I had a very difficult and dominating father, who did many very good things and many very nice things, and who was certainly not the worst father anybody ever had. However he very often seemed to have the attitude that I and his other children were in fact his possessions, and he often acted and behaved as if that were the case.
He often regarded it as a personal affront to him, or treated it like I had committed a crime or a heinous sin, when I made an honest mistake, honestly forgot something, or when something did not quite meet his standards or expectations. And he would always say that whatever he said or did was done out of "love", and was "
http://nospank.net/fyog.htm">for my own good", which he decided in Godlike fashion that I needed.
My dad basically couldn't let me make my own mistakes; he was often very hard on me when I made a natural, normal, honest mistake. He felt that he needed to protect me from some dire consequences of making some natural, normal mistakes. He didn't seem to respect that making mistakes, including sometimes dumb mistakes, was part of the learning process, at least as far as I was concerned. And then he often wondered why I had the problems I had, or was often unhappy, or lacking in self-confidence.
He even yelled at me one time when I needed to ask him if I ought to go to a certain meeting that a guy I had met in college was pressuring me to go to (which I myself didn't have any strong feelings about, and actually preferred not to go to), like I was so stupid that I needed to ask, or like I had my heart set on doing something wrong. And afterward he referred to it as something wrong with me that I got upset with him. Like many other times, my dad did not feel he said or did anything wrong, and felt he had nothing to apologize for.
And my dad was often especially poor at understanding, or even trying to understand, from my point of view, some sensitive and personal issue which was causing me to be upset, frustrated, or otherwise unhappy. He saw the world in a certain way, and he was very positive he was right based on how he saw the world, and would try to correct me or straighten me out based on how he saw things, and would make little or no attempt to really listen to me and try to understand from my point of view something that I was struggling with. My dad basically didn't like problems, and he would try to solve them quickly, and often in doing so he was very insensitive to the needs and feelings of another person.
And trying to talk something over with my dad that I was angry or upset with him about would usually do very little or no good. My dad felt very certain that he "loved" me, and that therefore he could do no wrong, and if I were angry or upset with him or with anything he said or did, it was always a problem or something wrong with me, never with him. He would very often either intimidate me or sweet-talk me into going along with whatever he said or did that I did not like and was really not OK.
My dad died over 25 years ago now, and my life has been a lot easier since he died, and I have since been able to do many important things that I had long wanted to do, both personally and professionally, which I had not been able to do or had a hard time doing when my dad was still alive.
Actually my dad was very worldly and very practical-minded, and I don't think anything by Kahlil Gibran, or any poetry in general, would have meant anything to him.
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