a kind of grief

[brainwane]

I wish I could go back in time and tell my dad:


If you are capriciously angry, sometimes yelling, you will raise at least one child who has an incredibly hard time dealing with her own or others' anger.

If you sometimes punish your children for their bug reports, you will raise at least one child who dreads telling you when something is wrong.


Realization stimulated by reading a bunch of hilarious and often heartwarming family stories, e.g., on togetherness and "Literally nobody in my house yelled. Ever. It was a rule." which is mindboggling.

(My father died in 2010.)

Comments

[ivy]

Lots of sympathy. Hugs if you want them.

[phi]

I'm sorry. It sounds like our fathers are/were very similar.

(Also those stories you linked are hilarious and adorable and also make me slightly sad.)

[rachelmanija]

My Dad was like that. I don't have issues with anger per se but it did lead to me not telling him anything ever unless I absolutely had to, a policy which I extend to unreasonable people in general.

[boxofdelights]

My dad brought home one of those Children Learn What They Live posters, and my mom put it up in the kitchen, but my dad couldn't seem to use that insight to alter his own behavior.

[sasha_feather]

<3

[ndrosen]

“Capriciously angry, sometimes yelling [and sometimes hitting]” describes my father. I would not precisely describe myself as having an incredibly hard time dealing with my own or other people’s anger, but I certainly have a considerable capacity for anger, and had a greater propensity for it in my younger days. That, however, may be largely a matter of membership in the messed-up human race.

And yet, my father did have his virtues, and did genuinely care for me and try to do what was right for me, even if I did not sufficiently appreciate this when I was sixteen years old, and he was throwing a screaming tantrum, and threatening to kick me out of the house (in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language), all because my younger brother had broken my watch.

[jesse_the_k]

Profound insight, I wish it was easier.

[lilysea]

If you are capriciously angry, sometimes yelling, you will raise at least one child who has an incredibly hard time dealing with her own or others' anger.

*solidarity*

Both my parents yelled, and my father was capable of INCREDIBLE physical violence, and I relate to this so hard.

[lilysea]

If you sometimes punish your children for their bug reports, you will raise at least one child who dreads telling you when something is wrong.

I was once, as a teenager, a passenger in a serious car accident that possibly could have been averted had (justified) fear of my father's anger not caused me to hesitate for a moment to tell him that he was doing an unsafe driving thing and that he was pulling out into oncoming traffic without adequate visibility (he only has one eye.)