Of All the Things I Wished

Greeting cards never say what I want them to say.

To be honest, I’m not really sure what I would want them to say, though I can always tell when they have the wrong words, the words that wouldn’t be true if they came from me.

Empty promises and empty sentiments.

It sounds pretty angsty when you strip it down to that, but how can I give someone a card that thanks the recipient for always being there, for staying strong, or for showing me what it means to be a good person, when all I saw was the wrong way to be a father?

I am most confident in my ability to seek out the wrong. It’s a radar that was used past the point of accuracy when I was a child, an instinct that was made to keep me alive and instead fills me with a creeping sense of dread. It’s an over-exhausted night guard who is beginning to see things that aren’t really there, to brace for dangers that will likely never come. I can’t even take the “likely” out of that last sentence, so convinced am I that the other shoe will drop someday, that any of the joys in this life I’ve carved out for myself will be swiftly carried away from me by forces outside of my control.

It’s an anxiety, a fear, a resignation to the inevitability of abandonment.

My father’s greatest gift to me.

Not one of love, or anything material he tried to give in exchange for my forgiveness, or anything a father should give to his daughter. Simply a gift of fragility, the quality I can’t stand in others because I find it so hard to admit it in myself.

He never laid a hand on me, never did anything to harm me physically. Because of that, I spent a lot of my childhood (and, admittedly, my adulthood), thinking that I was lucky, that I was blowing things out of proportion in order to make myself feel special. I don’t know where that idea came into my head, but I wish with all of my heart that I could go back to the scrawny little redhead I once was, pull her out of whatever fantasy novel she’d escaped into, and tell her that it’s not normal, it’s not okay, and it’s not something she deserves.

I would tell her that the drunken rages, the biting words, the threats, and the pattern of police presence on her doorstep was not something she could have ever prevented or controlled.

I would tell her that the world is not all like this, that she will grow up and grow past this, and that she will find so many people who love her in ways that don’t hurt.

I would not tell her about the ones who will love her and then leave, just like her father did, nor about the holes they rip in her gossamer soul, because she’s still convinced it’s made of iron.

But let us turn to a story of light, because nothing in this world is simple.

After we’d moved to our third house in a state thousands of miles from where I was born (though I do not regret leaving), my mother, my baby sister, my father, and I started to cautiously settle. The house was larger, the neighborhood nicer, and there were no ghosts haunting the halls at night.

I had my very own room at the top of the house - what would end up being my last solitary room before my parents divorced years past when their marriage should have been over and I received a myriad of step-siblings. It had a plush green carpet, a stooped closet where I stored my stuffed animals, and windows that looked out at the upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood lined with enough trees to fool you into thinking it was nature. I was lucky enough to have a queen-sized bed, a hand-me-down from my mother, complete with the thick, woven comforter set she’d had as a teen.

Reading at bedtime had been a tradition that started when I was still in my mother’s womb, and continued well into my adolescence - far past the point where I was reading chapter books on my own. When times were good, my mother and father alternated reading to me, and sometimes we would read as a family. When my father disappeared every so often, it was my mother who stayed.

A second gift that my father gave me: the knowledge that my mother would be there.

However, in the room with the green carpet, before everything fell to pieces and my family drifted apart like ashes from an eruption spinning away on the breeze, I remember my father telling me stories.

They were not read aloud from a book, no. They came from a brilliant mind, one that was so often plagued by a darkness it couldn’t control. But those moments were nothing but light.

We laid side-by-side on the queen sized bed, staring up at the ceiling as though it were made of stars. Then, we’d close our eyes as he spun magic around the room, transporting us to mountain tops, tropical islands, and far-away lands that we would never see. He called them visions, and they added to the abundant world I was building in my mind for when I wanted to escape from the one I couldn’t control.

The one where people lied, people yelled, and people disappeared.

He was, and still is, quite good at all three, though I believe that age has done something to mellow him, clouding his mind so that he forgets just how many times he went away without telling anyone where he was going.

My mom once told me about my reaction to one of these disappearances, which usually followed a hellish drunken rage where my father was replaced by a crumbling mountain bigger than my dreams, ready to tear the whole world down. Luckily, it was usually just a few broken objects, a suitcase hurled down the stairs, or threats to put my mother six feet under. After one of his earlier episodes, my mom said, I curled up next to her while we sat on the steps, processing the shockwaves that came after his storms. He’d gone off, leaving behind a wreckage and two huddled souls.

