True Grit

This weekend, I spent a night with my parents, who are now in their mid-70s and living in a retirement village about an hour from us. My kids had gone to visit their dad and I had a sudden yen to go hang out with the old folks back home :-) I also wanted to bring them up to date on my plans for next year and its much easier to talk big things through face-to-face rather than over the phone.

And it's funny - you think you know all there is to know about your parents and then suddenly, you learn something new. Sunday morning, mom and I were talking about the past, and how we as a family nearly emigrated to Australia in 1963, when I was five. I've always known the story, about how sailing was delayed so my dad had to take a temporary job. And about how we moved to a small village an hour outside of Cape Town while we waited for the three months to pass.

But what I hadn't known was that apparently my gran (his mum) was terribly, terribly unhappy about her only son going off to Oz. And my own mum was also terribly, terribly unhappy about moving to a foreign country with two small kids and a husband with a fondness for the bottle. They were all praying that the move wouldn't happen. So when sailing was delayed, and Dad had to take a temp job, granny and grandpa started driving an hour each way to visit us every Sunday. I'm guessing they all worked really hard to persuade my dad that emigration was a bad idea.

It worked. We never went. My dad worked for that same company (and that same shitty boss) until he took a medical retirement 14 years ago at 61.

The other thing is that in his 20s, my dad was an alcoholic. He always said that when he became a Christian, God set him free from drink. But listening to my mom talk last Sunday morning, I realized it wasn't quite as simple as that.

Those first years in that lousy job must have been difficult. I'm saying this because mom told me that in those days he drank a lot. Vodka in the morning, brandy at night. Looking back now, I wonder how much of that drinking resulted from the fact that his dream had been taken away from him - no moving to Australia, no chance to do whatever it was he might have dreamed of doing over there. Instead, he found himself counting beans for a large agricultural company, working for the boss from hell, in a country town far from anywhere, with a wife and two little girls to support. Maybe he gave up, gave in to the pressure to stay in SA, pressure applied very lovingly by his own mother, father and wife. And for a man who was used to finding solace in the bottle, well - is it any surprise that he started binge-drinking again?

He also had regular attacks of the so-called Monday Morning Flu. One day, in desperation, my mom called the doctor. He came in after evening surgery. Mom was putting us kids to bed and she pointed listlessly at the bedroom, saying 'He's in there...'. The doc knew them both well and he knew what was up. That night, he put the writing on the wall for my dad. Told him that if he kept on boozing, not only would he destroy his family but he'd also probably kill himself as his liver was taking severe strain.

And my dad heard him. He stopped drinking. Just like that. Then and there. Apparently, he had one more bender in Dec of that year, but after that nothing. Mom said those early weeks and months of sobriety were hell - he eschewed any form of help, refused AA, refused counselling, refused medication. And to this day, he doesn't touch alcohol.

Now that is pretty damn amazing, I think. But the point here is that he did it alone, by sheer will power and determination. At this point, 'God' had nothing to do with it, at least from his perspective. My mum had started going to church by then, but my dad, a 'back-slidden' Christian, wanted nothing to do with it. As the years went by, he slowly started a spiritual journey of his own - reading books (including The Christian Agnostic by L D Weatherhead) and listening to church on the radio in the dark - which culminated in his eventual return to faith, some time after the birth of my youngest brother in 1969.

Later on Sunday morning, mom came to me and hugged me. "I know I talked a lot about dad and our troubles this morning," she said. "But one thing you must know is that throughout it all, we both loved our kids above everything else. You were the ones who mattered."

That story changed my mental picture of my dad a bit, not that it was a bad one to start with. Quite the contrary, in fact. And it inspires me. I may look like my mom and I share her loony sense of humor, but generally I'm a lot more like my dad - logical, analytical, intellectual, etc. And then of course there are the not-so-good traits we share, but lets not go there now. And given that no family is perfect, there are, of course, 'Issues' on all sides, some of which I know I still have to deal with.

But still. I'm proud of him. I'm proud of his grit and determination. And I'm proud to be his daughter.