Kindred Bonds

My father had something of a catchphrase when I was growing up: “Children suck.” He used it all the time: when my brother was suspended from school a third time, when I got my car towed from my boyfriend’s apartment for parking illegally, when my aunt described how her youngest had taken to ruining her walls by grinding crayons into their surface. Every time he said it I would roll my eyes or laugh, but inwardly I flinched – did he mean it? Was this “joke” just a thinly veiled expression of his genuine feelings? I didn’t know then, and remain slightly unsure to this day.

           

This tension, between being about 99% confident that my father loved me, but only 45% sure that he liked me as an individual differentiated from his child, was the source of much of my childhood angst. It was difficult to negotiate the idea that while I trusted my father implicitly to care for me, to pick me up from school when I was sick and make macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets when my mother was out of town, I was afraid to share anything with him for fear that would be rejected. I wanted him to come to my track meets, but I didn’t want him to know I wasn’t the fastest girl on the team; I wanted to share my writing with him, but was thought he would judge me or laugh.

It is this relationship that colors my interpretation of the final scene in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. In the final panel when Alison jumps into her father’s outstretched arms she writes, “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (232). Yet I do not interpret this as a scene of catharsis, but as recognition of a paternal relationship analogous to my own. Alison’s father is more than the rudimentary definition of a father, one that “conveys vagueness and distance” (197) because she is able to find in him the paternal love and safety that every child is entitled to, and for that, at least, she is grateful to him. However, I also feel that Alison also makes a distinction between kin, being familial bonds of blood and shared ancestry, and kindred, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “allied in nature, character, or properties”. Her father is established as being kin, but it is a kindred relationship she desperately craves.

When Alison finds this bond through literature, she clings to it vehemently. As she says on page 204, “it was nice to have his attention… however vicarious it may have been.” Even though literature is perhaps not the interpersonal connection Alison had initially hoped for, such as when she first shared her poetry with her father, it is still something through which she can receive the praise and affection her father otherwise refuses to offer. The panel on 204 in which Alison asks, “So… what should I read this weekend?” and her father has an arrow labeled “elated” is one of the only moments in the novel in which Alison’s father has a confirmed, positive reaction to anything. As a scene reminiscent from my own life, this made me laugh. How many times had I crept into my father’s study and had him look up at me, anxious, “like a splendid deer I didn’t want to startle” (220) only for me to ask, “Do you have any music suggestions?” and watch his face light up with rare pleasure.

If there is a singular exception to the tenuous relationship between my father and me, it is music. I didn’t listen to N*Sync or Britney Spears when I was younger – instead, I loved The Fixx, The White Stripes, and Spoon. I loved them even more because my father loved them, and seemed proud of me for sharing his passion. I was the only one in our household who would sit gladly at his feet for hours, listening to him play guitar or introduce me to new and obscure bands. Hearing the excitement, the piqued interest in his voice when I’d found a song to share and he liked it, gave me these moments of connection that I longed for in our everyday coexistence. Music was the thing that rallied together my father and me, the thing that I could wrap around me like a shroud and nestle up to in moments of uncertainty. Even now, while my father and I rarely talk outside of my visits home, we regularly email each other: “Did you hear this song yet? Did you know Britt Daniels has a new band?”

I love my father; I know that there is very little we wouldn’t do to assure my safety and wellbeing. But, simultaneously, I am able to acknowledge that we didn’t, and likely never will, have the romanticized daddy-daughter relationship I envied in so many of my friends as a child. In reflecting on her childhood and coping with her father’s death, I think that Alison Bechdel comes to a similar conclusion, and is able to find a way to cherish her father in spite of, or maybe even because of, their imperfect relationship.

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Works Cited: Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. 1st. New York: Mariner Books, 2006. Print.