“Mommy,” I asked her, “what if he can’t find his way home?”

“He knows the way back to the house, baby girl. Even when he’s…like this. He won’t get lost.”

“No,” my brow furrowed, “I mean…what if he can’t find his way home?”

My mother sat back, doing her best to prevent the tears from spilling down her cheeks as she realized what I was trying to say with the limited vocabulary and abstract thinking I had at the time.

I was five years old.

And, in a way, I was right. I’m not sure if my father ever has found his way home, or if he knows what it looks like anymore. Maybe there never was a home for him. From him, I’ve learned the importance of stability, of creating a life for yourself full of expectations, routines, and a strict aversion to chaos.

Nothing, however, goes according to plan forever, if at all.

I feared my father’s rage when I was a child and vowed never to follow in his footsteps, but I received another gift from him that contradicted my hopes.

He gave me anger, rooted in a deep sadness.

As a teenager, that rage boiled up quick and hot. Most people attributed this to my redheadedness, and others chalked it up to adolescent angst, but I recognize it now for what it was then: a present wrapped in a bright red bow and shiny foil, set ablaze. I screamed at every injustice, slammed doors, and threw pillows. Though I longed to do more damage, to hurl every deep-cutting insult I could think of at the ones I loved, something held me back from the worst of it: the fear of being just like my father.

When I broke my stepfather’s nose because he dared to lay hands on my mom, I remember standing in the kitchen, shaking with rage in the wake of his absence, after the flurry of officers had taken him from the house. We were all shaken that night, but what I felt more than anything else was horror and a deeply rooted sense of fear. I’d lost all sense of myself, and I’d seen nothing but red. In that moment, I think I understood my father more than I ever had. Left alone, trembling and sorry, in the wake of my own explosion. I remember my mother, staring at me with a look that I still can’t quite place, somewhere between grief, anger, regret, and an exhaustion that had been haunting her since her own tumultuous childhood.

She compared me to my father that night, and I’ve never forgotten it.

In hindsight, I know it was a warning, and that warning may have saved me.

I sat in the corner of the kitchen, feeling nothing but the cold tile below me and staring at my hands, the hands that had wreaked so much havoc on my command.

I vowed never to do anything like that for the rest of my life.

I’d seen what anger could do, and I’d felt the aftershocks when I was the one to wield it.

I’ve never felt so ashamed.

Since that moment, I started doing everything my father didn’t do, and maybe didn’t know how to. I spend much of my time analyzing my thoughts, my feelings, and my reactions, tracing them back to their roots and digging them up before they can do any harm.

In this way, my father has taught me how to be an excellent gardener.

The main difference between our gardens is that I spend too much time trying to cater to everything and detect the rot before it comes, panicking every time I see a wilting leaf, while he burns everything to the ground the moment a bloom dies.

I suppose we both have room to improve.

In addition to a gardener, a worrier, and a foil-wrapped gift on fire, I am also the sadness bred into me.

Both of my parents were raised lonely.

Not that they were alone, per say. In fact, I have an abundance of aunts and uncles that I don’t really talk to anymore because I stopped trying, and they never did. My parents grew up with brothers and sisters, chaos and noise, and parents who made them feel unworthy of love. My father was raised in a military family to a mother without time and without a spine, and a father who thought that the only appropriate emotion for a man was anger. Perhaps this explains something of the person my dad grew up to be and how he’s never been able to approach the torrent of pain inside himself with anything but rage.

I’m not sure if that redeems him.

Looking at his past, however, and trying to understand what trimmed his fuse into non-existence has given me a remarkable skill in analyzing human behavior. It nearly made me go into a therapeutic profession like my mother did. She’s a renowned psychologist currently working on publishing a few novels about her experiences. My father plays a key role in many of her pages. I, however, decided on a different path. I’m a teacher now, and the hypervigilance that kept me safe as a child and sane as an adult, observing patterns of behavior and trying to understand why people do the things they do, gives me insight into the minds of my own students. Maybe, if I care enough, if I listen enough, if I’m there for them enough, they won’t feel as lonely or as angry. Maybe they’ll understand that there’s at least one person who cares about them, who will listen to them, and who will validate their hearts in a way that no one did for my dad.

Maybe, if he’d had someone to tell him it’s okay to be sad when he was a child, things would have been different.

