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Let me tell you a thing about my DAD
Shorty
touching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
touching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
I tell people my father is a cyborg.
What I mean by this is, he's got a mechanical heart valve. My stepmother claims that she can hear it ticking, just barely, between his breaths in the small hours of the morning. I'm not entirely sure I believe her, but I like the idea anyway.
He used to have a pig valve, which wore out. I remember going to see him in the hospital when he got that first surgery, twenty-three years ago. I was still small enough that he seemed like a giant; the day would come wherein I would learn that my dad was not the tallest man in the world, that, really, he was on the short side of average, but then I was in awe of his size. We had brought him a stuffed Oscar the Grouch, to keep him company during his stay--again, at the time this seemed appropriate, but now I know that this surely seemed silly to him. My father is not sentimental. Or, at least, he pretends not to be.
These days I wonder more and more if he's secretly sensitive, a man who feels deeply in his quiet way.
We walked into the room, and now I'm not sure if I remember it exactly how it happened, if maybe I have reconstructed this event over the course of two decades, rebuilt it into something that bears only a passing resemblance to what my mother or sister might recall. But here it is nonetheless: We, my mother and sister and I, walked into his hospital room, and my father was standing at the window, as tall as he ever would be, back to us, hands clasped behind him, gazing out the window, but also not out the window, looking for all the world like a man who had come close to death and not blinked, dignified and proud in the understated way of someone with no interest in proving it to anyone. Hospital gown notwithstanding. Then he turned, and looked at us, and smiled.
With what was once alarming frequency, people ask me what my father does for a living. I usually tell the truth, which is that I'm honestly not sure. He explained it to me a few times when I was growing up, but he got promoted frequently enough that I could never be sure if it was still true (and what the hell does a "systems consultant" do, anyway?). I know he is employed in the tech industry, by a company that manufactures fiberchannel switching equipment, but that's as far as I get--he could be a marketer or an engineer or an accountant for all I know.
This might seem like I don't care, but that isn't true. I would love to know what my dad does to make a buck, but he doesn't tell anyone about it. He says it's boring, that nobody would be interested, then by way of proof starts talking about trunk overrun failures, and it turns out he's completely right.
Perhaps incidentally, one of his favorite movies, one of the half-dozen or so he's ever owned an actual copy of, is True Lies.
On those occasions when I don't tell the truth about my father's profession, that's what I say: He is a spy. He is paid to steal The Documents or, in this day and age, The Hard Drive. Or whatever it is that spies actually do. And you know what's crazy?
People usually believe me. Especially if they actually know him.
I don't think it's how I sell it--I'm a good liar, but I don't think I'm that good. Apparently, he just seems like the type. He is unassuming but charming, eminently competent, and possesses a skillset of almost incomprehensible breadth. He can catch, gut, and cook any fish from trout to salmon, then go and build a carport or seal a driveway or build a house, teach a child how to pass a baseball or a football or a volleyball, tear apart an engine and put it back together, set up a wireless network, or cut down a tree, and has done all of these things. I've seen the proof. He is essentially a Washington-flavored version of Hank Hill. And he can dance, and tell a joke. And at my sister's wedding, he got drunk and hit on my date, and she was flattered.
So I know, intellectually, that my dad is a white-collar schmuck working a job he likes but nobody else could ever possibly give a shit about. Except, he might not be. He might be a spy.
When I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, the right age, at any rate, to have some stupid opinions and be utterly confident in them, I had an argument with him about homosexuals. I made the assertion that gays are not born, but "made gay by gay influences."
I know now that this statement would have seemed completely repulsive to him, and with good reason, because it totally is. But his response was not to raise his voice, or judge or condemn me. Instead, he said this:
"That's really not how people work. I know it might not seem that way right now, but maybe when you're older and you've had more experience, you'll understand that."
I didn't respond. It was not his words that gave me pause, but his tone: it seemed to suggest unfathomable disappointment and sadness, and resignation that I'd arrived at a position he found disgusting. And, despite this, he still respected me enough to suggest that it didn't have to be true.
My parents divorced shortly after his heart surgery. I've never asked him about it. I wanted to ask him for a long time, to confront him, ask him why he left me, but I lived with my mother for the following ten years and came to understand exactly why he couldn't stand her anymore.
But it has come up, as things do in conversation--well after the time when all reasonable people are in bed, and we've gotten to the point in the night when we're all too drunk to play trivial pursuit anymore, and it seems like a good idea to listen to the Cowboy Junkies or Pink Floyd or anything else that is more suited to the kind of introspection you don't want to talk about the next day, music that brings out the worst in groups, that behooves everyone to fill in the pauses in conversation with all of their saddest memories--the divorce and the next ten years where I saw my dad only every other weekend, when he wasn't around even when I needed him most. These things come up.
