My Father...Myself?

Had a dream about my father last night. This is not necessarily an uncommon occurrence; I seem to have one every few months. They generally revolve around the notion that he has somehow magically come back from the dead...or, that he never died in the first place. I'll go to visit my mother and there he'll be, like he never left, and I'm always shocked & horrified to discover him there. "But...but I SAW you, dead on the table! You CAN'T be here!" That's usually when I wake up, and like any nightmare I have to console myself with reality for a little while before I can nod back off to sleep: "Only a dream, only a dream..."

My dream last night didn't follow this script. Actually, I can't really remember much about it, and what could be WORSE than having to not only read about a dream on a blog, but to have that dream be only hazily remembered? Right: nothing. So let's just suffice it to say that my dad has been on my mind recently, both knocking around in my subconscious AND in my waking thoughts.

All the books I've been reading about fatherhood stress that men will inevitably reevaluate their OWN father/son relationships, looking for things that they want to emulate, or perhaps avoid at all costs. I can only nod sagely: "Yup." Almost from the moment Miss Tessmacher came out of the bathroom with a glistening pee-stick showing two blue lines and announced "This means I'm pregnant!", I've been thinking about the kind of dad I hope to be. And, of course, that means I want to be almost exactly the OPPOSITE of my father.

My relationship with my father is almost infinitely complicated...so much so that I hesitate to even begin trying to explain it, fearing that too much detail will dull the senses of even the most dedicated reader, and not ENOUGH detail will fill my story with unavoidable plot holes. Here, then, is the history of my dad in as condensed a form as I can make it:

Wendell Scott Honsinger was born at home (in the house my mother has occupied since 1986) in the mid-spring of 1929. (Yeah. I know. For those of you who are already counting, that makes him only two years YOUNGER than my maternal grandmother.) He was the second of 5 children, all of whom were born in that house...the third child died, leaving two older kids (my uncle Jim and my dad) and two younger (my uncle Lloyd and aunt Ruth). The farm in Vassar was a working dairy farm, and my dad grew up there in the shadow of W.W. II. He was a good-looking kid, flirtatious and a little bit of a scoundrel, and (apparently) was sometimes referred to as "Wendy-balls, man with the biggest tool in school!" A lifelong musician, he eschewed the more rough-&-tumble sports that his farm upbringing might suggest, instead singing in the school choir and playing the trombone. He graduated from Vassar High School in 1948 and went to Central Michigan to earn a bachelors degree in music.

By this time the Korean War was upon us, and dad enlisted in the Marines. He always evinced a strong pride at being a Marine, but I never really heard him talk about it...my understanding is that he was basically able to play in one of the bands during his service time. He had a wife named Marian, and two kids: Michael and Patricia. After his service was up he got a masters degree in music...largely through the aid of his paper-writing wife, if I understand things correctly. His first job was at a no-name school somewhere in the lower Thumb, and then he moved on to Millington...which is where my mother enters the picture.

My father the jar-head: early 1950's

See, dad had this thing for younger women (girls?). He focused on my mom, and there was something of a scandal...this was back in the day when the administration told him "You should quit...before we find a reason to fire you." So, under the same kind of twisted rule that kept moving Catholic priests around from parish to parish, my dad was allowed to silently slink away to another school, never having to really face the consequences of whatever dalliances he had with my teenaged mother. I think this is important, because if I really had to sum up my dad I'd say that he was a man who forever thought he wouldn't have to suffer consequences.

I also view my mother as innocent in all this, but understand that I have a hugely undeniable bias here, so I'm hardly an objective observer. Nevertheless, as the adult in the situation it fell to my FATHER to be the one to keep his pecker in his pants; failing that most basic task, my mother never really got over what should have been a simple student/teacher "crush." She continued to pursue my father, and - Surprise! - ended up pregnant in the fall of 1967. Letters from the time indicate that, when I was born the following summer, the only thing my dad found more disappointing than the fact of my birth at all was the name my mother had given me. He sent money sporadically, but essentially said point-blank that he wanted nothing to do with me. Consequence avoidance #1: disavow your parental duties, and try to cover up the evidence so that your REAL family doesn't discover what has transpired.

I grew up as an only child with my unwedded mother, and we had a great time. I never lacked for strong father-figures: my grandpa, Robert...my uncle, Warren...and, later, my best friend's dad, Dale. I never really felt like I was "missing" anything, and when I learned that our family lacked something most others had, my mother was up-front about the fact that, yes, I did have a dad, and no, he didn't live with us. End of story. Except...it really wasn't. My dad's marriage with Marian was falling apart, not because I had been discovered but just because my dad was impossible to live with...and so, free now to trade in for a younger model, my dad began to come around, reigniting my mother's interest. Consequence avoidance #2: turn the lemons of your dissolving marriage into lemonade with a new, sleeker woman.

By the time I reached junior high my parents were a strong couple, and I'd learned to accept the fact of this male in my life. He treated me well, if a little distantly: remember, he was not just a generation older than me, but really two, and so he had that kind of fatherhood mentality. My parents decided to buy a house together, and we moved to Cass City, from which my dad would commute to his teaching job in Ubly and my mom to Bay City. Those six years in CC were pretty good; my dad was, by now, a normal fixture in my life, although my early history generally made it so that when I wanted something I asked my mom first. He certainly didn't "get me" the way my mom did; she at least tolerated my music, even coming to like such classics as Twisted Sister's "Burn In Hell." When I got my ear pierced at 16, he was furious and wanted to "force" me to take it out. (This from the same guy who would walk up to students in the hallway in the early-70's, give them $5, and order them to go get a haircut.) My mom calmed him down, basically saying that, hey, if an earring was gonna be the extent of my rebellion, that was a pretty easy thing, no?

Dad conducting at Ubly: early 1980's

Of course, my mom found out - MUCH more quickly than did her predecessor - that my dad IS impossible to live with. For one, he was an alcoholic, consuming a fifth of whiskey every couple of days. For another, he had definitely old-skool ideas about masculine/feminine roles, and despite the fact that EACH of them did exactly the same job, he expected to come home (from his shorter commute) and sit down with a highball while my mother cooked his dinner. And then cleaned up afterwards. Lastly, he didn't seem to think that paying bills was what HIS money was for; those pesky things should fall to my mother, so that he could continue to buy his Seagram's and his mail-order clothes from Blair and whatever other shiny thing caught his eye. At the end, when they split up in the winter of 1985, he told my mom: "I feel like I'm being shafted!" Yeah...'cause that's how it works: you get to do whatever you want, and then you get to claim to be a victim.

Whew! Okay, I said I'd make this brief, and here I am wasting a beautiful day writing thousands of words. If you're still here, congrats: you've reached the end of our story for the day. Like any good soap opera, I'll leave you danglin' through the weekend, and pick up with part two of our tale next week.