Percolated Bias

By Tara Cohen

I talk about sex. I talk about politics. I talk about religion. I talk about race relations, health care, family dynamics, social networking, autism, aerobics, child birth, breast feeding, diaper rashes, potty training, and baby snot. I talk about vaccines and cloth diapers, computers and blogging, insurance and therapy. I have weight issues, food issues, and volume issues. I am tough to embarrass, easy to wind up, and hard to shut up. So when I start talking about colorectal surgery, it’s safe to say that the couple at the next table is officially done eating. Now.

And that’s exactly where I found myself earlier this week: two chocolate martinis into a girls’ night at a local restaurant, discussing the not-so-finer points of pregnancy-related hemorrhoids. Given the inverse relationship between my ability to keep my voice down and the number of drinks I’ve had, it’s safe to say that any teenager within 30 feet received the absolute best possible dose of reality-based contraceptives money can’t buy.

As the topic morphed from pregnancy and childbirth to family dynamics and in-laws, almost everyone had a story to share: In-laws who show up with no notice, adult siblings who ignore their own kids, manipulative mothers, parents who don’t make time for the grandkids. I was struck by the realization that there was a single common message all of these women wished they could get across to some family member or another: This is not about you. And this made me think of my father. Cue flashback…

I failed my Driver’s Permit test the first time. By one point. I reacted much as one would expect from any healthy, well-adjusted, typical 15-year-old girl: with utter devastation and certainty that no such injustice had befallen anyone, ever, in the history of humankind. I was crushed that I would have to wait yet another month before learning to drive, incredibly disappointed in myself for having failed, and mortified that all my friends knew I’d gone to the DMV and would be asking about it the next day at school. I went across the street to my boyfriend’s house to commiserate. He and his mom reassured me that I would eventually get my Permit, that this was a temporary setback, and that it happened to a lot of people. Though grateful for their love and support, I was, after all, a teenager. I had an inherent, hormonal need to mope. So I headed home and slumped upstairs to sulk, turning up Morrisey or The Smiths or whatever other maudlin mood de-hancer I could find in my mix-tape cassette collection.

Now, for me, time is both a magnifying glass and a fun-house mirror. While some events fall into sharper relief over the years, others are distorted, twisted, and bent to the will of memory, viewed through percolated bias. The majority of my life is documented in the cerebral equivalent a dollar-store paint-by-numbers book, narrated on a dubbed-over cassette tape. For the moments of greatest emotion and consequence, however, my grey matter has its own digital widescreen home theater on which to play its hi-def-and-surround-sound-mental-blu-rays.

Earning my Driver’s Permit was beyond important to me at 15. But in the grand scheme of my life, particularly once I had my actual license (the test for which I passed on the first try, thankyouverymuch), having failed my Permit test was rather insignificant. I would likely not even recall it, given my abysmal memory, but something happened after I failed that test to make my brain jump into hi-tech gear and record every moment of the aftermath. Because truly, the moments that shape life are not, in and of themselves, always single, significant instances. Often what matters most are the consequences, the “now what?” minutes and hours and days trailing behind our personal miracles and catastrophes and moments of bliss. So I remember failing my Driver’s Permit test not because it was truly such a life-altering event, but because of the fallout that followed.

Having holed up in my own personal pit of despair, I brooded disproportionately, quite sure that I had suffered a tremendous indignity and most unwilling to discuss it. Had nothing happened after my little mope-fest, I probably wouldn’t even recall having failed that test. But something made me remember. And it came in the form of my father entering the room.

In the CBS-After-School-Special version of my life, my dad walked in and sat on the end of my bed, encouraging me to study hard and try again as soon as the rules allowed. He offered to quiz me and assured me that plenty of people fail Permit and License tests the first time and that it’s really not such a big deal. He told me he had faith I’d pass the next time and offered his help.

But my adolescence was more of a Lifetime Movie of the Week (only with cursing), so the encounter went more like this:

Him: (Arms crossed) Your mother told me you failed your Permit test.

Me: (Tearful) Yes.

Him: (Scowl) Well? What happened?

Me: (Head down) I missed it by one point.

Him: (Mounting anger) How could you get that many wrong? What the hell is wrong with you?

Me: (Trained silence)

Him: (Full-blown anger) Are you a complete idiot!? What’s the matter with you!? Does this mean every single person on the road is smarter than you!?

Now, by age 15, I had learned not to answer angry rhetoricals. It was best, I knew, to be repentant, visibly ashamed, and quiet, although that didn’t work well when the tirade was followed up by his trademark, “Heh?! Well?!” This just about never ended well. There was no right thing to say, just a range of wrong answers, some more likely to result in my phone being thrown across the room than others. I was, most unfortunately, never good at choosing one of the “righter” wrong answers.

