Psychologist Looks to Her Father and Learns Possibility of Change

As a psychologist, it is my job to help people change. Do you ever wish you could change some part of your personality, but then think it's too late, that you're too old, and that the die is cast? I want to share a most amazing case of personality change --- my father's transformation at the age of 77.

My father was an intelligent, intellectual young man, but bitter and angry. Dad had lost quite a bit in the lottery of life. He was born in Poland, to a peasant family. He had memories of living in abject poverty in a one room shack in a little village. Their house, if you could call it that, had very little furniture. It was dominated by a huge, brick oven, with a huge brick slab on top. The oven was used to cook meals, but more than that, during the cold days and nights of the year, the whole family, all six of them, huddled and slept on the bricks above the oven.

Dad arrived here from Poland in the early 1900s, and settled in Pittsburgh, Pa. with his mother, father, older brother, sister, and younger brother. He remembered the entire boat trip as traumatic. An experience of seasickness and lack of food. The boat was so dilapidated that once it reached America, it was impounded as unsafe. Life in the new country was also a struggle with all members of the family having to pitch in to make money, all the while struggling to learn a new culture and a new language.

His father worked as a tailor and did the best he could. Then tragedy struck. When my dad was a teenager, in rapid succession, his father died of cancer and his younger brother died of appendicitis. Then his mother had a nervous breakdown, and all the kids were farmed out to live with distant relatives. Dad claimed that these relatives had treated him horribly for the two years he boarded there. When he could, he joined the army.

My mom's early life experiences were happy ones, and she had the sunny disposition to match. She came to this country from Russia, the youngest girl of four children. Her memory of the trip across the ocean was of all of her siblings and her parents standing up on deck in new clothing and fur coats, waving goodbye to the relatives they were leaving behind. Her father had been a merchant in Russia, and when he landed in New York, he started up a dry goods business and was successful. As the youngest girl, she was allowed to get modern American schooling and go to college. She was enough younger than her two older sisters that they each doted on her. She adored her father. Life was good.

She became an English teacher. My parents, both Pisces who loved to swim, met in the middle of the ocean in Provincetown, Massachusetts. My dad had a leave from the army and was meeting a friend. My mother was on summer vacation with her friends. After some time bobbing around in the salt water and talking, they both abandoned the friends they each had come with. My mom was 30 and my dad 40. They had no time to waste. They married soon after.

Throughout their marriage, in all aspects of life, my mother was the friend-maker, the happy one, the appealing one, the funny one, the social one, the giving one, the one others were drawn to. A social worker, she was fascinated by other people, and she knew how to draw them out. My dad was loving to his wife and daughter and a few close friends, but he was not warm or talkative. The scars of his past still affected him. He expected life to throw him curve balls.

He got upset easily, was stubborn, held grudges, and he was ridiculously slow to forgive. He was distant and standoffish to some acquaintances, and with strangers, he was suspicious, abrupt, sometimes even rude. He ran a small business, and it clearly was a strain on him to be polite to his customers.

After almost 40 years of marriage, my mom died first. I had wondered, occasionally, what would ever become of my father, if my mother died first. He loved her so, but he had so few other attachments. Would he ever leave the house again? Who would look out for him? He was still living in Pittsburgh. I was living and working in Boston, with my husband and new baby. But the most amazing transformation occurred to my dad at the age of 77. After all those years of living in her shadow, it was as if Dad had soaked up my mother's social skills for four decades. He didn't stay home alone.

A niece and her husband reached out, and my dad gladly responded. He began corresponding with my best friend, now in Texas .He made dates with their old friends, and he went to the same play and lecture and concert series that he had gone to with mom. Never an organization-joiner, now he went off to Sunday brunches and discussion meetings. Everywhere he went, he showed pictures photos of his new granddaughter.

When he came to visit us and meet our new friends in Boston, his personality was unrecognizable to me. He made eye contact with new people in a way he never did before, listened intently to their stories, and told fascinating stories of his own.

My friends adored him, called him charming, and assumed that he had been either an attorney or a physician. Wondering if I could trust my own eyes and ears, I contacted my mom's social work friends in Pittsburgh who went to the same events for a second and third opinion. They had witnessed the same profound change in him that I had, and they were equally stunned. When I asked my dad about these changes, he simply remarked that he felt he either had to change or he would die a kind of death himself. Ask yourself what changes you need to make, so that you don't die some kind of death yourself. Maybe my dad's story will give you a little burst of optimism. (November, 2007)