TOM: How do you think your father felt about what the ideal was for a man dealing with his children?
DAD: I don’t know if he had a conscious sense of “this is what I ought to be trying to do as a father.” What I experienced was a remoteness, a lack of intimacy, a lack of physical interaction, some standards of propriety, some sense of right and wrong about things certainly—but it really was about withholding emotional connection, except when he cut loose with abrupt anger. That was the one emotion that would show. Obviously, it was not a very welcome one because it would come out quickly and abruptly and sometimes quite unexpectedly and I was very upset by that, particularly when the anger was at my mother. What partly defined my sense of being a husband and father was realizing, as I got to the point where I was going to be married and then to have my own kids, that there was a model in my own father, which was absolutely not the one I wanted to follow.
Now, I may be very unfair—not unfair to say that he was emotionally withholding—but there were aspects of kindness and care and consideration and working hard to provide an income for the family, but part of what you probably remember was my determined effort to say: I’m going to play with my kids, my sons. I’m going to wrestle with them. I’m going to be part of their lives in a physical way and in a sharing way. That is not what I got from my father and I tried to not to be the angry, barking, explode-at some-point figure if I could help it.
TOM: Do you think your dad was depressed? In looking back on it, it seems to me like he had some set of demons or whatever that had him stifled.
DAD: I think that’s likely. I don’t have any way to gauge fully. Quite late, partly after a Robert Bly weekend and the encouragement of Bly to the group of people who were gathered to go to talk to your old man before it’s too late, I went and had two full conversations with my father ranging back about his childhood and got some better sense of what it was for him to be growing up and what his father was like, because I never knew his father really. He died when I was about five. So I have a visual image of my grandfather, but nothing that I could fill out a sense of how he dealt with kids, how my dad had been fathered in turn.
My father was very private and interior about the things that he felt most intensely about and I think that most of them were pretty dark; the later stages of his life were discouraging or depressing. There wasn’t much joyfulness. He would take pleasure in certain simple things—watching a good soccer game or going back to Princeton. Those were positives, but I think he felt he was in a pretty bleak place in the later years.
Next: Civil Disobedience
Hi, Tom-
I took a couple of courses with your dad at Cornell in spring and fall of 1970 (so he was not at U Mass then). He was a wonderful lecturer and one of the teachers I admired most at Cornell. He definitely influenced my views on race. He was also a tough grader, which did not help my GPA at all, but it was worth it. I was interested and pleased to hear of the direction his life took and that he is alive and well in beautiful Rockport, Maine.
Tom, It took me a couple year’s after my Father Passed away in September of 1999, to understand who he was but more importantly The man I thought I had to be… I think our Fathers, seem so Hero like as children in our eye’s! As we age and mature, They have exspectation’s and we tend to think or believe what they want for us, is Not in our plan’s. So we fighnt it every step along the way. Tom, My Dad many times through out my childhood made me feel WEAK and Unexcepted! Growing up My eye’s saw his… Read more »
What an interesting guy your dad is, Tom!.
One of the striking things that comes through this conversation is that despite your returning to the father/son theme over and over, in so many instances that you and your dad address the fathers were not present, or the men were not in family situations etc. Makes it clear how major a shift your generation is in the midst of, and how timely your focus is!
Thanks for showing open interest in your son’s cause, Jean Matlack, in your comment here and your own interview in May. Discovering his TGMP work is one of the best things that’s happened for me in the past few months. It does my heart good to see Tom honoring his father and mother while finding his own way!
Excellent interview, Tom. I am very glad that you were able to sit down and connect with your father like this. As much as we think we know our dads at times, there is always more to the story—small (or in your case, large) details that would have gone otherwise untold unless you spend quality talk time.
I enjoyed this. You both are good men.