THE LOST FATHER | Kerry Malawista
A few years back, a patient came to see me after his wife discovered he was having an affair. This was not Leo’s first affair. He had been having affairs throughout his thirty-year marriage—some for months, others for years.
Leo spent most of our first session telling me about these clandestine relationships and how good he was at not letting them interfere with his home life. He was curious why he felt driven to behave in this way, when he loved his wife and was anxious he might lose her.
Toward the end of our meeting, I asked about his parents. He mentioned a “decent” relationship with his mother, who lived nearby in an assisted living facility.
“And your father,” I asked.
He startled. “Oh…He died when I was 11.” He said this as if he was talking about a friend from forty years ago, whom he hadn’t seen in a while. When I asked what happened, he told me that one day his dad had gone into the hospital and some vague time afterward died from a brain tumor. With a shrug, he added, “He’s long gone. I never think about him.”
The following week Leo continued telling me about the frustration he felt at not being able to understand why he continued to carry on these affairs.
“It’s puzzling,” I said. “It’s like you are continually living this secret life that your family knows nothing about.”
“Yes, exactly! It’s crazy. Why do I feel so compelled to do this? It’s so wrong.”
It seemed as if Leo’s brain maintained two rooms: one where his wife and children resided, the other his girlfriend and no children, with no door connecting the two.
In that moment, to my surprise, I thought of a nightmare I’d had when I was twelve years old, just three years after my mother died in a car accident. In the dream, which I’d thought about often throughout the years, I was standing on an old, weathered, gray dock, in the black of night, alone, a foghorn blowing in the distance. A small wooden rowboat, its lantern lighting the bow, drifted in. As the boat grew closer, I saw a lone figure standing on the stern: A woman draped in a long black cape, strawberry-blond hair and sunglasses hiding her face. It was my mother.
I woke with a start, my heart thumping wildly in my chest, a flood of guilt rushing through me. In my mind was a single, utterly clear thought: Dad can’t get married. Mom is still alive.
I had that dream the night before my father’s wedding, a wedding I had been thrilled to see happen.
Like Leo, I understood that I, too, had maintained two separate rooms, one where my mother still lived, and the other with a wedding about to begin, a new mother to take her place. Like Leo, nothing connected the rooms.
Trusting my gut, I proposed something to Leo. “You know, I can imagine that an eleven-year-old boy, whose father one day goes into the hospital and never returns, could think he hadn’t really died. That he had gone off somewhere and was living in secret. Maybe he even had a wife and family.”
Leo paused. “I never told anyone that, but that’s exactly what I thought. I always imagined he was still alive, with another family. Another son.” Bemused, he added, “I was just a stupid kid.”
Those first months after my mother died, I too, felt like that stupid kid. At night I’d lay in bed, imagining alternate endings to my mother’s accident. Had she somehow survived the crash, extricated herself from the burning car and run off? Was she living somewhere else, secretly and peacefully without kids? She had often been exasperated by the fights my siblings and I got into, and more than once she had told the five of us that if we didn’t stop, she just might disappear. Had she choreographed the whole thing? My mind was full of fantasies that she was still alive somewhere, somehow. And that one day, she might magically return.
These conversations with Leo were the portal to the understanding that followed.
Slowly, over the months ahead, memories of Leo’s father’s illness and death returned. He began voicing his long-buried feelings of sadness and grief. He spoke of the unfairness of being the only boy at school without a father. The anger he felt toward his dad for leaving him. The pain and shame of not having a dad around to show him how to be a man.
In time, Leo came to see that he had made his father insignificant in order not to feel overwhelmed by his longing for him. Yet deep down he remained that little boy, always waiting and wondering when his father would reappear.
My siblings and I had likewise clung to the idea that our mother was still in our midst. For my tenth birthday, my father gave me a Ouija board, which my sisters and I used often. With a towel wrapped around my head, candles arranged around the card table, we would watch as the heart-shaped wooden planchette divined messages. When the letters reliably spelled out “It’s Mom,” we’d all scream and jump back from the table.
How could either of us—a boy of eleven and a girl of nine—accept, much less mourn, the loss of someone who was still so vital to our developing sense of self? Their absence, like a phantom limb, felt tangible long after each of our parents were gone. In a sense, their deaths were a threat to our own lives, because it is the very sense of self that feels terminated when a parent dies.
So we both had turned to fantasy: If Leo’s father or my mother magically still existed somewhere, then we did too.
And while this fantasy soothed Leo’s inconsolable grief, it brought with it the equally painful belief that his dad lived on with another family—another son. In time, the conscious fantasy receded, but the kernel of that fantasy unconsciously remained, enacted in his many affairs. Now, rather than missing his dad, Leo became him, living out the kind of secret life he’d once believed his father had pursued.
As Freud warned, unexpressed emotions never die, but are instead buried alive, to rise up later in more destructive ways. While Leo’s fantasy of a father living elsewhere was the predominant one, he likely harbored a host of others. In the child-Leo’s mind, a dad with a family risks dying early, so a girlfriend with no family may be a reach for immortality or a hedge against death. Maybe there was a thrill-seeking element—a desire to grab for all the excitement, even danger, he can in life because he might die tomorrow. Perhaps he even imagined that if he misbehaved, his good father would return to punish him.
The challenge for Leo, whatever his fantasy, was a universal one: how to integrate this loss into his current life. To do this he needed to find a bridge between an outer reality, that his father was dead, and an inner fantasy that he was not gone. He needed a new antidote to loss, the one that my sisters and I found together: to remember. By repeating stories about our mother to each other, both funny and sad, we committed them to memory, keeping our mother with us as we grew older. We remembered together so often that sometimes we couldn’t be sure which memories belonged to whom. When we looked hard enough, held on tight enough to those memories, we would once again find our mother.
Therapy gave Leo the space to understand and resolve his compulsion to have affairs—to live out his father’s secret life. First, we needed to open a door to connect the two rooms, then create a new space to raise the dead—to remember and mourn. Slowly, he began recalling the dad he loved, the one who took him fishing and taught him to skip rocks. The dad who worked hard to take care of his family and would never have had an affair. The one who never would have walked away.
In time, with mourning and memory, Leo recognized that his father was someone he loved, admired and had lost. By re-finding his father in therapy, he no longer felt an urgency to live as his imagined father, a dad with a secret family. Instead, he allowed himself to emulate the man he remembered from childhood—a good one.
Kerry Malawista, PhD, is a writer, training psychoanalyst, co-chair of New Directions in Writing and founder of The Things They Carry, offering virtual writing workshops for groups in need of healing. She is associate editor of the new creative nonfiction section of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, and literary magazines. She is coauthor of When the Garden Isn’t Eden, Wearing my Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories, and co-editor of The Therapist in Mourning, Who’s Behind the Couch and editor of The Things They Wrote: A Writing Healing Project. Her recent novel Meet the Moon, is a Kraken Prize finalist.