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| Image by the Author |
Dad had his past and his reasons, so maybe if I can make peace with them, then maybe I can show him that I love him too.
Yours were the ones I knew first. Your footsteps, your voice, your hands, your care—a proper daddy’s girl, I grew up under your favored lighting and attention, and so maybe everything yours were the ones I learned to recognize first. The sound of your tricycle parking in the driveway, the smell of your cooking, the feel of your hands caressing my hair, everything yours was suddenly associated with warmth, safety, and love.
Yours were the ones I grew to love first. Your way of scratches, your hugs, your air tosses, your liveliness—the fun parent, I always favored how you gave me what I wanted and more with the best smiles on your face. You promised me things, and you delivered, and it always made me happy how you knew to do things for me the way I liked them.
I grew up always attached to you, always backed by you, so I always thought yours would be where I’d always look when things went astray.
But everything yours wasn’t really light and fun and safe. Things happened, and it opened me, and suddenly everything yours wasn’t nice anymore. Everything yours wasn’t all kind, wasn’t proper, and then I’m back to re-recognizing everything yours.
Yours were also the ones I feared first. Your open palms, your slippers, your shouts, your temper—maybe it was our culture, but you let us grow up with the notion that there is violence in love. Discipline in the harshest degree, you called it, a necessary evil, but was it still love to leave us in pain for something in our nature as growing children? You believed it was, and I couldn’t argue with that.
Yours were also the ones I hid away from first. Your misunderstandings, your demands, your loopholes, your insistence— you were (and still are) so headstrong on so many things, and it grated me how you could keep at it while I tried to recover from the epiphanies I had with everything yours. I was suffering, and yet you kept pounding away trying to make everything work your way, and in the end, I just learned how to dodge and how to hide away from everything yours.
I learned how to live without much of you, but when you came back, everything yours became a gray area I had to decipher again. You came back, with your safe hugs and your delicious cooking, and your heartfelt apologies, and ever since you’ve been trying your damnedest to make up for everything yours. You tried to wash away everything yours associated with grief and pain and replaced them with everything yours associated with being a better dad.
I know it hurt you, seeing the conflict in me in accepting everything yours again. My rejection, my avoidance, my short replies, and my hesitance to come closer—I know it hurt so bad, and maybe that’s how you thought that I hated you for everything that built up the trauma I now have to live with.
Dad, I don’t hate you. I don’t resent you for the things that you did—at least, I don’t think that I do, because I understand that you were doing them as they’ve only been done and passed down to you. Father to father, for generations, taught you that this was the way to be a dad.
Dad, I don’t hate you. For any of it, for all of it, I understand, and it’s so tiring, but I can’t keep hating you for any or all of it. It hurt once, and maybe there’s been enough hurt for me to move on and start with something nicer feeling than hurt.
It’s rarely spoken, but dad, I don’t really hate you. I think I did, at one point, but I don’t anymore.
I’m sorry if you still think that I do. I’m trying to be better, but dad, I hope someday you do know that I don’t hate you.
I love you, dad.
I love you.
