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when I facilitated an online course on healing on our Ancestral Lines.
It came as a shocking surprise to all women participants, myself included, how UNSEEN and unfamiliar our Fathers’ Lines felt…
We are all are so used to working with our Mothers’ Line.
It’s surprising to see how much yearning do our Fathers Lines feel towards our gaze, our attention, our heart, our healing…
My father, Silviu, was born in Bucharest, Romania, 1932, died in Jerusalem, Israel, 2010
In all my healing journeys for the past 30 years I have focused on my Mother’s Line…
I had many complaints and grudges, criticism and dismay about my father’s ways of Fathering me, but I never looked at my father’s lineage or the wounds that passed through generations of men in our family.
This photo of my father and I was taken in Romania, just before we emigrated to Israel. I was almost 3 years old.
The horse carriage I am riding belonged to the photographer, my family had no budget for such toy.
My father, who really wanted the boy, loved me dearly yet his philosophy was to offer negative reinforcements as the means to educate his children.
He expressed his love in material gifts as he could afford them.
He never hugged us or kissed us except on birthdays, when we were posing for a photograph.
He never said the words: I Love You
Yet he often said: “You know this for your own good, and I do this because I love you, you know that, don’t you?”
I’m not sure I did know that…
I experienced him is very severe, critical, cold, towing a moral line.
He was wounded in many ways.
Our Fathers’ Lines carry so many Wounded Stories…
This is my Father’s Father, Herman, whom I called Uku as a child.
He immigrated from Romania to Israel in his fifties.
The only work he could find was lifting and transporting huge rocks by hand at a quarry in Nazareth, where he and my grandmother lived.
I remember, as a small child, visiting him with my dad at his work site.
His face and upper body running rivers of sweat, almost collapsing under the weight of the rocks.
He never really mastered the Hebrew language nor integrated into Israeli society in any significant way.
He showered me with gifts that made my head spin:
A doll such as I’ve never seen before, and our first family camera, which was his gift for my 6th birthday.
When I was 12 he hanged himself in the bathroom.
My grandmother came home from work and found him.
He owed some money to debtors and saw no other way out but taking his own life. My father said later it wasn’t even a huge sum of money…
I was considered too young and wasn’t allowed to go to his funeral, so never had a chance to say goodbye…
Do you know the stories of your Father’s Lineage?
I can only name my mother’s father, and my father’s father.
There are no photographs, no names, no stories for any of the men in the generations before my grandfathers.
What details do you know your father’s story?
Both of your grandfathers stories?
Your great-grandfathers stories?
It’s astounding to me to realize how much more familiar I am with the stories of my mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers…
Is it because our mothers were better storytellers?
Or because our fathers couldn’t find the words, buried their memories, detached from their pain…?
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