I certainly had an abundance of support throughout my childhood. Aside from my mother, who was always there, I also had my own fair share of school counselors. I didn’t know that seeing the guidance counselor every week - and sometimes more - wasn’t an experience that everyone had. There were others, sure, but knowing that didn’t make it better. If anything, it made me frustrated. Sometimes, it felt like everyone on earth was having a harder time than I was, but was handling it better than I could. Sure, my father drank and yelled and almost killed me when we got into a car accident after he drank a fifth of vodka, but at least he never hit me. At least he never assaulted me. At least he never actually killed me. Others had it worse. I had my mom, and other kids didn’t have anyone. We weren’t poor, I never went without a meal, and I usually came to school with a packed lunch. Sure, kids made fun of my lunchboxes, my clothes, my voice, anything they could pick apart, really. But they never beat me or took my lunch money like bullies did in movies and tv shows, so it couldn’t have been that bad.

Or so I told myself.

I couldn’t understand why things were still so hard when I was one of the lucky ones.

I wasn’t officially diagnosed with depression until I hit my early 20’s. I don’t think it was the fault of my various school counselors or even my mother for not recognizing something sooner, but rather something outside of their control.

You see, when I was very little, I received another gift, another skill, from my father. And that was the mask I had to wear. To this day, my father is an exceptionally fragile human, prone to shattering at the slightest inconvenience, and the resulting shards of glass will slice up everyone in range if you’re not careful. It was far better to slip on a mask, to cover whatever you might be feeling just in case it wasn’t happy, than to risk cracking his cheery exterior. It would shatter all by itself eventually, but if you played your cards just right and kept your mask on at all times, the stretches between explosions could be peaceful.

So, I learned to hide the sadness. I learned so well that I even hid it from myself. I didn’t fully register that it was the reason I was so tired all the time; why I couldn’t relax, why I always wanted to keep moving; why, when I got my license at sixteen, I went for long night drives by myself, playing the music as loud as it would go; why I buried myself in books every time I had an idle moment; why I clung to my friends as though they were life preservers and I was drowning; why I sought the attentions of those I should not; why I paced my room endlessly until well past midnight; why I sometimes sat on the floor and stared at nothing at all, too weighed down by the indescribable feeling in my chest to get up again - it was all because I was sad.

I felt relief when I finally understood that I wasn’t weak. Just sad.

It never really goes away, the depression. Some days, it’s just a little cloud that follows me around, barely noticeable unless I’m looking for it. On other days, it grows dark and heavy, pressing on my shoulders and chest until I forget how to breathe, and I have to run for miles to escape it unless I want to be pinned to the floor for hours again. Luckily, these days, when I have so many things in my life that make me happy, so many wonderful joys that I’ve worked hard for, the stormiest days are few and far between.

But there will always be more to come.

My father is showing signs of early onset Alzheimer’s. It’s what took his mother’s mind, and it’s looking as though it may claim his, too. I saw him last summer, visiting only for a weekend so that nothing would explode while I was there. I asked him to teach me some of his card tricks, and we went to the beach to watch the sunrise and find seashells together. It was nice, but it was hard to be genuine with so many skeletons clamoring to be heard behind locked closet doors.

We did not let them out.

I wonder now, with the knowledge that his mind will not be his forever, if I should fly down to visit again.

If, this time, I should open the closet doors and let the skeletons out to see what he really remembers. See if he can still ignore them when they’re standing right in front of him, speaking truths that he can’t run from anymore.

I wonder if he’ll say sorry again.

I wonder if he’ll mean it this time, or if he’ll throw gifts and flowery apologies at me that don’t really mean anything, like he’s always done.

I wonder if he knows that, of all the things I wished, I just wanted a dad.

I didn’t care about the gifts, or the money, or the weekly phone calls that he’s convinced constitute a relationship. I don’t care about how much he makes now, or how he’s renovated his pool, or how their house was just valued at nearly two million dollars. I never cared about the trips, the new toys, or whatever else he tried to give me to excuse all the times he scared me.

I wished for what so many other kids got: a dad who was there.

A dad who gets angry sometimes, but doesn’t have to get handcuffed for it. A dad who makes stupid jokes and laughs with friends and stands at the grill at family gatherings. A dad who attends birthdays instead of disappearing on them. A dad who doesn’t move away the first chance he gets. A dad who makes everyone roll their eyes instead of learning how to walk by tip toeing on eggshells. A dad who can listen to problems and help with them, instead of being angry that they exist at all.

I know he tried, and that’s what breaks my heart the most.

I don’t know if I’ll ever tell him, because I think it would kill him if I did.

But that’s what I wish the greeting cards would say:

I just wanted a dad.