And in these moments, when, I am certain, he thinks I am not paying attention, he gets a look on his face. It is a look that only someone from a soul-crushingly repressed family like ours could ever recognize: a look of absolute abject shame.
So I don't bring this subject up. There was a time when I might have, when I was angry and bitter and frustrated with him and everything else in my life, and I would have relished the opportunity to hurt him, taking revenge for the worst part of my childhood. But as I get older, I find it hard to blame him. He was not an absentee: he was there on every single one of his arranged weekends, even when he was ill, and when he had finals to study for, and right after he remarried, times when no-one would have blamed him for asking our mother to keep us this time, just this once, I'll get the next, no problem. And he never made other plans at the same time, never left us alone, myself and my sister, always cooked breakfast for us (something my mother never, ever did), always made us feel like we were wanted, and not just another in a growing list of obligations. I've heard about far, far worse fathers from friends who weren't from supposed broken homes. It seems to me that he did the best he could.
So I let it go. It seemed unfair to do otherwise.
My father turns fifty-four this November. I respect the everloving shit out of him and when he is gone I will weep like a child. And I thought you should know.
tell me about your pops, SE++
or your moms or your sisters or brothers
tell me about your family
or something else
what's going on
What I mean by this is, he's got a mechanical heart valve. My stepmother claims that she can hear it ticking, just barely, between his breaths in the small hours of the morning. I'm not entirely sure I believe her, but I like the idea anyway.
He used to have a pig valve, which wore out. I remember going to see him in the hospital when he got that first surgery, twenty-three years ago. I was still small enough that he seemed like a giant; the day would come wherein I would learn that my dad was not the tallest man in the world, that, really, he was on the short side of average, but then I was in awe of his size. We had brought him a stuffed Oscar the Grouch, to keep him company during his stay--again, at the time this seemed appropriate, but now I know that this surely seemed silly to him. My father is not sentimental. Or, at least, he pretends not to be.
These days I wonder more and more if he's secretly sensitive, a man who feels deeply in his quiet way.
We walked into the room, and now I'm not sure if I remember it exactly how it happened, if maybe I have reconstructed this event over the course of two decades, rebuilt it into something that bears only a passing resemblance to what my mother or sister might recall. But here it is nonetheless: We, my mother and sister and I, walked into his hospital room, and my father was standing at the window, as tall as he ever would be, back to us, hands clasped behind him, gazing out the window, but also not out the window, looking for all the world like a man who had come close to death and not blinked, dignified and proud in the understated way of someone with no interest in proving it to anyone. Hospital gown notwithstanding. Then he turned, and looked at us, and smiled.
With what was once alarming frequency, people ask me what my father does for a living. I usually tell the truth, which is that I'm honestly not sure. He explained it to me a few times when I was growing up, but he got promoted frequently enough that I could never be sure if it was still true (and what the hell does a "systems consultant" do, anyway?). I know he is employed in the tech industry, by a company that manufactures fiberchannel switching equipment, but that's as far as I get--he could be a marketer or an engineer or an accountant for all I know.
This might seem like I don't care, but that isn't true. I would love to know what my dad does to make a buck, but he doesn't tell anyone about it. He says it's boring, that nobody would be interested, then by way of proof starts talking about trunk overrun failures, and it turns out he's completely right.
Perhaps incidentally, one of his favorite movies, one of the half-dozen or so he's ever owned an actual copy of, is True Lies.
On those occasions when I don't tell the truth about my father's profession, that's what I say: He is a spy. He is paid to steal The Documents or, in this day and age, The Hard Drive. Or whatever it is that spies actually do. And you know what's crazy?
People usually believe me. Especially if they actually know him.
I don't think it's how I sell it--I'm a good liar, but I don't think I'm that good. Apparently, he just seems like the type. He is unassuming but charming, eminently competent, and possesses a skillset of almost incomprehensible breadth. He can catch, gut, and cook any fish from trout to salmon, then go and build a carport or seal a driveway or build a house, teach a child how to pass a baseball or a football or a volleyball, tear apart an engine and put it back together, set up a wireless network, or cut down a tree, and has done all of these things. I've seen the proof. He is essentially a Washington-flavored version of Hank Hill. And he can dance, and tell a joke. And at my sister's wedding, he got drunk and hit on my date, and she was flattered.
So I know, intellectually, that my dad is a white-collar schmuck working a job he likes but nobody else could ever possibly give a shit about. Except, he might not be. He might be a spy.
