In elementary school, friends would complain, “My father would ground me for a week if I did that!” or they’d explain dolefully through a screen door, “Can’t play. Restricted.”
And I’d wander home envious.
I rarely had a reason to start a sentence with “father” and was only punished in somewhat rare bursts of corporal application. In part because I wasn’t a troublemaker but also because no one was paying attention– although once my exasperated mother tied me to my sister because we were fighting so much. Encouraging a truce through forced proximity.
The primary discipline was expectation. That you would get good grades, put your bike away, and dry the dishes was assumed. But expectation is a passive restraint. So, lacking parental rules, I tried to discipline myself. To be my own parent. I made up chore lists and gave myself stars if I completed them, which I rarely did.
Okay, never did.
I also put things on the list that I would do anyway, like feed the cat. (Miss you, Mitty.) But I could check these off and reward myself with one of those five-point gold stars teachers put on math quizzes. There is a lot of security, it turns out, in structure.
My two older sisters knew our parents were having a tough time in their marriage so one day, they suggested we help them out by taking over disciplining ourselves. I liked this idea because (I did not see where this was going) and I craved discipline. But when your siblings are 5 and 8 years older, you are not on the disciplinary committee, as super fun as that sounds. You are the defendant.
I was told to crawl into the upstairs storage closet under the eaves, and the dismantled side of my old crib was propped over the opening. I think my crime was having left the water running in the bathroom. Things happen! You get distracted!
It was stifling in the closet as I stared out between the bars, and I was afraid there was a wasp’s nest in the dark back recesses where the eave sloped down. This house had, after all, recently been a barn, and our bedrooms were in what had been the hayloft—but I was denied parole. My sisters were affable jailers, of course, and I could have simply moved the bars and walked out, but that was not the reality we had agreed to or the one I live by now.
This was to become, I believe, a paradigm for my life and maybe yours. All my imprisonments are self-imposed. The unrelenting remorse. The tenderizing grief. The constant comparing of myself and my life to others and finding myself lacking. I sign up for workshops online that I think will heal this habit from sites like “Wisdom for Life” — classes like “Healing Trauma with Compassion” and “The Rewiring Your Brain World Summit.” Then I forget to attend or can’t spare the time. Or let’s face it, I opt out for the more imperative “How the Cosmos Will End.”
Some things are hard to believe, but keep an open mind because, as George Bernard Shaw said, “All great truths start as blasphemies.” Or, I’d add, as experiences. A gifted Intuitive once shared quite matter of factly that the spirit of my long-dead father had entered the room. He confided things about our relationship no one could know and apologized for his role in my emptiness. He had grown in spirit, was working hard at becoming a better …dad, human being, higher consciousness… whatever it is we become after we die.
Which I suspect is just us minus matter.
Since I couldn’t see him, I said, “Does Dad have any signs he uses to communicate with me?” I was hoping for direct access. A way to feel my dad’s presence without third-party interpretation.
“Gold stars,” was the reply. “He says he communicates with you with five-point gold stars.” I was disappointed. There is so much ambient light in my town, I barely see the stars and I hadn’t seen any in recent memory.
The next morning, after my quiet time, where I try to be available for a connection with love’s energy, my attention was drawn to a small cabinet my father had made as a school woodworking project when he was 14.
It is about a foot high, with a hinged-lid compartment on top that opens above two doors and a drawer below that. It hung on the wall of the breakfast room at Barnstead. Mom kept letters and stamps in it, and for a long time it housed a couple of arrowheads we’d found along the barn’s foundation. I’d looked in that cabinet many times with the idea I might paint it someday. But this day, on impulse, I opened it again.
Scattered inside were three 5-point gold stars. The kind a child might receive for a job well done. The kind you might give yourself for having done the best you could.
But that is not the end of this story. The end is this: I tucked the earliest photo I have of my father and me upright in the cabinet behind the little doors and stowed it on the highest shelf of my closet. He’s a 35-year-old father of three in that picture, and I’m a six-month-old baby, listening attentively in my white bassinet as he sings to me and plays his guitar.
The other day, I was feeling down. I went into my closet to find my running shoes, thinking, sure would be nice to feel like I wasn’t in this alone. And I looked up on the highest shelf, where the little cabinet with its photograph has been stowed for years, and the doors were wide open, the photograph just where I’d left it.
And Dad was singing to me.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.