Clearing The Air

Clearing the Air
November 1999

The other night I blew up at my step daughter. Why I've decided to call her my "step-daughter" in this piece will be clear later. The trigger for my blow up was totally inappropriate on my part and isn't worth mentioning. I'll just say there was a trigger, a "cause" that pushed me over the edge and moved me right in to the REAL energy that carried the blowing up material.

What followed the triggering event was her putting on her attitude. You know about teen age attitude right? I don't think it's any different in females or males and it's the very same one you and I exhibited when we were teens. It's that nasty, who-needs-you stuff combined with the narcissistic notion of
entitlement. A very bad combination guaranteed to escalate any situation. So, of course, I bit.

She stomped out of the house, I withdrew to my office and we both fumed. She, over the unfairness of the triggering event. Me, over her attitude. Add to that the underlying "stuff". It took a full day of ranting to myself and my wife to discover what it was.

In other words, I had to bring up all the junk that was in the way to get down to the cellar where the cesspool lay. It was about resentment. This resentment was linked up to and stimulated by the attitude thing. It had to do with how I felt I was being treated as a father. I was hurt and pissed off and had been for the whole seven years we had been together in this relationship and I really hadn't known it. It had been an unconscious and suppressed response to being treated as though I had to always get it right (fathering) and could never really measure up anyway. Not because I was being compared to a living model who WAS measuring up, but because I was being lumped in with a fantasy model who didn't even come close.

It's roots were nurtured by the idea that all men are no good so-and-sos because the first man, her biological father, was, and is, exactly that.

The way this was lived out in everyday life over the seven years of our being in this stumbling dance was that I would make an advance to get close and she would not respond. There was no overt hostility in the air, just a kind of tolerance. The same kind of response one gets from a waitress or a waiter after a less than adequate tip. I figured that since I was the stepfather, the faux father, in this situation I just had to wait her out and then, over time, she would see that I really was an ok guy and she could let herself get closer.

But it wasn't happening. The dynamic was frozen; I kept waiting and so would she. I was waiting for approval, she was waiting for me to prove something.

She was gone all that day to a friends house and so I rehearsed just exactly what I really wanted to say to her. What I whittled it down to was that I wanted her to say she was sorry just once. My reasoning was that she had never initiated, in all the time we'd been together, a simple; "I'm sorry." for any upheaval between us without my having either; 1. Insisted or,
2. Apologized first and then coaxed out a reciprocal apology.

That night when she walked in the door of our bedroom where I was watching TV I unloaded. She, totally confused, after all, she had not been a part of any of my process throughout the day, began to cry. In the midst of my speech I found that what was coming out of me was a hundred pounds of resentment over being treated like a second class also- ran while she spent her emotional energy still trying to win the approval of a distant drunk who could care less about her well being. What was surprising to me was that by the end of my tirade, she was still sitting on the edge of the bed sobbing and had not, following the usual pattern, stomped out. I told her all of it. How I felt I was in competition with a ghost, how I felt ignored, how I felt I meant less to her than her fantasy father. Etc.

Once I had emptied out the resentments, my compassion became engaged. But I also wanted something to change. "I will feed you a line and you can decide to use it or not; 'Let's work this thing out.'" I said softly. No response.

Time passed. Ten, fifteen minutes. Then from under her hair came a plaintive; "I'm sorry."

Well; everything melted in me of course. We hugged and cried and began to talk REAL talk. I told her I wanted to be a real father to her not just a shadow. She said that was what she wanted too. I said I wanted her to be a real daughter to me not a "step" anything. More tears and hugging...and, wonder of wonders; eye contact!

So it was all worth it; as usual. The anger, the blow-up, the
confrontation, all of it. All the stuff I usually avoid and thus miss the treasures of as well.

That night I had a dream. In it I was standing on a balcony and looking down at a crowd of people. Someone in the crowd was lecturing. The sky was gray and there were three trees that stood in the crowd that were withering and losing their leaves. The crowd began to leave the room and I called out to the people to wait as I rushed down to them. I caught about a third of them before they left the area and said; "All it takes is love!" and as I said that, I reached out to the withered trees and they began to grow again. The trees would only respond when I felt this movement of energy, a flow of feeling inside me that I knew was love. And I knew that only by allowing that flow could there be a genuine healing.

In my world we call this a Medicine Dream. A dream that heals. Now it is time to awaken that dream into my life and keep it alive. May this little tale of truth awaken one in you

Dick Prosapio ©1999

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