How Did He Do It?

I don’t know how he did it.

My father’s retired now, but he worked at a factory up until around 88, when we moved from the suburbs to a more rural area where my parents still live. That’s when he became a postal worker. Even when we were at the first house, he was always taking overtime, trying to make life better for his wife and three kids. He didn’t really like the job, and you could tell.

At the second house, I often remember him coming home, greeting us all, and then going upstairs to take a shower. He would often be up there for awhile, so on occasion I’d go check on him. I almost always found him, still in uniform, laying on his back on the made bed, having fallen asleep. He was always so goddamned exhausted.

I’m sure he wasn’t entirely thrilled working at the factory, either.

Despite this, mom always gave him shit. He was working too much, she said. He needed to spend more time with the kids, she said. Even then, I felt defensive regarding him. He was doing the best he could, giving it all he had, pushing himself to provide for us, and then he came home to a wife that tried to instill guilt in him over it. It infuriated me.

I work an hour or two overtime, I pick up an extra day at my shit job, and I feel miserable and raped of my free time, my freedom in general — yet I get to come home to a quiet, third-story, one-bedroom apartment where I live alone, no one there to nag me or kick me when I’m down, no one to guilt trip me — and still I find myself utterly loathing society and hating my life. I find myself needing to be alone, isolated from the world, to engage in my true passions.

So how the fuck did he do it?

The mindless minutae, the meaningless patterns, the mind-numbing redundancy: how did he survive psychologically all those years, all the way to retirement?