When I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, the right age, at any rate, to have some stupid opinions and be utterly confident in them, I had an argument with him about homosexuals. I made the assertion that gays are not born, but "made gay by gay influences."
I know now that this statement would have seemed completely repulsive to him, and with good reason, because it totally is. But his response was not to raise his voice, or judge or condemn me. Instead, he said this:
"That's really not how people work. I know it might not seem that way right now, but maybe when you're older and you've had more experience, you'll understand that."
I didn't respond. It was not his words that gave me pause, but his tone: it seemed to suggest unfathomable disappointment and sadness, and resignation that I'd arrived at a position he found disgusting. And, despite this, he still respected me enough to suggest that it didn't have to be true.
My parents divorced shortly after his heart surgery. I've never asked him about it. I wanted to ask him for a long time, to confront him, ask him why he left me, but I lived with my mother for the following ten years and came to understand exactly why he couldn't stand her anymore.
But it has come up, as things do in conversation--well after the time when all reasonable people are in bed, and we've gotten to the point in the night when we're all too drunk to play trivial pursuit anymore, and it seems like a good idea to listen to the Cowboy Junkies or Pink Floyd or anything else that is more suited to the kind of introspection you don't want to talk about the next day, music that brings out the worst in groups, that behooves everyone to fill in the pauses in conversation with all of their saddest memories--the divorce and the next ten years where I saw my dad only every other weekend, when he wasn't around even when I needed him most. These things come up.
And in these moments, when, I am certain, he thinks I am not paying attention, he gets a look on his face. It is a look that only someone from a soul-crushingly repressed family like ours could ever recognize: a look of absolute abject shame.
So I don't bring this subject up. There was a time when I might have, when I was angry and bitter and frustrated with him and everything else in my life, and I would have relished the opportunity to hurt him, taking revenge for the worst part of my childhood. But as I get older, I find it hard to blame him. He was not an absentee: he was there on every single one of his arranged weekends, even when he was ill, and when he had finals to study for, and right after he remarried, times when no-one would have blamed him for asking our mother to keep us this time, just this once, I'll get the next, no problem. And he never made other plans at the same time, never left us alone, myself and my sister, always cooked breakfast for us (something my mother never, ever did), always made us feel like we were wanted, and not just another in a growing list of obligations. I've heard about far, far worse fathers from friends who weren't from supposed broken homes. It seems to me that he did the best he could.
So I let it go. It seemed unfair to do otherwise.
My father turns fifty-four this November. I respect the everloving shit out of him and when he is gone I will weep like a child. And I thought you should know.
tell me about your pops, SE++
or your moms or your sisters or brothers
tell me about your family
or something else
what's going on
Shorty on
+73
Posts
I don't know where he'll land, but I know what I hope
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Sometimes I wonder if my Dad and I are related at all.
His favorite band is the Eagles.
He doesn't read fiction. Ever. His bookshelf is filled with things like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
His favorite sweets are those awful giant jelly gumdrops.
He's great at mechanical stuff- cars, carpentry, etc.
He's incredibly outgoing and energetic.
He's perfectly happy living on an island in the South Pacific, whereas I would go nuts if I spent a week there.
Sometimes it's scary how much we are alike
We both have struggled with obesity most of our adult lives
We both have the same smile and hairline
We both love driving
We both love to cook
Along with dozens of mannerisms that I never noticed until my brothers or stepmom point them out.
I have 2 brothers, first is 1 year younger than me, other is 6 years younger. I get along much better with the youngest, our personalities match.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
He's a good work guy. Better work ethic than i will ever have. not the smartest with money, or the bravest, and he always wants to be the good guy, but these are not the worst flaws.
Dad's always had anger issues.
When I started on with adolescent depression, he started on with trying to beat it out of me.
Sometimes I'm afraid I'm just like him.
Before all this he grew up poor in a rich part of San Antonio, played football in school and had a free ride with the Longhorns until a double concussion put him out of football for good. Then he went to college and lived on a ranch with his best friend and a pet raccoon named Rocky. I've seen pictures, it was goddamned adorable.
I used to work with him. Hell from the time I was 12 to about 27 we worked together in the family construction business. Now I live 7 hours away and only see him a few times a year. We're getting together in the fall to go camping, then again during rut to go hunting.
Honestly? Dude's my best friend.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
Then I screwed up a bunch in college and he was pretty mad at me for awhile. I had moved out for a few years and when I have to move back, my sister had moved out and him and my mom had divorced, he wasn't use to people living there again, we butt heads a lot, didn't get along. I'm pretty sure he thought about killing me in my sleep at one point.
