Like father, like son?

Of late I find myself talking to a lot of people about their family history. You could divide them up in many ways, but I tend to choose between those who have pretty basic memories of their family, and superficial knowledge of their background, and those who have taken on the usually monumental task of really researching their family.

Once you start down that road you often find some pretty common things: that the version of your history that you learned as a child really has little to do with the truth; that a lot of unpleasant and/or illegal things are politely forgotten; and that people's memories of childhood as often as not actually reflect the TV programs that watched when young.

The other realization, and the one that I'm working through right now, is that however enlightened or progressive you may believe yourself to be, you ultimately carry a lot of your parents around inside of you, and reflect that in your behaviour.

(And yes, there's a BIG Donald Trump discussion to be had here.)

The fellow pictured, passed out on the floor is my father. He was a drunk to a fair degree, was arrested for liquor offenses. He likely cheated on his first wife, and pretty much abandoned both her first child, and her second, fathered by him.

As I dig out long repressed memories of my childhood, I've realized that he was also a pretty lousy parent and husband. He surely wasn't a role model for a young, non-athletic boy who spent most of his life with his nose in science-fiction novels.

So today, as I work on a book based on my mother's life, I find that I have to face up to some hard truths: a lot of my past behaviour reflects what I grew up seeing.

(And in retrospect I can recall, when young, meeting other kid's parents, and visiting their homes, and being surprised by how everyone got along together. How their lives just seemed easier, and happier, and lacking in strife and drama.)

In my late teens I discovered beer, then whiskey. I began smoking Colt cigars, then cigarettes. Eventually Camels, unfiltered. And of course, inevitably, pot and hash, with no knife not blue at the end from hot-knifing.

Somehow though, at some point, at the end of a three day drunk weekend, I realized that I was at a precipice: either I had to rein in the liquor, or I was going slide to very quickly into a nose dive into hard-core alcoholism.

And yes, I still love a pint at a pub, or a bottle of wine, but it's also moderated, and it has been a very long time since I had a real hangover.

In retrospect my father was also lazy, and tended to do just enough to get by, and no more. Self-employment meant that he worked just as much as needed, then went skiing. It also meant that my mom's grocery money was alway less that ideal.

At this point I can't speak to my dad's reputation as a businessman, but I'm building a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't all that great - more from laziness than dishonesty.

Now I look back on my own past - jobs worked, multiple abandoned post-secondary attempts - really, you name it - and my eventual shift into self-employment or freelancing, and yeah, there's the pattern. Good intentions perhaps, but a tendency to let things slide, and abandon them if it was too much work.

Although, in my own defense, I'll claim that I have made progress on this in recent years - a lot of that reflects growing confidence, and support from various fronts to encourage me.

But still, I look back and think. "Wow, what could I have accomplished if I wasn't like my father, and if I had a dad that encouraged me to excel?"

Again, looking back, there were teachers who went to great lengths to build my confidence, to encourage my intellect, to point me in positive directions, but none of them managed to quite defeat the low expectations and utter lack of self-confidence that had been instilled in me. That took some thirty or forty years, and is still part of who I am.

Of course, now I'm trying to understand what was going on in his head, both to fill out my book, and to find out what underpins my own psyche. On one hand I can see this as valuable and essential thing for me, but it's also frightening.