Father’s Day
It can be hard to write heartfelt entries on a stupid blog about very real, very personal things. Yet when other people post such entries, I rejoice. So here’s the best I can do while protecting some details that needn’t be in the public domain.
It’s Father’s Day. I have been spending the last two weeks with my father in Reno. They have been a hard couple of weeks. They’ve been a hard couple of weeks because we’ve had a hard decade - respectively and as a pair. My dad and I have moments wherein we are able to demonstrate an amazing level of support for one another. We also have our moments wherein we’re getting in a fight about a gum wrapper. We also have our moments wherein we’re saying exactly the worst possible thing we could say, unintentionally tailored to wound the other with such impressive detail that it should be studied by anthropologists centuries down the line.
There are factors at work here that we can’t control and that I can’t speak on in detail. But I can say that we each have our own very deep, very selfish problems that when put together have some kind of chemical reaction, which make them bigger, worse, and more selfishly needy for attention than they are when with anyone else. I can pretty much nail down all our problems to three sources:
1. I grew up 600 miles away from him.
2. He had a really shitty second wife.
3. Everything that happened when 1 and 2 conflicted.
To our credit, we keep trying with each other and we keep letting the other try. And that, I guess, is the message I wanted to come to. Shit is hard and shit may always be hard, but we each slog away at it because we love each other. Because he’s my dad and I’m his daughter and that is supposed to mean something. So we make it mean something.
Happy Father’s Day, Tumblr.
