The Reckoning

My dad is the only father I know who received an instruction manual on parenting.

Soon after I was born and my personality emerged, my enneagram-5-father recognized that we speak different languages. The spirit that moves in me is un-tame-able in ways he had never seen before. I was boisterous and performative, enamored with spice and variety and anything vaguely Bohemian. It wasn’t the fact that I played dress up that tipped him off, it was that I chose to dress up as Bizet’s Carmen, and requested castanets for my third birthday. Something about a precocious girl who dressed (and sang) like a French-singing alto whore made him wonder if I might need a different sort of cultivation climate.

So he did the five thing and bought books about the enneagram. Studied new ways to speak and listen. How to make time special for both of us.

Fives are hermits - the type that adores spending time with plenty of books or PBS or instructing and imparting their encyclopedic knowledge to other humans. They happily cancelled their plans in March of 2020, those fives with access to ample food and internet, and were ready to socially distance indefinitely. Maybe, they thought, I’ll finally get through that pile of books on my nightstand, or the one next to the couch, or possibly even the ones in the cellar.

His five-ness drove him to buy a few volumes about the Enneagram, sometime in 1984 when I started to socially butterfly and play the violin for an audience.

He cried the battle cry of enneagram pros everywhere,

"Oh f*ck! A four!”

Me - last time I rocked a center part. Him - probably still has (and wears) that shirt