David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

family

I can change my appearance, but my inner self will stay the same

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Do people really change?

I’ve gone back and forth about this over the years. I want to believe people change, because I want to believe in the redemptive power of love and growth. But the more I watch the people I’ve known for years, the more I’m forced to admit that people never change who they are at their core.

I’ve been agonizing over this issue lately because of reconnecting with someone I used to know quite well. We haven’t had extensive contact, but my gut tells me to be wary. He was someone I came to distrust decades ago. When circumstances brought us together recently, I thought maybe he had grown — and that maybe I had grown — enough that things would be different.

He’s changed on the outside. He’s more successful. He’s more polished. He says the sort of things that made me have some hope. But then the mask slipped this week — and I saw the ugliness that pushed me away from him long ago.

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On Father’s Day, I can finally afford
to view my father’s good side again

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This is the first time in many years when I haven’t felt a horrible sense of dread about Father’s Day.

My father expected to be honored and acknowledged on Father’s Day, but I quit doing that a long time ago, because I decided I couldn’t continue to be that dishonest. Instead, the day became an annual reminder of the tension between the praise he wanted and the reality of what I needed to say to him.

When I kept trying to get him to talk with me about the past — and how he treated me in that present — he used to get angry and say, “Nobody gives me any credit for all the things I did for you children.”

That wasn’t true, but when you need to get someone to look at the abuse he’s inflicted on you (and continues to inflict), you’re in no mood to recount anything good about him. Now that he’s dead — and no longer stalking me online and showing up at my door unannounced — I can finally allow myself to look at his positive side once again.

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My love of ‘fur friends’ stems from the callousness I saw in my father

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Boots was the only dog I had as a child. He was mostly black, but he had white around his feet — hence the name — and on his chest.

Boots lived with us for only about a year when I was 9 or 10 years old. I loved him dearly and spent a lot of time outside with him, but when we moved — only about 10 miles — Boots didn’t make the trip with us. I will never know why. I will never know what happened to him.

When we were about to move, I asked my father where Boots would stay at the new house. The yard wasn’t fenced and it was in a subdivision, not like the house in the country where we had been living. My father didn’t answer my question — and I knew better than to ever again ask a question which my father ignored.

I never saw Boots again, which hurts me and angers me to this day. Years later — when I was safely into my adult years — I asked my father why Boots didn’t move with us and what happened to him. He claimed not to even remember. He seemed unconcerned that the child in me still needed to know what happened.

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