date: 2020-02-23 weight: 4
Is this what you were expecting?
Not at all. Or perhaps some very small part of me was hoping for something like this, but it was one of those ‘hope against all hope’ type things.
What were you expecting?
I suppose I was expecting something along the lines of what I got after my dumb-as-hell coming-out letter: an acknowledgment of receipt and thank you for the information. Perhaps I was expecting a phone call in return, and I’m not sure whether that would be better or worse than a response, no matter how curt.
Were I to get a call, I would have frozen up and not been able to talk about anything of import.
And so what does this mean?
I suppose it means a few things.
It means that I was spending rather a lot of time catastrophizing. That I spent all of my time defaulting to the idea that he was somehow unwilling to engage with me on a very real level may have been informed by times in the past, but clearly is not the default.
This, in turn, means that I need to somehow reorganize my conceptualization of my dad around this new version of reality. I was holding this picture of him in my head that was based solely on those times with him that left the strongest impression. My view of him was limited to the man I ran away from juxtaposed against the man who was finally able to interact with me on an equal level when we were able to drink together. It was not based on an interpretation of him as someone who was constantly improving — constantly striving to improve — and who, yes, may have been able to interact with me better as an adult but who nonetheless enjoyed the fact that I was his kid.
And?
And it also means that there is far more that my dad doesn’t know about me that I had first imagined.