cycles of mercy

Leafing through photos of my Dad on what would have been his 81st birthday, I'm struck by how present he was with his young children. 

Here he is blowing out birthday candles, there boxing, over in that country introducing us to sea cucumbers and sashimi, back in this country playing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to us on his guitar.

I never knew until TODAY that Pete Seeger wrote and sang Little Boxes.

And then he disappears from the photos. In 1976 we moved from Santa Cruz, CA, land of north coast freedom, to Escondido, CA, land of semi-desert suburbia. He drove away each Monday morning on a one-hour commute to Camp Fox, San Diego County Dept of Education, where he directed everything from programming to breakfast to cabin cleaning to county administration. He returned each Friday, but those empty 5 of 7 days widened the cracks.

He returned to family photos toward the end of the 80's, resolutely joined them in the 90's, and even created them in the aughts.

Perhaps he decided cameras were not necessary to life in 1976. 

He longed to live ideally. He decided once that our family of six would eat mainly potatoes - at every meal - because they theoretically hold all the nutrients we need. (And they are very cheap - he sustained that young family on a 1960's teacher's salary.)

More likely his disappearance is a reflection of the family disintegration appearing in 1976.

Perhaps idealism was involved after all. Dad seemed to truly hope for a saving- the perfect - philosophy and a system born from it - an effect of growing up Catholic? He was searching for it still until he could not. The "experts" said, in the 1960's, that if children felt loved and secure by the time they were three years old, they could pretty much handle anything. They were still saying it in the 1990's. He seemed to have also assumed his marriage was strong enough to withstand his 70% absence. Which it was not, to his, and all of our, heartbreak.

He had little choice in those 1980's, and so we saw little of him. As he lived with himself, learning himself, we began to see him more. 

By the 90's, we now-adult children felt the missing piece slide back into place. 

By the 2000's, he was part of us, redemptively and proactively, until we lost him again in
2007. This loss was as heartbreaking as the first, with no restoration in sight except as we all learn to live with it as we are able.

My siblings and I had always wanted more of him than we had (except in the brains-on-hormones teen years), and how glad I am that he found mercy from his children. Mercy is hard and frightening, and it brings tenderness where flint could be.

How is it that we try so hard to not repeat our parents' mistakes, yet sometimes we do in ways we don't recognize until it is too late? I look back and see how I believed the experts as well, the ways I disappeared from my own children's lives at points, and my heart breaks again.

How is it that our children keep choosing between dismissal and mercy, and that my own children choose mercy? They welcome me and invite me, a truly overwhelming gift. I am tentative to step in, knowing the reality that as we move closer any hurts are more painful. And I choose the scary tenderness over a hard heart that doesn't truly protect.

Mercy.