My Father

Lately, my thoughts have been on my father.

When I was fifteen, I started to hate him. Too many reasons. My mother once said—You two are very alike. That is why you fight. The truest reason of all the countless reasons. When I still lived at home, and if the both of us were angry at the same time, it was unbearable for everyone. Among all my cousins, I am the first to go away to college—two hours away. And it was because of my father. I loved my family, but needed to escape my father. I hated him all the time we drove up to my university, all the time he helped me unload my luggage into my dorm room, all the time he kept giving me advice. And then we were standing next to the family van. Everyone else—my mother and my three siblings—were in the van already, and it was time for the family to go away and leave me in peace. My father stood next to me, and then started crying. Loud sobs, sniffles, a big mess. He reached out and hugged me. He whispered—I will miss you so much. Take care of yourself. I knew he was asking for more—he was asking me to forgive him for all the mean ways he had treated me. My anger and hate melted. I couldn’t say anything. How can it be that this is the only time I can remember my father hugging me? I was 19, and it was the first time my father had ever hugged me. Even though it took months, I learned to love and respect my father again.

Sometimes, people ask me if I love women because I hated my father so much when I was a teenager. No. I love women because I fall in love with women. What does my father have to do with it? I am not a man-hater. I have more guy friends than girl friends. If anything, I aspire to be more like my father because I respect the way he treats women. His whole life—except when he fought in the Vietnam War, his best friends have been women. I’ve never told him that I’m gay, but I don’t think it’s necessary. We talk about women very matter-of-factly. I ask him to describe a beautiful woman for me, and he does. I ask him to tell me about his relationships with the women he’s loved before my mother, and he does. I ask him about the best ways to treat a woman, and he does. One of the few ways that my father and I are different is that he can easily approach women and I can’t.

Sometimes, I wonder if I was meant to be a boy, his son, and then things would make more sense, but my father treats me like his son/daughter now, and I am content with that. He’s passed down his history to me, he’s slowly teaching me how to make a home a home, and with his life, he’s showing me how to deal with pain, disappointment, and loss.

I think—of all the people I know, I know my father best. And yet, he harbors more secrets than he’ll ever tell me. I have written more words about him than about anyone else I know. He is the villain and hero of my stories. He is the most complicated, complex person I know. Someday, when I finally publish my first book, it will be about him. By writing about him—his weaknesses, mistakes, prejudices, all of the ugly as well as the good—I have learned about myself too.

When I was younger, I would look at women I loved deeply, and I would say to myself—There, that’s a woman who I aspire to be. I admired women who were most unlike me. I admired women for their strengths without seeing any of their weaknesses. That sort of admiration is not something I can grow on. These women don’t show me what to do with my weaknesses, fears, self-hatreds. My admiration for these women was false, based on surface appearances. Finally, now, truly, I think that I aspire to be like my father. If someday I can give a woman and our children as good of a home as my father has given all of us, then I would have become as good of a person as I’m capable of being.

Shopping with my father

My motto is that I don’t shop for pleasure. The only things I enjoy buying are food and books and toys (magnets, water buffaloes, legos—all thrift store brought). I realized I have been lying to myself when I went shopping with my father. He makes shopping fun. We went looking for a vacuum filter on Sunday. The bunny we babysat for had peed and pooped all over our townhouse’s living room carpet and when we vacuumed up the nastiness, the dampness had set into the filter and rendered it dead—or suffocated it to such a degree that future vacuuming ventures created enormous billows of dust. Hence, we went to Lowe’s and Super-duper Walmart to get a replacement filter.

In Lowes we walked all over and I had the chance to ooo and aahh over how enormous the shelves are and how I feel like Jack in the giant’s castle. We found the shelves of filters and shrieked at the prospect of spending $30 or $25 for the wrong kinds of filters.

We exited the giant’s castle and entered Walmart, the giant’s dollhouse. We went looking for the vacuums section and I lost my father. I had turned around to backtrack and look at something and when I turned around, my dear father was gone. I looked and strolled and gave up after three minutes. I had no cell phone on me, but I knew that I would find him—by his coughing or the way he talks to himself as he analyzes prices or by the fact that he just yells my name when I’ve disappeared for too long.

I went over the posters section, because I wanted to find a movie poster of Heavy Metal, because of the gorgeous warrior chick featured on it. I should have known a 1981 movie poster would not be there, but I hoped. Instead, I saw posters with babes in bikinis, Twilight, messaging shorthand, Twilight, guitar fingerings, Twilight, babes in bikinis, Twilight, wrestling champs, Twilight. And heard my father calling my name and so used my powerful sense of echo-location to locate my father, who was standing in the vacuum section. We shrieked furiously at the prospect of spending $20 or $15 for a new vacuum filter. Then my father used his considerable find a cheaper solution powers and we ventured forth into the air conditioning filters section. It was here that we combined our powers of bargain detection and found a $4 filter which could be cut up to fit vacuum’s filter compartment. Triumphant, we exited Walmart and went home. Our dear vacuum still coughs a little dust, but much less.

I think the reason I do not like to shop is that I can expect to spend a lot of money. I can expect to enter the store, grab a shopping cart, and if I want panties or soap or jello, I roll my cart to the shelves labeled thus, and then I have to stand there among numerous brands and look and look and read labels, trying to calculate the benefits of cost verses how carcinogenic is this brand of soap? Booorrrriiiiinnngg!! Stuuuuupidd!! I don’t want numerous options—I want to learn to think. I want to escape the system. I want to stand there and say—Ha, so you companies think you can make me buy your $30 vacuum filter or your $5 teeth whitening tooth paste or your $5 soap that can peel the dirt off of me—well, I have another solution! I can fix up an air conditioning filter to fit my vacuum. I can brush my teeth with tree bark. I can use dishwashing soap to bathe in.

Dad’s birthday on the 24th. We ate together as a family, and even though my brother and I fought, everyone else have been getting on well with each other. We went to Walmart and brought two kinds of cake—a rolled up carrot cake and a German frozen chocolate cake. First we tried the carrot cake. Overall consensus was that it was too sweet. Little sister Kim said—let’s try the chocolate cake. Since I had devoured two platefuls of carrot cake roll, I had no room for chocolate cake. Dad and sister approved of chocolate cake.

Now, a day later, it is raining hard, thundering right now and sister Kim is whimpering. I feel hungry, but I am hesitant about eating. These past weeks, I usually feel bloated because once I start eating, I don’t stop until my brain realizes that it is freakin’ hot, I’ve been eating oily foods, and I feel mighty uncomfortable because of the combo of the two.

My sister—after staying for a week by herself at our college townhouse (it is lovely to say—ah yes, our college townhouse)—has returned and told me how great it feels to control her eating.

During dad’s dinner party, when I looked greedily at her slice of carrot cake, she said—you want to eat it, don’t you?

Yes. [Looking greedily at cake]

Oh, you can have it. I don’t want it.

After eating that slice, I of course felt bloated and awful. Henceforth, I will endeavor to control my portions.

I feel guilty and sad for not making my father’s birthday more of a big deal. He has been feeling poorly and ill lately, and I wish I was less withdrawn and more able to celebrate life. I asked dad—how does it feel to grow older? Is it good? My sister Christine sneered at me, sending evil brainwaves at me—why ask such a question? Maybe I’m an idiot conversationalist—I don’t mind being one—but I was asking that question earnestly, thinking my dad has gone through a lot in his life, and he should feel content to celebrate the variety of such a life. But no, my dad had disappointment in his eyes and shook his head.

I am not one for making gestures, but I wish I was capable of expressing how I feel. Life—such as it is—should be celebrated for all the things that went wrong as well as went right.