home video reflections

I watched a VCR tape of home videos last night at my Mom's house. When I started watching the video, I had totally forgotten what it recorded (a Dafforn family gathering), or that my dad would be on the tape. It was very strange to see him on video. He has been gone for almost 15 years now. We kept rewinding parts that showed my dad, so that Heath could see him and maybe we could hear his voice. Finally, we came to a part where he looked at the camera as I was holding it, and we could hear his voice. He said, "Don't use up all their film, Jenny." (It was my uncle's video camera.) Not quite what I'd been hoping for, but oh well. Heath said that if my Dad could see it now he would wish he had said something else at the one moment we would have his voice preserved.

Of course, watching the videos sent me into a reflective state of mind. I was 12, almost 13 years old on the tape. I looked 16, but I was just entering 8th grade. Heath says I had an attitude on the video. The previous two years, 6th and 7th grade, had been years of hell. I was teased mercilessly by my classmates. They called me "pistol-packing mama," and sang a song with those words. The song "Janie's Got a Gun" had come out that year, so I was serenaded with that as well. This was all because there was a girl in my class in 6th grade who told me to meet her after school to fight. I told her no. She said, "Okay, I'll just bring a gun to school and shoot you then." Thinking she was ridiculous, I said, "Oh yeah, me too." She said, "You don't have a gun." I said, "Yes, I do..." and proceeded to tell her how many and what kinds. (My dad was a big hunter and had taught me how to shoot and provided me with "my own" guns since I was little.) I was not popular and she was, so the popular kids started in with the taunts. Anyway, I digress. Suffice it to say, this was the summer following those years of hell.

There were two things that sort of stunned me about hearing my Dad talk on the tape to me. First of all, I was still a little girl that he could order what to do. He didn't say it to me like you would to another adult - because of course, I wasn't. Hearing it again, I felt again what I probably felt at that moment when he said it - chastised, embarrassed and shamed because my other relatives were there. My second observation was that he seemed not to like me very much. And I probably wasn't very likable at the time. It took me back to that time in my life, to the fights I would have with him. Junior high age kids are not always the funnest to live with, you know.

Heath says the reason it bothers me is that I never got to fix it. My dad died when I was 14, and we still didn't have a good relationship at that point. I hadn't really learned to be kind to those closest to me at that point. I was disrespectful and probably a very frustrating kid. Once I hit puberty, I don't think he knew what to do with me, with my emotions and girliness. I remember being told I was "Daddy's girl" when I was little, so I think he liked me well enough then. But when I turned into a punk teenager, our relationship short-circuited.

It took me back to those years of adolescence, when we all just want people to approve of us so much. We are so aware and concerned about what people think of the things we say and do, and we are so critical of the things other people say and do. It has been a relief to be a part of true Christian community in recent years, where people accept each other and love each other and help each other. But I still get hung up on whether or not people like me, and I still have a hard time being likable sometimes. I'm not an obnoxious teenager anymore, but I am an awkward adult sometimes, who doesn't do well at showing people she cares about them because of being self-conscious or unsure of herself.

At the time the video was taken and the years that immediately followed, I didn't think it mattered to me what Dad thought of me. I thought it only mattered what my peers thought of me. But it does matter to me now what he thought of me then. I wish I hadn't been such a jerk, or that he had known how to push through my adolescent angst to keep our relationship intact. I wish I could remember both being liked by him and being likable. I wonder what impact it has had on my life not to have experienced those two things.