GENERATION IN THE MIDDLE: CHANGING DEPENDENCIES
Like it or not, new responsibilities are often thrust upon a man during the mid-life period because of a milestone event: The death of his father. This searing experience has been described as “a scab that in no man ever heals” by author William Gibson, who wrote A Mass for the Dead to make peace with his own father, himself, and his sons.
Freud regarded a father’s death as both the most important event, and most poignant loss, in a man’s life. He himself was forty when his own father died. Like many men, Freud suffered guilt for the hostility he had long felt for his father, and also began to appreciate him more. From that time forward, however, Freud surged ahead on a new path toward independence. Within the next few years his self-analysis, including dream interpretation, became increasingly systematic. And he is reported to have emerged from this period of his life “with a deep-reaching interior transformation.”
Not all men undergo such a radical metamorphosis. But in many instances a man’s development does not really begin until he is freed from the shadow of a strong father, a release that may occur only through death.
A clothing manufacturer from Boston, Richard S., did not begin to establish any true direction until he was almost forty. Before then, although he had done traditional things like marry and raise children, his aimlessness was clearly related to the influence of his father, a dominating patriarch. After his father’s death, Richard took over the family business and put his own stamp on it, separated from his wife of eighteen years, and made plans to marry the woman he had fallen in love with. He had just begun to have some sense of his own strength, as he explains:
I had my own turf in sports, but it was a real hassle through school. I screwed around in college for three years, and then sort of drifted out of school and went into my father’s business—which he wanted me to do. I was sort of on the rebound from a really hot romance when I met my wife. She cared for me and I wanted to get out of my house, so I really drifted into getting married, too.
My whole frame of mind was drifting. I had nothing planned, no thought of where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do.
During my marriage I traveled a lot and sometimes I’d be away 100 nights a year. Every once in a while I had casual affairs, but nothing of deep involvement. At home we never had any hostility, but the marriage was unclose—an unbelievable lack of communication. I found it difficult to talk about things that were really bothering me, and Marge also ducked it. So we just never talked about a lot of things.
I met Ellen three years ago when I hired her as a designer. My father and I had a lousy relationship in the business.. We really had some conflicts, which were all personality and power things. As I became more sure of myself I guess T became more threatening to him. I was trying to make some changes in the business, give it some organization. To him it was a one-man business— him, and me, and zilch. Then just about that time we found out he was sick. He had cancer.
Within the next month I got very involved with Ellen and spent a few nights every week in New York with her. T had never been involved with anybody T had really been close to before on a working basis. From that point on, all I wanted to do was be in New York and be around Ellen. And my father was dying, and I really had a torn kind of thing.
Then my father died—and it was a relief. The king is dead! Long live the king! I’ve got it all, baby!
During this period I was really riding high. T could have Ellen, and I could have Marge and my family— and they both really had to do what I wanted them to do. I didn’t really think about the future, because I could have the best of both worlds. And I could be the image of my father. I had this uncle working for me, and my grandmother leaned on me, and I took over some of my father’s charity jobs. It was really a wild scene. And I wasn’t really thinking about all of this. It was just happening to me.
When my father was alive I guess I felt I couldn’t compete with him. He held all the power strings. I know I was trying to live in his world, because after he died I tried to be everything he was. And then gradually I stopped trying to do everything he did. You know, being nice to all the people he was always nice to. It was a difficult period for me—strengthening and confusing.
I began to change from a person drifting to knowing where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be. I had a business I wanted to get together, and a personal life I wanted to get together. I’ve been building up the business with plans to sell it, and then move into some foreign investments. The deals are already negotiated and I’ve got a partnership formed. And then in the next year I’ll be moving towards the divorce. It all happened, I think, because Ellen was there when something dramatic—some great change—was happening in my life.
Regardless whether a man’s father is already dead or only now approaching death, the developmental challenge remains the same: If a man is to mature at mid-life he must give up his dependency on his father and assume the psychological burden of replacing him.
The difficulty in assuming full fatherhood is, of course, that it requires abandoning some very comforting fantasies. “In a way, this final taking-on of responsibility is like the last bite of the Biblical apple,” says Dr. Edward Klein, a psychologist with the Yale group. “You’re no longer the ‘son,’ the one who can’t do certain forbidden things without full awareness of the consequences; you’re the guy who’s in charge of the whole show, the one who’s entrusted to take care of others. The trouble is—who wants to let go of the apple.
What is actually occurring at this stage of life, say the Yale group, is that a man is being forced to redefine his own role as a father, which means assuming more authority and learning how to be genuinely paternal. But this task is complicated by the fact that a man is being challenged to relinquish his own dependency at the same time that he is being confronted by new problems from his own children and from other younger people.
It takes special courage to assume this new paternal role when a man is being assaulted by reminders of his diminishing powers. To his maturing children he is no longer the omnipotent parent who can heal every hurt, conquer every care. The small child who used to gaze adoringly at a beloved father trundling him to the zoo or ball park has suddenly been transformed into a towering, terrible adolescent who glowers at him with disdain. Being caught in this generational crossfire, this double bind, is painful indeed when a man feels as if he is being undercut by his own children just when his father’s death, or decline, requires him to be stronger than ever.
During adolescence the most highly charged issue for many parents, fathers especially, is that of sexual experimentation. Because sex is more open today than ever before, and more openly discussed, the repercussions are often disturbing for men who had a less permissive upbringing.
“It’s a tremendous challenge,” said one beleaguered father. “There’s a fierce desire to say to your kid, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ But inside there’s really the agonized feeling, I could never do that!’”
Suddenly many sexual matters which a man may never have questioned, nor even though, about, now become topics for conversation in his household. When, for example, his teen-age daughter wants to discuss the latest magazine article on oral sex, he is likely to begin asking himself some questions about his own experience: Whether his own sexual life has been satisfying; how responsive his wife has been; and whether he himself is really a good lover. If he has in fact been unadventurous, this may be the moment that sparks a lot of internal conflicts about missing out on something.
“I knew my son was sleeping with his girlfriend,” said the father of one seventeen-year-old boy, “but it didn’t, hit home until I discovered they’d been making love in our double bed when we went out. I exploded at the kid, really went berserk. It wasn’t just the bed, of course. My wife was always lukewarm about sex, but I’ve been afraid to play around much. That incident sure changed my thinking. Now I’m wondering, Well, if my own kid is getting his rocks off, why not me?”
There is no doubt that this generation of mid-life men have trouble understanding and coping with the free-wheeling options now open to the young: sexual freedom, extensive travel, drug experimentation, prolonged schooling, exercises in self-exploration, and leisurely attempts to define work goals.
Some of the viable alternatives pursued by today’s youth reflect the fact that they obviously hear the call of a different drummer. When it comes to going to college or choosing a career, many young people are making it clear that they are scornful of success and achievement as primary goals. They sec work as a means rather than as an end. They want to earn money to buy land, or travel, or support some creative effort. Some want a personal sabbatical from college or graduate school to explore the world, an effort that often leads them to do manual labor—to work as truckdrivers, bartenders, carpenters, house painters, or moving men—while they make up their minds about the future.
Others, unperturbed by a pressing need to fix on career decisions, simply want to concentrate on self-awareness and enjoyment for a while. They say they are in pursuit of happiness, or personal growth, or a better understanding of other human beings. Such amorphous ambitions are not easily tolerated by fathers forced, for most of their lives, to tread a straight and narrow path bound by duty, discipline, and obligation. Thus, even though their children may not be rebelling in cither an antagonistic or a self-destructive way, their simply following a nonconventional path goes deeply against the grain of an older generation’s implicit faith in the work ethic.
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