A Word About My Father

My father is an incredible man. It has taken me a lot longer to realize this than I wish it had, and I am glad that I know this now rather than later.

I don't always understand, or appreciate adequately, the way my dad pronounces, "I love you."

As I was growing up, it has sounded like, "Where are you going?" "Who are you with?" and "When are you going to be home?" It has often looked like criticism, sometimes like tough love, occasionally disguised itself as anger, and regularly rubbed me the wrong way because for almost 24 years, I have been listening with my ears instead of my heart.

My dad loves me so much.

He has put a roof over my head, clothes on my back, food in my mouth, band-aids on my knees, and displayed the kind of faith in me that most people only dream about.

When I was in college, my senior year, I had my thesis professor present me with a writing assignment of such a magnitude, to be completed in such a time constraint as I had never seen. I was utterly aghast. My dad said something to express his belief that I could get it done, and it came across like, "Quit bitching and do it." (I am sure that what he actually said was nothing close to that; I was so stressed out that he could have said, "What would you like for dinner?" and I would have heard, "Your life is fucked and you're going to die.") I screamed, "I HATE YOU!", got out of the car, slammed the door, and stalked off. It is the only time that I can remember ever saying those words to him, and I sincerely wish that I could travel back in time, shove them back into my mouth, chew them up, and spit them back into the depths of all things disgusting from which they came.

While the words that came out of my mouth said one thing, my heart said another. It said, "I am so worried that I am not the person you think I am that the only thing I can do right now is shove you away."

I don't know why it has to be so hard to be a parent. I don't know why being a kid means having to care so much about what your parents think. I just know that it is, and the best thing we can do on either side is try to be gentle with each other, and with ourselves.

He didn't yell at me, he didn't say, "I hate you too"; he didn't mope around in pain or sulk or give me the silent treatment (which I really couldn't blame him if he had). He let me know in his own way how much those words hurt, and I apologized, even though at the time I was still angry at him for believing in me at a time when I didn't believe in myself.

My dad was listening with his heart. He seems to have known something innately that all parents should know; children will forgive you almost anything, if you are there for them.

I think that bears repeating.

Children will forgive you almost anything, if you are there for them.

My dad has always been there for me, even when I had no idea that that's what he was doing, in the best ways he knows how.

There are a lot of things about my dad that I don't know, or don't understand - we can be going the same direction in a conversation and still inexplicably butt heads. A lot of it has to do with how similar we are; I find him to be lacking in tact, and myself to be lacking in oh-so-many-innumerable-things.

It simultaneously irks and amazes me.

The truth is, I am incredibly lucky to be like my dad.

I'll be more than blessed if I turn out to be only half of the person that he has shown himself to be.

P.S. I may type up the letter I gave him today, I may not. Either way, it made him cry. It was an awesome letter.