After awhile we got use to each other and he saw how hard I had been working to fix my past mistakes. To get through school . All that stuff, and I saw how hard he was still working, even without kids to support or a wife.
Now we exist in the weird space. I call him once a week, we talk a bit, catch up. He doesn't really get how college works, but respects that I'm working full time and in school full time.
But I'm afraid of him still. Not of his rage. But of his disappointment. More then anything I want to succeed in school, start a career, want to become a father myself, because I know he will be proud of me.
Long story short: My dad and I are complex. Respect him to death and we have a very interesting sort of familia love.
He doesn't approve of my choice of career because academics and community work aren't manly enough.
I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm gay because of it, and he really doesn't like that.
Quiet, hardworking, humble. And instead of getting more and more bigoted as he ages, which it seems many old people do, he's getting more and more open-minded and willing to consider alternate perspectives.
He can do pretty much anything you might reasonably expect of a person to do, wire up a house, lay tiling, build a picket fence, rebuild a car from the ground up. He's the opposite of my Mum in that he never loses his temper - I never even heard him swear until I was a teenager. Mum has a short fuse and swears like a sailor.
I don't think he could be a snob or pretentious if he tried.
I try to be more like him every day.
For example near as I can remember he did not show emotion outside of anger or the odd laugh for like 29 years. I just sorta accepted thats how he and in turn I am. Quiet solemn guys
Then my neices were born and he is totally a doting grandpa
My mind is blown
Same here but then he moved in with me and my brother and died almost 2 years ago
He is younger than me, and I know I helped raise him when (living with a single mom) our mom was working almost every hour she wasn't sleeping. But when I saw him become everything I wanted to be in highschool, non-judgemental easy to be around, excellent musician and well respected throughout the school, then later watched him grow up to be really cool with himself and totally has healthy ways to deal with anger and stress, doesn't let others push him around and makes his own path for himself because he knows what he wants and needs to be happy.
If I ever have to claim the one good thing I did, it was help him become the person he is today. He is my favorite.
I just got the quote for it.
It's over ten grand.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
Satans..... hints.....
That sounds... awkward at best.
you don't even want to know how awkward it was
Appreciate your nice dads if you have them is what I am saying!
painting the inside or the outside
the inside I can't understand anybody hiring painters for
Because painting fucking sucks?
and it goes pretty quick if you've got at least one other person to help you
I feel the same way about trimming trees and cutting them down with chainsaws.
But most people hire somebody to do that.
I could see hiring somebody to do a tree because messing that up could get you hurt
Painters just cost so much money that the idea seems ridiculous to me
Plus when you do it yourself you paint dicks all over the walls
He's just an imperfect man with a lot of personal problems that he never really overcame and won't really get help to deal with, and this really screwed him up and led to him being kind of a shitty father in some respects.
But I look back on my life and anywhere my father has failed me, he never did so out of malice or a lack of care. I have never in my life doubted that my father loves me, and I have never really felt like I hated my dad. He just is who is, flaws and all, and by age 30 I have overcome most (if not all) of the meaningful ways in which his mistakes as a parent affected me.
All that said, the unfortunate reality of my father's personal problems (most notably, his alcoholism and untreated mental illness) are such that I have to keep him at an emotional arm's length. I can't allow my father to be too close. I call him every couple of months, visit with him a couple times a year if at all (last time I saw my father face-to-face was two years ago), and in general sort of keep my distance from his life and keep him distant from mine. His alcoholism, his depression, his money problems, his paranoia, they're all this incredibly dark vortex that sucks in everyone who gets too close to him and drags them into his horrible world of self-destruction. For many, many years I kept getting drawn into this vortex because at the end of the day I do love my father and I want him to get better.
But he's not ready to get better. Something I learned in my own struggles with substance abuse is the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. My father won't admit he's an alcoholic. He won't admit he's mentally ill. He won't see a therapist or a psychiatrist, he won't go to meetings. He in no way will get meaningful help for his problems. There is only so many times you can extend your hand to a person and have it slapped away before you sadly just stop reaching.
So I keep in touch with my dad, keep up to date with what's going on in his life, and when I talk with him just sorta carefully tease out if he's ready to admit he needs help yet. If a day comes where he is, I'll be there to help him, but it's gotta start with him wanting the help first. If he admits he needs help, tries, and fails, that's okay. I won't give up on him. But he's gotta try, and until he's ready to try all I can do is just be polite and friendly to him and keep him a bit distant, because it hurts too much to have someone in your life like that who just rips themselves apart.
The last time I heard him saying anything to anyone in my family was when he found out one of my sisters, Michelle, had a mixed-race baby with a black man, and emailed oldest sister, Tracy, saying "I'll never be able to get over the fact that I have a (n-word) for a granddaughter."
