Growing up, my dad and I always fought. As an adult, I want to find out why

Now or Never15:50Levi Garber and his father reconnect over liver and onions

Growing up Levi Garber and his dad Les had a tumultuous relationship. One year in high school, they barely spoke to each other at all. As an adult, Levi wanted to know why, so he flew back home to Winnipeg to tackle the tough conversation.

This First Person column is written by Levi Garber, who is a journalist and CBC producer in Toronto. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

I turned on the stove, poured some oil into a pan and chopped up some onions to throw in. Standing in the kitchen of my childhood home as it fills with the sweet scent of the caramelizing onions, my dad picks up a tightly wrapped package from the deli and unravels it. 

I've flown to my hometown of Winnipeg from Toronto, where I currently live and work, for this meal. But not because I enjoy the smell or even the taste.

I'm about to start cooking fried liver with my dad because I want to understand why we had such a bad relationship when I was younger. It's been more than five years since I left the house, and now that we're both older, I want to finally have a real conversation with him about the feelings that forced us apart.

I want to finally have a real conversation with him about the feelings that forced us apart.- Levi Garber

As the liver begins to sizzle, I realize we've never really cooked together before. I chose fried liver because it's something my grandmother, Janet, used to cook for him every Monday when he was growing up, and my dad seems excited to eat it again. 

Janet Garber was a Holocaust survivor who came to Canada in the 1940s, met my grandfather, Ed, and had my dad. They both died before I was born, but I have always known that in my family, like so many other Jewish families I grew up around, the legacy of the Holocaust impacts so many parts of our lives. We were taught to always be pragmatic and keep our emotions to ourselves.

My three brothers and I grew up like that, and so did my dad. I always felt like he got along better with my brothers — and that I was on my own.

As the liver fried, and filled the house with an intensely earthy and eye-wateringly noxious scent, I think back to all the loud shouting matches my dad and I used to have in this kitchen. Sometimes our arguments were about bad grades or something I'd done to tick him off, and other times I just wanted to get on his nerves because I was struggling with my own mental health and needed to lash out. Then, for a whole year in high school, I almost didn't talk to him at all. 

I thought, maybe if I got to know what my dad's upbringing was like, I could get a better sense of why our relationship was so sour. So I asked my dad to take me to his parents' grave — a place he's never brought any of his children before. 

The drive to the cemetery is a long one, so while we're in the car — buckled up and unable to escape an awkward conversation even if we tried — I started asking him personal questions about our relationship. Why were we always fighting? Why didn't he have the same kind of connection with me that he did with my brothers? Was he disappointed in how I turned out? 

Why was it so hard for us to just talk?

I expected my dad to shut these questions down and offer only curt shrugs, but to my surprise, he opened up. He admitted that even though he doesn't know exactly why we had trouble connecting, he knows he didn't try hard enough with me. And at times, my angst and anger was so intense that he backed away because he was afraid of me. 

Hearing that my dad was actually afraid of my anger shocked me. I never thought he was scared of me. I just assumed that my dad was angry, too.

While I'm processing what he's said, my dad told me something else that surprised me. When he was younger, my dad went through a lot of the same feelings about his own parents. He didn't think they understood him very well and they would clash about some of the same things he and I argued over. But at one point, he decided to accept his parents as they were and stop worrying too much about what they thought of his decisions. 

By the time we finally got to the cemetery, I realized I related to my dad's experience. We pretty much felt the same way about our parents growing up. The only difference is that I got the chance to talk to my dad about it.

Over his parents' grave, all I can think about is how so much pain and frustration could have been saved if we'd had a conversation like that earlier in my life. But as my dad talks about his mother's story of fleeing the Nazis, surviving the Holocaust and moving to Canada to start a family, I realize that our family's trauma kept us quiet about sharing feelings and emotions with each other. 

And it has led to a lot of regret. 

Now that I know more about why my dad is the way he is, I regret that I was so furious with him. I regret that we didn't have a closer relationship. And I regret that those teenage years feel like they are lost to a cloud of anger and fear.

But reconnecting with my dad, and discovering all these things about his life that I would never have known if I didn't ask, feels like a relief. I'm relieved that we're now on the same page about how things were between us.

And now that we're both adults and I don't rely on my parents for everything anymore, I feel like we can have a new kind of relationship. One that isn't filled with doubts about the choices we both made. And might push us to be more open and honest with each other.

He and I are much more similar than I ever thought - but, for the record, I still hate fried liver.

Levi Garber is an associate producer with CBC Radio in Toronto. You can reach him at levi.garber@cbc.ca or on Twitter at @LeviGarber.

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