My father isn’t a big man.
At his peak, he fell just shy of six feet; the passing of time has made that but a memory.
How strong winds don’t blow him over is beyond me.
But the shadow he casts belies his physical size.
He possesses an outsized intellect that has created outsized accomplishments that have impacted the world.
His shadow is long, and it is dark.
And for most of my life, I’ve stood in it.
The shadow was created in 2 stages by 2 parties.
I, as many little boys do, idolized my father.
And as such, I put him on a pedestal.
Completely unaware at 5, 6, and 7 years old that by placing him on a pedestal in the sun, it had no choice but to cast a shadow.
He, whether consciously or unconsciously, kept me in that shadow.
Comments, some purposeful, some perhaps inadvertent, reminding me that I’d never stand atop his pedestal.
Consistent reminders that my best wasn’t good enough.
Anything less than perfection was a failure.
My ideas were never good enough.
All resulting in the belief that I wasn’t enough and I’d never be worthy.
Together we worked in silent complicity to maintain the shadow. I trusted him, and I trusted the process.
Following the unwritten and rarely challenged hierarchy of the father/son dynamic.
In Roman mythology, Saturn was the god of time, generation, dissolution, abundance, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal, and liberation.
He’s also the god who ate his children to prevent them from usurping his power.
This myth is captured in the savage yet stunning “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco de Goya.
I struggle with the painting because my father never possessed the psychotic rage Goya depicted.
My father rarely raised his voice.
He didn’t have to.
His soft-spoken words were wielded like a surgeon’s scalpel, extracting my self-worth and widening my inadequacy.
Goya’s work strikes a painful blow at the little boy who lives within me.
Whether he did this to hurt or to help, to protect or to serve, I don’t know.
I only know how cold it was in the shadow. I only know how inferior I felt and longed for the sun.
Every so often, I’d encroach on the line delineating light and dark, and every time I’d be reminded about what lay on the other side.
It wasn’t for me.
It was for “them.”
It was for him.
“Who did I think I was?”
The shadow may have been cold, but I found warmth in its familiarity.
Believing the unwritten rules and acquiescing to the beliefs.
I learned to settle for just enough to meet my level of inadequacy.
Going to prison and losing almost everything could have reinforced the paradigm.
But it didn’t.
I was no longer a prisoner to the old blueprint, his blueprint.
The paradigm had been destroyed.
Something I’ve learned:
I didn’t have to blow up my life to escape the shadow.
All I had to do was question the beliefs I bought at face value.
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