Refill with Randy – A father with his own hurts often wounded his own son

By Randy LeBaron

Good morning! Grab your favorite cup. Fill it up. And let’s start this week right… TOGETHER!!!

Well friends, I was quite floored by the amount of feedback that I received from my last article where I wrote about the unseen scars of being bullied. Thanks to the many who wrote letters, sent e-mails, messaged, or simply approached me while I was out and about to let me know that it had resonated with you in some way. I was actually hesitant about submitting it, but it certainly seemed to have struck a chord, so I am glad that I did.   

More than a few of you have also asked about how the different acts of reconciliation that I mentioned came about so I thought as a follow up I would share an abbreviated version of how my broken relationship with my father was redeemed and what I have learned looking back on it. Caveat – even in the abridged form it is way too lengthy for one article – so today I will share some backstory and the events that led to our estrangement and then, in two weeks, I will share about how the healing took place.

To start with, my father’s name was Lloyd LeBaron but everybody called him “Fuzz”, and I mean everybody. Someone once sent him a letter that was simply labeled “Fuzz, Sinclairville, NY” and it made its way to our mailbox. Anyway Fuzz, or Dad as I will refer to him from here on, was born in 1931. He spent much of his childhood in the hospital which caused him to fall behind in school and eventually led to him dropping out, only completing the 4th grade.

He entered the Army when he was 17 and was stationed in Germany. After his first stint he switched to the Air Force where he would go on to run a Carpentry Shop in Paris. While he was in the service he got married and at age 19 had my oldest brother, Rick. The very next year my twin brothers, Rod & Roger, were born. The marriage didn’t last and my Dad went back overseas so my brothers ended up being raised by aunts and uncles.

Fast forward to 1967, and Dad was working as a Tool & Dye Maker at Crescent Tool and ended up marrying a much younger woman (11 years) who was also very much pregnant. My sister Roberta was born and my dad adopted her as his own. By 1974 my dad was 43 years old, already a grandfather a few times over, and did not have becoming a father again on his radar at all. This is where I entered the picture, 23 years after my brother Rick was born I made Fuzz was a father again whether he liked it or not.

In my early years I don’t think he minded so much but once I hit school age and someone made the mistake of asking if he was dropping off his grandson things started to change. Dad had quite the temper and, as an undiagnosed child with ADHD, I would often do or say something impulsively that would lead to being branded by his belt. The reality was that he was older, more easily irritated, and I think somewhat resentful because it was clear early on that I had not inherited any of his mechanical skills. To this day I am still the least handy person around, just ask my wife.

All in all things didn’t seem so bad though, I mean this was the ’80s and most of my friends’ fathers treated them the same way. It seemed normal, until my dad’s world came crashing down. I was in elementary school when my father suffered a heart attack and was taken by Mercy Flight to Buffalo General where he would undergo a quintuple bypass surgery. It was a long recovery and, to make matters worse, he was diagnosed with diabetes and after being prescribed a new experimental pill he had a reaction that nearly killed him. It caused him to lose so much weight that he looked like a skeleton.

To make matters worse he ended up losing his job because he could no longer meet the physical requirements and my older brothers had each made some poor choices that eventually led to divorce for one, drug use for another, and prison for the third. It was at this point that my dad told me in no uncertain terms that he had not wanted to be a father again in the first place and, because he figured I would just turn out like my brothers, I wasn’t worth it.

At that point he disengaged not only from me but my mother as well. He moved into his own room in the house and more or less cohabitated with us. From that point on he did not attend any school functions or go to any of my sporting events. There were even times that friends from school would ask me if my parents were divorced or if my dad was dead and I just responded yes because the truth was too humiliating.

At this point my father was not as physically overpowering as he once was but he could still wound with words. He would often give me demeaning nicknames and, because I had to go to speech therapy throughout school, he would always make fun of me and say that he could never understand a word that I said. As I shared in my last article, this compounded the bullying that I was enduring everyday at school and so even as I was feeling like a helpless victim I also began to be filled with anger and bitterness that was on the edge of boiling over.

Jump ahead now to high school where one of the most tragic moments, the sudden passing of my grandmother, led to a respite of sorts as I moved in with my grandfather to help take care of him. Eventually it was no longer safe for him to stay alone while I was at school so he ended up moving in with my parents, but I remained in his apartment by myself. Things seemed like they were headed in a better direction—some of the bullying at school had dissipated since I had started martial arts. I got involved in the church down the street from where I lived, and I even got accepted to a college in Kansas which, if nothing else, was far away from my father and all the bad memories that I had accumulated over the years.

On the day that I left for college my parents drove me to the bus station where I proceeded to get on the wrong bus. Thankfully I realized my error in time and quickly got off to find the right one. That was when my mother ran up to me and said that my dad had made an effort by coming out and that I had not even said goodbye.  She then said that she was afraid I was going to hurt his feelings. In that moment I felt every bit of anger, hate, and resentment that I had toward my father and simply replied, “Good!” as I walked up the steps of the bus without looking back.

See you in two weeks!
Pastor Randy