When I called my dad to wish him a happy birthday, I didn’t know he was turning sixty. I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot of a bar in Santa Cruz as the sun was going down. We hadn’t spoken in two years, and that was only five minutes. Before that, we hadn’t spoken in thirteen years.
My dad was sitting in his car and when he picked up the phone, it took him a second to figure out it was me. He was also sitting in his truck in his driveway after coming back from a birthday dinner. We talked for an hour, and as nervous as I was dialing the phone, it went away as soon as he answered the phone.
We determined the best course of action was to move forward and not talk about the past. We’d never be on the same page anyway. Memory is a funny thing. It shapes ideas and perceptions, but is completely vulnerable to interpretation and manipulation. Even though it is all we have to depend on, it can never be fully trusted. Which doesn’t say anyone is right or wrong; there may not be a right or wrong.
When I had lunch with him and maybe it was that we both looked so different, or that we were so alike, but we got along. We sit the same way, we react the same way, we tell the same jokes. They’re not always funny, but we always laugh.
Five years before that lunch, when I got sober, I was still using words like always and never. My dad was a never. Someone I trusted told me it would change, and I always disagreed. Even as it was changing, I didn’t buy into it.
I never really felt like I had parents I could depend on. That may or may not be true, but it’s what I believed. In looking at the past, I only saw where they fell short and where they could have done better, but simply didn’t.
Instead, I carried this idea that they should try to make it right. Even just admitting they made mistakes would have helped. In the years I was making consistently bad decisions, I knew the majority of them were wrong at the time, I just didn’t care. Rarely did I suffer from the kind of delusion that prevented me from having to justify my choices; and my parents provided an endless list of how I was shorted and what I was owed.
Looking back, I absolutely needed them to be wrong to continue living how I was living. If it wasn’t for them, I could be happy. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have to get high all the time. If it wasn’t for them, I’d be able to love someone else who loved me back. Healing those relationships would rob me of the most useful and manipulative excuses to make selfish choices that kept me a victim.
Years passed until I realized I kept a secret list of things I held onto just in case I needed an excuse to fuck everything up again. My dad was on the top of that list, and I thought if I didn’t fix the relationship with the first man I had ever known, I had no chance of having a healthy one with any man in the future; that idea prompted the first phone call to him.
It didn’t go particularly well. There was no great feeling afterwards, just the awkward felling that I was losing something. I had so few good memories of my dad, and the rest were pretty negative. So in letting go of him being a bad person, I was letting go of most of what I knew of him. I was letting go of him completely.
My relationship with him today is one of the best ones I have. He’s shown up for me in ways that defied every idea I had about him, me, and fathers and sons in general. He’s my dad today. He’s not a monster, or a villain, or a bad person. He’s a guy who made some mistakes and is making it right.
I understand that on so many levels.
B
My dad was sitting in his car and when he picked up the phone, it took him a second to figure out it was me. He was also sitting in his truck in his driveway after coming back from a birthday dinner. We talked for an hour, and as nervous as I was dialing the phone, it went away as soon as he answered the phone.
We determined the best course of action was to move forward and not talk about the past. We’d never be on the same page anyway. Memory is a funny thing. It shapes ideas and perceptions, but is completely vulnerable to interpretation and manipulation. Even though it is all we have to depend on, it can never be fully trusted. Which doesn’t say anyone is right or wrong; there may not be a right or wrong.
When I had lunch with him and maybe it was that we both looked so different, or that we were so alike, but we got along. We sit the same way, we react the same way, we tell the same jokes. They’re not always funny, but we always laugh.
Five years before that lunch, when I got sober, I was still using words like always and never. My dad was a never. Someone I trusted told me it would change, and I always disagreed. Even as it was changing, I didn’t buy into it.
I never really felt like I had parents I could depend on. That may or may not be true, but it’s what I believed. In looking at the past, I only saw where they fell short and where they could have done better, but simply didn’t.
Instead, I carried this idea that they should try to make it right. Even just admitting they made mistakes would have helped. In the years I was making consistently bad decisions, I knew the majority of them were wrong at the time, I just didn’t care. Rarely did I suffer from the kind of delusion that prevented me from having to justify my choices; and my parents provided an endless list of how I was shorted and what I was owed.
Looking back, I absolutely needed them to be wrong to continue living how I was living. If it wasn’t for them, I could be happy. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have to get high all the time. If it wasn’t for them, I’d be able to love someone else who loved me back. Healing those relationships would rob me of the most useful and manipulative excuses to make selfish choices that kept me a victim.
Years passed until I realized I kept a secret list of things I held onto just in case I needed an excuse to fuck everything up again. My dad was on the top of that list, and I thought if I didn’t fix the relationship with the first man I had ever known, I had no chance of having a healthy one with any man in the future; that idea prompted the first phone call to him.
It didn’t go particularly well. There was no great feeling afterwards, just the awkward felling that I was losing something. I had so few good memories of my dad, and the rest were pretty negative. So in letting go of him being a bad person, I was letting go of most of what I knew of him. I was letting go of him completely.
My relationship with him today is one of the best ones I have. He’s shown up for me in ways that defied every idea I had about him, me, and fathers and sons in general. He’s my dad today. He’s not a monster, or a villain, or a bad person. He’s a guy who made some mistakes and is making it right.
I understand that on so many levels.
B
Posted by Peanut Butter And Jealous 