Suffice to say, the whole family basically isn't talking to him anymore, although I'm the only one out of us who deliberately told HIM to piss off instead of the other way around. This is because I'm the only one of my siblings who was raised alone by him and had no one else to protect them from the worst of his crazy bullshit while growing up. Both my sisters had each other, at least, and my mother was never really subject to his authority and so he never really took it out on her.
For seven years I was stuck with him, and I'm never putting up with that crazy jackass again, on his own terms.
I'll be willing to talk to him if and when he's willing to at least SAY that he's sorry for what he's done. In other words, probably never.
twenty five years later he was diagnosed as bipolar and now the only thing he believes in is the San Antonio Spurs and taking naps
i speak to him about once every two or three years
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
I dunno, it's hard to explain.
My mother is a massive loon and a bigot and spiteful of everyone and everything. She has tunnel vision in life, zero critical-thinking ability, and is very child-like regarding things she wants; it has to be now and if it isn't 100% as she wanted she will flip her shit, to the point of accusing people (including us, her kids) of purposely messing with her. She also lies a lot. And she is never interested in hearing what people have to say. Oh plus, what my dad did about achievements in life and such, she does too.
I should write about the surrogate parents I've had in life maybe since they were actually positive influences in my life. Next post!
my dad had a happy upbringing in spite of his father having health problems due to a childhood of literal coal mining and, later, a very serious head injury while working coupling railroad cars, and in spite of his mother being a malicious crazy person. he went to college to major in history and after graduating worked construction for a bit, before he managed to get a--hooray--government job in the district. he lived "at home" for a good while, got his master's, and then was able to move to a part of central maryland that at the time was still mostly empty fields to pursue breeding, training, and racing standardbred horses. the last bit was a defining feature of who he was and explains why he did not get married for as long as he did: most people find it a challenge to exist in close proximity to one or more horses, and to compete with them for attention. eventually, though, he met my mom, and they got married and were very happy together.
they got out of racing years after i was born, when i was still young, because they wanted to focus on my sister and me, and also because the money for purses had dried up. racing was dying, and now it is dead, more or less. most of the horses were sold off. one continued living in the backyard accepting handfuls of grass from the neighbor kids and keeping the deer out. i did not know this was an unusual state of affairs for some time.
my sister and i were not perfect kids. there was bickering between us and with our parents when we were little and when we were bigger, about some things that were important and a lot of stuff that wasn't. i regret that any of it ever happened. sometimes they squabbled with each other, sometimes heatedly, but only ever with words and they always made up. my mom and dad did the very best they could with us, which is all that anyone can ask, and most of what i am now i owe to their effort.
my mom passed away three years ago. we all miss her.
so that's an incredibly sparse outline of each of their lives. i don't know if anyone will like reading it, but i liked typing it. there's more, so much more to each of them, interests and issues that they shared with me and things i'm sure they didn't. my dad enjoyed competitive powerlifting when he was younger and continues to, in C.E. 2013, enjoy the mattel intellivision. my mom loved reading and wanted her kids to love reading, which i do. neither of them was a great cook, but my dad is way worse. my dad loves football; my mom at best tolerated football but appreciated it as an excuse to get folks together to talk and laugh and drink cheap beer. they were both catholic and politically quite liberal, and reconciled conflicts between the two by tossing aside the bits of the former that they disagreed with, stressing that ultimately it was mainly important to just try to be kind. i think, i hope, that she was and he is proud of the (few, comparatively less interesting) things i've done with my life.
i am very, very lucky that they were my parents.
steam | xbox live: IGNORANT HARLOT | psn: MadRoll | nintendo network: spinach
3ds: 1504-5717-8252
He showed up and raised my brothers and I as his own. We didn't always see eye to eye, but he was younger than he should have been and trying to learn as we grew. He was a truck driver, and loved what he did, I spent my summers in the cab rolling along the highways with him just looking, watching, listening, and most importantly talking. It took me a long time to realize everything he had done for us, but I appreciated everything, and I let him know.
He passed away last year at 39 from leukemia.
Ooh wait one more: So when my older brother was still a baby, my mom was driving home from work while my dad was home looking after him. She got rear-ended, and the car was totalled. After calling home four or five times from a payphone and not having any body pick up, she finally gets home to find him asleep on the couch, with my brother in the crib nearby. Completely dead to the world, didn't wake up from the phone ringing, not even stirring the slightest at the noise of her coming in. Then my brother makes some little gurgling noise as babies are wont to do, and my dad is up at his side making sure he's okay.