I did not and do not want to keep talking about my dad.\u00a0 I had a very firm plan about boxing that issue off and focusing all my anxiety into something productive.\u00a0 Worrying about him results in zero productivity, unlike feeding my new found Pearl Jam obsession or playing Bejeweled Blitz until my clicking finger bleeds.<\/p>\n
But ignoring him has proved more difficult than expected.\u00a0 You would think a guy who lives 200 miles away and isn’t particularly sociable would be extremely easy to ignore.\u00a0 Ha.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of the week, he emailed me.\u00a0 He rarely emails, but in all the times he has done so, the messages made sense.\u00a0 This one was confusing and\/or confused. The topic was comprehensible but the specifics garbled.<\/p>\n
I spent a few minutes panicking (What the fuck is this?), followed by longer minutes trying not to jump straight to DEMENTIA and instead taking all the steps to figure out his line of logic.\u00a0 Was this a simple error or a complex one?\u00a0\u00a0 Like those math problems from high school, where the teacher goes over every line of your work and marks where the error was made, and you could either get partial credit for basic knowledge or a SEE ME AFTER CLASS.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t figure it out.\u00a0 In the end, I took a shot in the dark and emailed back, “the attachment didn’t come through.\u00a0 Could you try again?”\u00a0 because if he was referring to a link of some sort, the message would make sense.\u00a0 No luck.\u00a0 Garbled response.<\/p>\n
Later that evening, I cried in the shower some and resolved to box that shit up.\u00a0\u00a0 Ain’t nobody need back to back posts in which I’m an asshole for betraying my dad’s privacy.<\/p>\n
But the next day, he called me.\u00a0 It would be hard to say who was more surprised, since he never ever calls me.\u00a0 As it turned out, he’d been trying to call my mom, and misdialed.\u00a0 Guess the universe thought he needed to pop in and rattle me and my box-making abilities.\u00a0\u00a0 He was embarrassed, since I was not the person he had expected and he didn’t particularly have anything to say to me.<\/p>\n
As I was crying in the shower that evening, it dawned on me that if my dad had died suddenly in full health, I never would have seen this part of him.\u00a0 I don’t mean the confused part.\u00a0 I mean that I have spent so much of my life being angry at him.\u00a0\u00a0 I imagine he would have croaked and my memory of him would be tinctured with that cold anger of teenage rebellion — my standoffish and unknowable father.<\/p>\n
Seeing him now, without the armor of sharp brain and obsessive interests, is like seeing Darth Vadar* with his helmet off.\u00a0 What’s under isn’t pretty, but it is vulnerable and exposed and who he is under all the trappings of who he was.\u00a0 Maybe there is God in this.\u00a0 Then I curse a lot.<\/p>\n
So as it turns out, my mom came into town this morning, and she brought my dad with her.\u00a0 I think, perhaps, she was lonesome and didn’t want to leave him alone.\u00a0 He was here this very morning.\u00a0 My boxes are chewed by dogs and strewn across my mental flooring.<\/p>\n
My parents seem happy.\u00a0 My dad sat in my living room and talked, and he was fine, fine, fine!\u00a0 So normal and daddish and at ease.\u00a0 He tells me about my sisters and my new nephew.\u00a0 We talk about the financial cliff and he throws up his hands in disgust.\u00a0 Then he stumbles on some thought.\u00a0 I see how much my mom is doing for him now.\u00a0 I suspect things are getting worse quickly.\u00a0 I realize at some point, maybe that will feel like a relief – at least it went quickly<\/span><\/em>, and I want to throw up.\u00a0 These are horrible, vulturish things to consider.\u00a0 Then I think about how it could go both quickly and still not quick enough, and I realize this is gonna be bad.<\/p>\n *And here I feel compelled to insist my dad was not the Darth Vader of my childhood.\u00a0 Certainly, I still have both my hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I did not and do not want to keep talking about my dad.\u00a0 I had a very firm plan about boxing that issue off and focusing all my anxiety into something productive.\u00a0 Worrying about him results in zero productivity, unlike feeding my new found Pearl Jam obsession or playing Bejeweled Blitz until my clicking finger …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,25],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-5047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dad","category-mission-impostible","tag-dad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5047"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5310,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions\/5310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}