Father’s Day is not a good day to realize your dad doesn’t like you. But as it happens, that’s how Father’s Day 2019 went for me.
Love, of course, is different than like, and to say my relationship with my dad was complicated up to that Father’s Day is both an under and overstatement. There’s no dramatic betrayal or abandonment– my dad has always been a constant, responsible presence in my life, and I knew at my core that he loved me. But like many men, he grew up on the idea that the only emotion he could acceptably display was anger– and his anger was something that confused me as a child, yet came to be the one thing I understood most about him as I got older.
Without going into too much detail of what happened that day, what I will say is that a lot of the anger and disappointment we’d held against each other, all bottled up inside, finally reached its breaking point– and there are those times when we say things we don’t mean out of anger, but this wasn’t one of them. I felt like he meant every word he said as I sat there listening, my face burning and eyes fixed to a point on the table in front of me, unwilling to fuel his anger with my tears and prove him right– that I wasn’t mature enough to handle things like an adult. My dad is a “stop crying” kind of guy.
But he’s also a removing the pith from orange segments before plating them up to my room kind of guy. He’s a cutting grapes open and removing the seeds one by one kind of guy. In these artfully prepared bowls of fruit, I saw a semblance of the father I grew up wishing mine could be more like– someone who would show the same patience toward my mistakes as he did peeling the skin off an apple in one long, uninterrupted ribbon. I’d often look at old photos of the two of us, trying to understand the ways my father loved me, how he could possibly be the same man who looked so happy to be holding me, his face full of levity and ease. I would struggle to bridge the gap between the man in the photos and the man I was face to face with every day, creases of worry and stress lining the spaces between his brows, in the harshness of his words when I fell short of his expectations.
It wasn’t until much later on that I would realize how much we’re alike– his anxiety, his overthinking, his protectiveness for those around him. He just has a hard time showing it without raising his voice. I’m not a yeller, I never have been. But I do love through words and favors, through I’m here for you’s and don’t worry about it’s. Removal of burden is a good way to put it– I want to make life easier for the people I love. Part of that is wanting to shelter them from the hardships and inconveniences of life. Maybe in the same way, in his frenetic worrying and micromanaging, my dad thinks he can protect me from my own mistakes, the same way he protects me from the tough pits of peaches, the stringy parts of a mango, the bitterness of an improperly peeled pomelo.
There are no photos of my dad and his parents together as a child. There is one where he’s a toddler, posed with his siblings, and each time I look at it, I recognize that the eyes staring back at mine, round and wary, are my eyes too. When I look at pictures of my grandpa, my dad’s father, I wonder if he ever joked with his kids, and if or how he responded to tears. What I know about him is he loved mahjongg and dim sum almost as much as he loved slipping us twenties to spend at the corner store. But still, in the two decades we had together, there’s still so much I didn’t get to ask. Three months after his passing, I visited his grave for the first time, and I found myself crying soundlessly as I stood in front of his headstone, tears flowing from behind my sunglasses as I kept my grief as private as one could while crying in broad daylight– something I’d learned to do a long time ago. And it’s interesting, isn’t it? The parts of ourselves that we first saw in our parents, whether passed down through quiet observation or genetics– something in the eyes, a minute tendency you wouldn’t notice unless you looked for it, but when you do see it, you think, oh my god, I’m turning into them.
One day, when my parents and I had just finished up lunch, I was putting dishes into the sink when topic of travel came up, and soon the conversation turned to the last trip we took with my grandfather. It was a lighthearted topic, or so I thought, but enough to bring my dad to tears. I didn’t realize what was happening at first until I heard sniffling from the dining table behind me, and my mom’s voice offering soft words of reassurance, my back facing both of them as I stood over the sink. I froze, unsure of how to react, before instinctively grabbing an orange from the fruit bowl on the counter. Without thinking, I scored the fragrant, pitted peel until I could pull it away, softly, to reveal the sweet segments, filling the bowl in front of me. And maybe it’s fate that we all eventually become our parents in some ways, no matter how hard we try to fight it, or how much our resentment can harden us against the thought. As I peeled away at the orange, I wondered if that was such a bad thing, turning into them. If we can’t forgive the parts of them that hurt us, and in turn forgive those same parts we see in ourselves. To peel back the layers of all the ways we let each other down and get to what was really underneath.
Behind me, my dad continued to cry softly as I set the bowl of oranges down in front of him. I did it for the child he once was, who must’ve been told, at one point in the vulnerability of his boyhood, to stop crying. To handle things like a man, to take care of those around you– and above all, to never make yourself the burden you were trying to remove. I didn’t tell him to stop, but I didn’t tell him it was okay to cry, either, to let it out because that’s all you can do when you miss someone you love. Sometimes you need to meet people where they are. And there my dad was, a man with streaks of grey shot through his black hair, at last showing a rare display of emotion– and in my respect for him, I didn’t say a word, didn’t look his way. But all that needed to be said was there, as he picked up an orange segment and brought it to his mouth, tears still streaming down his face.
