On Father’s Day

My relationship with my father is complicated.

He was the one who taught me to read. He took me to my first live professional wrestling shows. He taught me to drive and how to play Texas Hold ‘Em. He started a college savings plan for me that kicked off my life from a better financial position than a lot of people I know. He drove through flooded roads and totaled his car to be at my wedding the weekend of a hurricane. In an appeal to rejecting outdated gender roles and shaping my feminist sensibilities, he was the stay-at-home parent who cooked dinner most nights.

He was also the first person to hit me when I struggled to learn to read, and when I missed the bus to school. He nicknamed me Wimpy because I was quick to cry when I was little (and it rhymed with his nickname for my sister, Blimpy, for the brief, overlapping period when she was overweight). He was the one to hold my head under water at the municipal pool when I was nine years old and the worst kid in my swimming class. When, as a kid, I spilled my iced tea before sitting down to Sunday dinner at Grandma’s, he was the one to tell me, All you do is make more work for other people.

I haven’t had much of a relationship with my father in my adult life. I’ve seen him and for years stayed at the old house over holidays. There was the aforementioned wedding where his ballroom dancing skills made him the hit of the reception. He’s opened his door for me to have a place to stay whenever I passed through my hometown. And yet when push comes to shove, he’s not a confidante, a trusted mentor, or someone I go out of my way to visit.

There are times when I feel bad for that.

And then there are times when I remember my elementary school fantasy that one day I would be big enough to beat him up.

I’m big enough now, but I don’t want to fight.

Becoming a father myself cast a different lens on all of this. For my son’s first year and half, I only worked part-time teaching college writing, and dedicated the remainder to stay-at-home parenting, only writing, reading, or keeping up on TV in the cracks in between family life and duties. There are ways in which that made me appreciate my father more for the sacrifices of time and energy and sleep, with so little thanks in return.

But even at my most tired--even at that point that might be called bitter--I struggle to imagine raising a hand to this boy, or telling him, all you do…

And I know my father had it rougher. I came upon an email he’d sent my mother long ago, after they first split up, in which he explained about his own father taking a belt to him, and using this anecdote to mitigate how he’d treated my sister and I. Truth be told, in adult life, I’ve had my moments of wondering if I didn’t play the victim, inflating things in my head, particularly when I hear from friends who survived far worse abuses and injustices, who got by on a lot less.

I wish Father’s Day were a simpler holiday for me, or that when I protest against my little family now making a big deal out of it, it had more to do with modesty than the fact I have no template to base a celebration on. But my father rejected us doing anything special or buying any gifts, with an eye toward saving our money. And my sister and I? We never much wanted to celebrate him. So it is that I don’t know what to do with a happy Father’s Day greeting, and so it is that I scroll through my Facebook feed, touched by loving portraits of friends’ fathers, and simultaneously a little jealous, a little resentful.

I want for my son to have an easier time with this day, and not necessarily to go over the top or to aggrandize me. I just hope that I might do him proud. I just hope that when this day comes around in years future, he won’t second guess coming to my door these Sunday mornings, or pick up the phone with hesitation.

I want for this day to be better for him than I expect it ever will be for me.