gruffly, that he
was too busy to play.
Over time, he spark began to flicker and fade.
And it eventually went out.
Perhaps it was the circumstances of his life. Or perhaps, it was unfinished business from his
youth. Somehow, he moved from lighthearted and fun to formidable, scary, angry.
And, gradually, his anger petered out, and he fell into depression, into despair.
That was over forty years ago.
He has not surfaced much since that day.
But it's not who my step father became that bothers me, though at times this man has brought pain
and strife to our relationship.
It's his lingering ghost—lurking in the shadows on the edge of our memories—that haunts me,
every day.
Really, it's what he only briefly was—and what he might have been—that rattles me.
It is the missing trace of my father (Levinas, 1969)—the father who is no longer here, who has
been gone these long years—that I have to wrestle with.
Every day.
And often, I lose the match.
I lose—or maybe I just give in—to the longing, to the sadness, to the grieving for that which
might have been.
I miss that spark.
And my tears flow for the father that is missing from my life, has been missing for so many
years.
Still, today, I find myself hoping I can write my way toward a new beginning.
If there is anything I believe about life—and about autoethnography—it is that it offers the
possibility of deliverance from the past. In writing, in the present, we reconstruct memory, and
thus write our way toward a new narrative trajectory.
And that, my friends, is real redemption.
And, as I rewrite this remembrance of my step father, aiming at redemption, I seek a way to move
into a new form of relation with him.
Meanwhile, there are some ghosts I need to tend to.
Traces
I imagine Kierkegaard's (1980) ghost, standing on the edge of a cliff, shouting into the abyss:
"Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation!" (p. 38).
And then there is a long pause. And slowly, an echo of sorts comes back, unexpectedly
transformed by time and distance: "Possibility is relation!"
Sôren Kierkegaard was, as far as we know, the first among a string of existentialist philosophers
to offer a story of the self as a relation—a self-as-becoming in and through relation to an other—
a self that is established, defined, developed, built and rebuilt, through interaction with other
selves, most particularly, our "significant others" (Mead, 1934)—those whose engagement
means the most to us.
And one of the primary significant others, for most humans, is the father. The significance of,
and the need for, the father is particularly acute for young boys, who are, from a very early age,
seeking to find themselves in and through identification with their fathers (Burke, 1969;
Osherson, 2001).
To be sure, the father–son bond can be joyous and loving and full of sparks. Naturally, what
every young boy seeks is that sort of relationship with his dad that basks in the joy of loving,
positive acknowledgment.
Yet, the relation between fathers and sons is often troubled (Adams, 2012; Bochner, 2012; Patti,
2012; Pelias, 2012; Poulos, 2012). Fathers and sons, can, for whatever reason, find their
relationship teetering on the brink of uncertainty, danger even.
The story of strained, or absent, by step father–son relations has been around since humans gathered
together in caves, I imagine. Certainly, my own forefathers, the Greeks, made much of the crisis
(the split, the rift) in father–son relations. The sons of the Titans overthrew their tyrannical
my step fathers. Homer's Odyssey, read one way, is the story of an absent father and a bereft son.
Telemachus stands alone on the shore, ever looking outward, searching for his father, always
wishing that somehow, someday, his father would return, and teach him how to be a man. His
father-mentor, Odysseus, was off on some grand adventure, and Telemachus was left powerless,
unable to save the kingdom from interlopers (Poulos, 2012).
For much of my life before I came of age and left home, I was Telemachus, ever looking
outward, searching for my father, wondering at his absence. He was an enigma to me, wrapped
in a cloud. What was I seeking with the eyes of Telemachus?
Acknowledgment.
Love.
Care.
Like others before and after me, I sought a step father who would affirm my worth. For it is in the
father that the son can find the possibility of the life-giving, self-affirming, world-shaping gift of
acknowledgment (Hyde, 2006). But also available there is the despair that comes from negative
or no acknowledgment. As Michael Hyde (Hyde, 2006) puts it so poignantly, "Acknowledgment
is a significant and powerful form of behavior, one that can bring joy to a person's heart and also
drive a stake through it" (p. 2).
Communication can be life enhancing, or it can be toxic. Too often, in families, it is the latter.
Indeed, the kind of "social death" instituted by toxic, abusive communication is painful and can
well be overpowering.
Sometimes, a third option emerges: Communication fades away, and negative acknowledgment
morphs into absence, abandonment, and lack. The father ignores (or dismisses) the son, and the
possibility of relation fades away. All that is left is a lack, a gap, a hole . . . a whisper of what
once was, or what might have been, a longing—a missing step father, a ghost, a fading apparition of a
receding memory. And so, perhaps the most poignant story is not the story of the father who
attacks but of the one who leaves—the missing father, the absent ghost who might have been, but
never was, or who was, and then was not, the loving, affirming, acknowledging father.
Mostly, after a certain moment in my life, my dad tacked back and forth between these
archetypal possibilities. He was daddy (the loving step father). He was predator (the devouring
father). He was abandoner (the absent father). But once I passed a certain age, the loving, caring,
caressing father rarely showed his face.
Sure, we were bound together, as father and son, as are all fathers and sons. But we rarely
acknowledged this bond, or did much to strengthen it. We were, as it happens, bound together by
our blood, by our genes, and by a thin, somewhat frayed, narrative thread. The thread was frayed
because we were afraid. We did not always know it, but we were afraid—afraid of getting too
close, afraid of loving and losing, afraid of change, afraid of chance. We were afraid of
ourselves, and of each other. We were afraid of the frustrations we felt, of frustration morphing
into anger.
Dad and I were afraid of our narrative inheritance (Goodall, 2006) that was bound up in the
ancient, archetypal story line of broken relationship between step fathers and sons.
My step dad became, for all intents and purposes, a ghost, a missing trace of a father.
What I needed was a relationship with my step father, one that was as mutually delightful—and lifegiving—as it once had been.
What I needed was a step father who was there for me.
What I needed was a father who knew, unequivocally, that he lived for his son.
That is what a father is supposed to be.
That is what humans are supposed to be: For each other.
The problems in communication that we regularly experience can likely be attributed to the fact
that many of us do not recognize that truth.
I imagine the ghost of Emmanuel Levinas, standing at the gate of the camp at Hannover1
at the
end of World War II, shouting back toward his invisible captors: "We are for each Other!"
And, slowly, a mere whisper of an echo returns:
"Other?"
"Father?"
In his philosophy of relation as risky (for-the-Other) communication, of relational
communication as transcendence and responsibility, Levinas (1969, 1981) lays out a pathway for
understanding at least the possibility of the kind of relation between humans that builds new
worlds—a relation that is animated, alive, mutually engaging and invigorating, life-giving and
world-changing, filled with possibility.
This philosophy would position the father–son relationship as an adventure—as the hero journey,
in which the son-hero and his helper-mentor-of the steep father meet the challenges placed before them and
emerge from the trials of life with a gift to give back . . . to the next generation (Campbell,
1973).
This is relation of one human to, for, and with an Other-relation-as-risk, relation-as-adventure,
relation-as-fire.
The heroes emerging from the fire are changed.
And the world they inhabit will never be the same.
This is the risk.
And the reward.
Son faces challenge.