Lessons Learned From My Father

Lessons Learned From My Father

There were sayings my father used that were hard to understand at first.
Not because the words were complicated, but because I hadn’t lived enough life yet to meet them.

Things like holding the flashlight the right way.
I never knew where to point it. I didn’t understand that seeing where the work actually is takes practice—sometimes more patience than skill.

Or when he’d say he’d forgotten more than I knew.
At the time it felt dismissive.
Later, I realized it wasn’t arrogance. It was experience speaking from a place I hadn’t reached yet.

Then there were the ones about the wheel.
That everything comes back around.
That you make your own breaks.
That sorry doesn’t cut it.

Growing up, those didn’t sound philosophical. They sounded strict.
Like warnings you only understand after you’ve already crossed the line.

Over time, I learned that most of those sayings weren’t said in punishment or reprimand.
They were observations.
Hard-earned ones.

For a long time, I told myself I wasn’t like him.

I saw things in his marriage that I didn’t agree with.
Things I wasn’t proud of.
I convinced myself I’d turned out different.

It took two divorces for me to finally admit something harder:
I was like him—in some ways.
Not because I wanted to be.
But because I was shaped by what I saw.
By what was normalized in the home I grew up in.

There has to be responsibility where parents are unaware—or uncaring—about what they expose their children to.
Especially when it comes to the relationship between spouses.
That classroom leaves marks that show up later, whether we acknowledge them or not.

But there’s also truth in this:
just because you don’t see something happen doesn’t always mean it never happened.

About twenty-five years ago, after my second divorce, I found myself sitting with him on his back deck.
Just the two of us.

No hierarchy.
No proving.
No one better than the other.

For the first time, we weren’t father and son.
We were two grown men telling the truth.

I told him how both of my marriages had unfolded.
How I had finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t as different from him as I’d once believed.
How I had been a product of the environment I was raised in—my normal.

And I said it honestly, somewhere in that gray space between blame and lived experience.

That’s when he told me something I’d never known about his divorce from my mother.

From my perspective, he had never looked back.
I believed he didn’t care.
That the failure hadn’t touched him.

But he had looked back.
He just did it alone.

That was how he dealt with it.
By sitting with himself.
By facing it privately.

And suddenly, his last saying changed shape.

“Son, you have to look yourself in the mirror.”

I didn’t have to think twice about it.

This time, the saying was easy to understand.
But it proved to be the hardest one I ever had to learn how to do.

I knew immediately that it came from lived experience.
Not theory. Not authority.
Survival.

It wasn’t judgment.
It wasn’t a warning.

It was wisdom offered at the only moment it could be received—
a time when there was no denying anymore that I was like him in ways that mattered.

I took it as an invitation.

Talking to yourself in your head isn’t the same.
Journaling isn’t the same.

Those are ways of circling the truth.

But when you look yourself in the eyes—
without looking away—
there’s nowhere left to hide.

That’s real mirror work.

No audience.
No softened language.
No excuses.

Just you, standing still long enough to tell yourself the truth.

I still do it to this day.

And I understand now that he wasn’t teaching me how to avoid consequences.
He was teaching me how to live with myself when they arrive.

The wheel wasn’t karma.
It wasn’t fate.

It was memory—
coming back around.

And the mirror wasn’t punishment.

It was the place where honesty finally began.

 

— The Sovenquill