Happy Father's Day
The letter I received a few days ago put a spell on me, threw me into the memories of the past and into the unknown path ahead of me where I don't yet know what to do, what to say. But every minute I spend in the future or the past is a minute I subtract from my life here and now.
I haven't figured out how to tell my birth daughter about her paternity. She asked, but I didn't answer. I said that the year of her birth was exceptionally painful and difficult and I wanted to get to know her a little before I told her, and not over email, but over the phone, voice to voice, breath to breath. It bought me a little time.
I keep thinking of my father, the place I grew up, the way I think of my father when I think of my parents. I never saw my mother disagree with him. I used to wonder if they had the same thoughts, the same ideas, the same needs. By the time I started school, I noticed I went out of my way to avoid conflict with my father, and found myself echoing my mother's patterns of agreement. His hold was mystical. He always had a thousand good ideas and a thousand better ones to explain why they were so good. Failure wasn't in his vocabulary, and that expectancy rolled out and carpeted the rest of the family.
I didn't find out my father's big secret until I was an adult. At the age of eighteen, he flunked out of college. Smoking and drinking and gambling took the place of studying and classes, and my father left school in disgrace. The first in his family to make it through high school, my father couldn't tell my custodian grandfather and shoe factory worker grandmother that he failed. He ran away and joined the Army, and romanced and married my mother while he was stationed at Fort Knox.
He never touched a cigarette, never picked up a beer while we were growing up. When my father first told me this story my first thought was "so what." He had made something of himself, had worked hard in the Army, worked his way through school, and had a Ph.D. in education by the time I found out. None of those months so long ago had any bearing on where he was at that moment. But as I watched my father tell the story, I saw the shame in his eyes, and behind the sparse words I knew there was much more I would never hear.
We have only this moment. I know this now, know this because of long nights lying awake in emotional pain. I know this because of long days walking railroads and picking strawberries. I know this. But like my dad, I keep thinking of the past and the ways I wish it were different. I have to tell myself "so what" now. So what. It was a long time ago. It happened. I grew past it, through it, because of it. My daughter will understand.
8:08:12 PM 
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