After berating me for being such an incredible moron that I could not pass a simple DMV test, which, considering the vast numbers of idiots on the road, demonstrated my clear and undeniable mental inferiority, he paused. I dared to think for a second that he was done. But no. Then I got to hear about how my having sought comfort and support from someone outside the family was wrong, annoying, disrespectful, and obnoxious. Personally, I’d had no idea up to that point that we even were part of the Mafia, but apparently I was, yet again, wrong. Going outside the family was a massive betrayal, and, essentially I should have been so mortified at my incalculable failure and idiocy that I should have kept this horrendous offense to myself as opposed to embarrassing myself (and, by extension, my father) by letting anyone else know exactly how stupid I actually was.

At the time, I desperately sought to please my father, not because I thought he was right, but to avoid his vitriolic rants. As a teenager, I already saw that his temper was more about his issues than my own, but, particularly when I knew that he could also be so funny and reasonable, I simply could not understand why he was so irrationally angry so much of the time. And no matter how much I resented him and his somehow-simultaneously-childish-yet-narcissistic behavior, still, though I was loath to admit it, I yearned for his affection, approval, positive attention, and love.

But nothing I did seemed to merit the relationship I sought. Getting good grades while holding a part-time job was expected, not something praise-worthy. My dad let me know quite clearly that I was never pretty or smart or thin or industrious enough for him. Eventually, I rebelled against what I saw as the crushing oppression of my infinitely ill-treated free spirit by passive aggressively antagonizing my father, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, as so many teenagers are wont to do. This, of course, was fairly counter productive. And, to be fair, there were plenty of reasonable occasions for my father to be upset with me and my sometimes-way-too-sassy-eye-rolling-and-sighing-overly-put-upon little self without my adding any more attitude to the mix. I was really, really bad at hiding my feelings. I was also righteously indignant, prone to dramatics, and adolescently self-involved. Unfortunately, so was my father. This did not help our relationship. At all.

This is how I recall my adolescence. Something would happen. I would get upset because that’s what a teenage girl does when she’s still certain she’s the center of the universe. Then my dad would come in, assure me that not only was I not the center of the universe, I was not even the center of whatever had happened to get me so upset in the first place. And then, in an oddly ironic twist, he would find a way to make whatever had happened be all about him.

When I flip back through my mental photo albums, this is what I see. I wonder how much of my memory is viewed through my prejudicial filter, my emotional memory-editing software. I know life wasn’t always like that. My dad was actually a really funny guy when he wanted to be. He was incredibly smart and successful and respected by all the right people. And yet, when I look back on our relationship, even now (and maybe especially now) that he’s been gone for more than a decade, the bias I accumulated, the wall of resentment I stacked up over the years of being yelled at and threatened and squished down, it blurs the good times and makes those infinitely unfair moments stand out so sharply that I just wish just once I had been able to say, “This is not about you.”

This is all, of course, none of anyone’s business. My father was a fanatically private man. His personal business was just that: personal. And his dealings with me most certainly fell into that category. My father would be so outraged at my writing about our family that I cannot even begin to describe the litany of swear words he’d have strung together in order to form a verbal noose long enough to hang me with. The simple irony, of course, is that, had he ever treated me with anything close to loyalty or respect, perhaps I would still have some for him. As it is, he did not.

The truth is that my father died 11 years ago, and I don’t miss him. At all. Naturally, this does not make for good pass-the-turkey-and-low-cal-stuffing conversation, but then, I live pretty far from most of my family, so it’s not frequently an issue. My family and their feelings, however, are very much an issue. And, as such, I’ve long debated whether to write publicly about my father. My relationship with him was so pockmarked with the scars of my father’s errant rages and my adolescent responses to them that I was sure I couldn’t write fairly about him. Up to now, our relationship (or lack thereof) has been something that I’ve primarily shared only with those closest to me and my therapist-du-jour. But it’s finally been long enough for me to know with true certainty that my writing about my father is free of vindictiveness or malice or vengeance, which might have been the case in years past.

My father’s impact on my life, for better or worse, was so significant that it’s nearly impossible for me to open up completely about any issue that elicits true, visceral emotion without some flashback to my father and my youth. But being willing to talk about anything and everything with sincere, raw, naked-on-a-stage-in-the-spotlight emotional exposure means I cannot hold back. I can only be as accurate and honest as possible.

I bring myself, my life, my memories, my being, my all to my keyboard, and I pour out my personal truth. Sometimes my truth is grace and beauty and joy. Sometimes my truth is pain I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Sometimes my truth takes me back to my father. I know he wouldn’t like my truth, but it’s my truth. This is my life. These are my words. These memories, biased as they may be, are my memories. And whatever else my truth may be, it’s mine. And if my father were here, I could honestly and finally tell him: This is not about you.