Fathers

I am into the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, the monumental fictionalized story of his life in six volumes, and in this part he returns to the world of his youth (he is seven in this narrative) whereas he started the first volume at the time the narrator was in his thirties with the death of his father whom he hated and who was indeed hateful, even if in other ways he was a tormented man who deserved the narrator's pity.  Sometimes it seems he also gave him his respect.  In this volume the father is endowed with all the authority one generally finds accorded to male figures who are the parents of children.  Father as the head of household.  Karl Ove's father is a brutal, cruel, cold authoritarian figure who punishes without mercy, will never hear of explanations for behavior, always suspicious, demanding the rituals of family love so as to justify his position.  He appalls me and I am always amazed that Karl Ove, although he fears the man does not expect anything better, does not expect his mother to intervene.  As I have remarked in another blog, I was struck in the film "Boyhood" by the indifferent and selfish father of the boy who is the protagonist, by the cruel, tyrannical and brutal step-fathers his mother inflicted upon him without ever seeming to stand up for her son.  My father died when I was six, and when he was alive I lived primarily in the nursery and rarely saw him.  So in effect I had no father.  I cannot imagine living in a house with an adult male figure, certainly not if they in any way resembled these men.  I had no father, and yet I became a father of four.  What kind of a father was I?  I remember any number of wonderful times, of adventures--we have traveled singly and together in any number of countries--, of dinner parties, conversations with every one of my children, singly and in groups, anguished talks, anxious talks, everything.  I have spent hours laughing with them.  I can distinctly remember getting angry with them.  But in what sense was I a father?  a head of the household?  As children did they tremble when I walked in the door?  What authority?  What special love?  How did I invent myself as a father? Most important did I make the rules?  lay down the law?  set the stage?  I fear that I saw family life too much as a party and not enough as a corporate enterprise. Last month when I traveled up to Canada to my granddaughter's wedding not only was I the oldest person at the gathering, I was very clearly the grandfather, just as last year at her brother's wedding and even more emphatically when the grandparents had their special moment of introduction into the ceremony and my husband and I walked down the aisle and took our places, I was a grandfather.  But I was in the company of three of my children so I was also a father.  A father?  I wonder how they the children see it.  But do I really want to know at this late date?