When I was thirteen, we began to fight. Before then, you had been my best coach, guiding me through sports and supporting me with sporadic sage advice through my odd preteen years; if my life was the Nantucket Sound, Mom was the boat keeping me from drowning, but you were the anchor keeping me level. Suddenly, it was like the ties were severed. Somewhere in my head, I must have known that nothing had changed on your end, but in my newfound teenage arrogance, I found your words oppressive and harsh. I began to fight back, refusing to ever hold my tongue, and began a stubborn war. You stopped coaching me in softball that year, and when I got to high school the year after, you retreated to the far corner of the rink at all of my ice hockey games.
When I was fifteen, you resumed giving me profound advice in the smallest of doses. In those moments, when I was sobbing and you were sitting across from me on my bed, it felt like we had never fought before. But then the next day, when I had wiped away my last tears and the world had continued to spin despite the gravity every day pressed on me, we would retreat to our corners and hash it out once more.
When I was seventeen, I wrote a “Daddy” poem about you: dark and furious, I drafted my own version of Sylvia Plath's piece for Creative Writing class. And it felt good. It was everything I finally understood about why I was always so angry at you, but could never say. I still can't; I never showed you the poem and I don’t think I ever will. I was so angry, Dad. You had raised me to be an adult ever since I was a child, and I was so appreciative of that. But you weren’t ready to see me as an adult yet, and that frustrated me to no end. And because you and I are more alike than not - stubborn to a fault, steadfast in our thinking, loyal to our core - we continued to fight that same fight over and over. We kept running into each other’s walls.
When I was eighteen, just as suddenly as the war had began, all of the things I’d ever resented you for evaporated. Aside from Mom and Aud helping me move in, you were the first person to come visit me at school. I cried so much the day you left not only because I wanted to go home with you and pick up the life I had always deemed “normal” - the five of us around the dinner table, the five of us spread across the couches - but because you gave me the thing I wanted most: your approval. I had wanted you to acknowledge that you had, indeed, raised me right. We went out to dinner, we joked about terrible ice cream, and I felt like you listened -not just heard- when I spoke. When you left, I realized I had had your approval all along, just in different ways.
There are days still when I want to scream at you and feel us falling back into old patterns, where one of us speaks and the other disagrees, all hell breaking loose. But those days have grown more far and few between, standing as a testament to how much things have changed this past year.
I don’t think I’ve ever told you how grateful I am for how you’ve helped shape the person I’ve become and am constantly becoming. I know you remind me all the time of the ways in which I am so much like Mom, but you neglect to notice the similarities between us unless it’s a problem we both need to solve. Surely, though, you notice that I don’t quit things easily, and I always make time for what makes me happy, and I try to be as teachable as I can be, and I would do anything for those I love, and, while I’m not as good at it as you are, I try to pick between X and Y because if I do X then I can’t do Y. And I have your smile which takes over my face, so much so that my eyes squint shut. You’ll shake your head when I say it sometimes reminds me of you while I’m away at school, but I know you’re probably smiling now, too.
