Years ago when I was in my twenties, my dad wrote me a letter. The effect it had was like a rock shattering plate glass. The note, written in his childlike half-cursive I knew from birthday cards, was brief, and the point was simple: He demanded I not attend a major family event at his house.
The crisp, embossed invitation mailed to my apartment a week prior had barely had time to collect a speck of dust. His wife of many decades (a woman who never could or would hide her disdain for me), he wrote, did not want me there. Her reasons were hidden, but her will was firm. The best I could tell was the past, that inconvenient one involving me, was not her thing.
I’d long been accustomed to the phantom strangeness divorce brings, but it surprised me just how much this letter, a few curt sentences, gnawed at me.
My parents had both remarried when I was in single digits, so I’d long been accustomed to the phantom strangeness divorce brings, but it surprised me just how much this letter, a few curt sentences, gnawed at me. No matter how many times my dad tried explaining over the phone in the following days, I couldn’t understand. “If he could do this, what else could he do?,” I asked myself while hanging up on him mid-sentence.
I usually think about this moment on Father’s Day. I am not a dad, still hope to be, but I have some worthy father figures and great friends who are fathers that I can celebrate and honor on this day, and I will spend the day doing so. But this dull, gray feeling will still be there. It’s a choice to cut off contact with my dad in the name of preserving my sanity, and I get that. But can I feel complete knowing we may never speak again? Parents really can surprise you with the choices you’re forced to make in time.
I wrestled then with this question as I do now. One of the few times I allowed myself to see him, several years post-letter, was on Thanksgiving, when his wife’s idea of a greeting and icebreaker was to say in front of her family that I looked fat. I was out of there. He begged me to meet him the next day in a nearby New England diner with red walls and velvet Elvis paintings. He showed up looking hollow in ill-fitting jeans pulled up too high on his waist, his wiry eyebrows unkempt. We looked everywhere but at each other. His wife did not join him and offered no apology.
I couldn’t tell why I was there. Still, I listened to his entreaties, barely convinced. I remember staring at his sinewy fingers and the awkward way they negotiated the handle on his coffee mug. He seemed to have as much of a grasp on his cup as he did his life.
I understood then I had the guy’s hands. These hands are kind of small for a guy my size and generally hairless save for a few fine, barely perceptible strands. Enough to command mild respect in a serious handshake and often small enough to get lost in one should someone have real meat hooks. His hands, or one of them, wrote to me and told me I was a problem for him and that he was subtracting me from an equation. Sometimes small hands cause big damage.
These hands that my dad gave me, they’ve also allowed me to take what I learned and do things I regret. I, too, have made people feel unloved and unworthy in things I have said and done. My father isn’t entirely to blame, of course, but he helped me arrive at a place where I felt marginal in my own family and in life, easy to cast aside, easy to keep in a box.
I understand many have it worse and many have it better. I’m thankful for some things and less so for others.
I gave him many chances, but his acts of charity or time he gave me somehow felt like consolation prizes.
My dad may have helped me out financially over the years. We even ate edibles together on a “bonding trip” and I watched his stoned face marvel as the sun set by the water on Cape Breton.
I gave him many chances, but his acts of charity or time he gave me somehow felt like consolation prizes. As long as he was unwilling to bring me into his life, his real life, I would be an outsider.
He had no idea who I really was, what interested me or how I felt about anything. And no amount of money, however helpful, or trips across the border, changed the fact that I was more like a casual friend to him, albeit one with similar features.
After our last trip, he said goodbye before driving away, never suggesting this time after decades and decades that I come to his house for a visit.
When I was young, my father had this line he used when he and my mother were divorcing. He’d say “I’m always with you, no matter where you are.” I’m sure he really believed it. And it’s true, just not in the way he thought: All I have to do is look down at my own hands, no matter where, to see the proof.
And while I may bristle at this fact, realizing what these hands that resemble his have done in the past, I know it is also my responsibility to use my hands differently — to make my life better, and better for those I love. To bring them closer, and not walk away when it matters most.