The Healing Journey

June 20, 2026

So many of us are conflicted by our relationships with our fathers. We love them, we can’t get along with them, we try to please them, we want to run from them, and we spend a lifetime in their shadows. This poem was written by a man who loved his father dearly and still tries to understand that person who raised a family of seven children despite “his woundedness and hurt.”

Breakdowns

By Brian D. Wallace

He was almost always ill at ease
Looking around the corner
For the next disaster
Which usually arrived on cue
the endless stream of breakdowns
Plumbing, electricity, cars, mowers
cracks, leaks, holes and spills
Everything falling apart, shot to hell
The misfires and malfunctions
Upending the day and his equilibrium
Leading us to the edge of catastrophe
Yet for all of that, his seven children survived him
It was as if he paid for our larger blessings
By enduring the unrelenting small misfortunes
The constant irritants and annoyances
That piled up into monthly bills
and galloping indigestion
Week after week, year after year
The steady failures, the comedy of errors
Ending in shot nerves, and imprecations
Our red-headed, beleaguered father of seven
one thing after another driving him to distraction
All his life, he must have felt abandoned
Born between wars and the Depression
Dogged by the specter of wrack and ruin
In his woundedness and hurt he defined us
Gave us our names and identity
He pushed us away but he always came home
We spent a lifetime trying to understand him–
The thin little orphan who protected us for so long.
(Brian D. Wallace is the former editor of Fairfield County Catholic.)

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