dad's Mac and cheese, baby feet, and swim lessons

THE RECIPE

serves: no one

Pair with: a silent dinner

INGREDIENTS

1 box Kraft Mac and cheese

an inedible amount of salt

THE QUICK AND THE DIRTY

Ignore the instructions on the box

Bask in the confidence that any idiot can figure this out

Assume you know what you’re doing, despite never having made it

Add way too much salt

THE ESSAY

I planned on writing this week.  I planned on starting an essay with, “Today is my father’s birthday,” and then I was going to write about all the gifts you gave me—the ways I hate myself, the way I cannot say no when I want to say no, the way I flinch at loud noises, the ways in which I am confrontation-averse (even, and especially, when it really matters) and how I pretend (lie) about not being so.  Instead, I can I only write, “This week is my father’s birthday, and he is dead.”

Right now is the quiet space.  It’s been three days—the same amount of time Jesus died before he came back—and I haven’t told anyone.  I am walking around and watching the world go round as if nothing has changed.  Texts come in and I type some out as if nothing has changed.  Memes are sent and some go out as if nothing has changed.  I think, “Will [name redacted] look back on this exchange and wonder why I didn’t say anything?”

I used to pray for you, Dad.  I used to pray for you obsessively and breathlessly, almost every hour of every day.  When I was thirteen, my fifteen-year-old friend Erin told me, through her heavy braces, in the hot tub out back, that I wasn’t obsessive-compulsive because that wouldn’t present in the form of prayers.  “That’s just being religious,” she rolled her eyes, a tankini-clad sage.   

But it felt obsessive-compulsive, the way I had to recite the same formula of begging and pleading to keep you safe and healthy and alive.  The way I needed your heart to keep beating, as if I needed it in order for my own to keep beating.

It seems so funny now.

Do you remember Olivia?  Her now-dead dad used to read auras, and he was too polite to say anything about you.  In the seventh grade, he brought us to Elysian Fields, a local New Age store, where I splurged on “Angel Cards,” which were basically Tarot cards that didn’t offend my Catholic sensibilities.  I did a lay-out once on your health after your first open-heart surgery, and it said I had nothing to worry about then.  That was twenty years ago.  I guess they were right-ish.

A small voice in the back of my mind tells me, “Maybe you don’t want to talk about it because then it will be real.”  She’s rude, I know.

It feels more real now that the obituary, typos and all, is up online.  I am surprised that my old name has popped up inside of it.  I’ve gotten one text from an old coworker who must have seen it.  “Thinking of you,” she says.  I pretend I don’t know what she is talking about.

I used to feel so afraid of your death.  I sometimes felt like I bartered for your life.  Like, I pleaded so hard with God that you wouldn’t die that maybe we altered your timeline.  Like, maybe you were here when you weren’t supposed to be and maybe that’s why you got so mean.

But that’s just a story.   That’s just a coping mechanism—magical thinking.  You were mean long before your first heart attack.

Is this my eulogy to you?  Eulogies are supposed to praise a lost loved one.  I did love you; I do love you.  

“Did you tell anyone he died?” My mom asks.

“No,” I say.  I picture the responses: “Good.”  “Fuck him.”  “[Party emojis].”  I picture the things people who don’t understand what to say but who feel confident in saying something nonetheless will say.  I acutely remember all the friends who talked to me about people “choosing to go non-contact” when I told them I had been disowned, the well-intentioned friend who suggested I write a gratitude list when I talked about the ache in my heart on father’s day.  The weight of being misheard sits on my chest.  It is too much to bear.  Being angry at these people, who simply showed up for me in the wrong way, feels better than feeling whatever accompanies the sound of my brother saying, “Well, I’m sorry to tell you dad’s dead.”

“I figured,” I’d said. 

I hadn’t heard my brother’s voice since September of 2015.  I have not seen him since his second wife passed away that March.  You wanted me there.  I hadn’t wanted to go all the way to the upper Midwest.  Our income was limited, and we drove my Ford Fiesta to save on gas.  He was heartbroken.  You never deserved my brother as your son.  He is a good person, and he is the most sensitive of all of us.  It’s true that telling the truth does not come naturally to him.  It’s true that he, like all of us, is complicated and wounded and, therefore, necessarily difficult to love.  But, he was a sweet child, who desperately wanted your approval and affection.  And, he still carries an emotional earnestness that gives me second-hand embarrassment.

I’ve opened a bottle of wine to write this, and it reminds me of how much I drank the night of the funeral for my sister-in-law.   It was the first time I felt close to my brother.  The desperate need of how much I wanted to be close to him in that moment embarrasses me.  

After the funeral, you texted me that you were proud to have your children gather in a time of need.  But, you had raised my other half-siblings, your step-children, who didn’t come and whom you never thought of as your children.  Your definition of family was taciturn and petty.  

You used to say things like, “When you’re a parent, you’ll understand.”  

In the movies, characters usually say this when they are doing something out of purported love for their child.  “If you have kids, you’ll understand why this hurts me more than you,” about some faux-sacrifice.  But you said this when you told me, “It’s hard for a man to love children that aren’t his.”

You said this to me when I came home from the police department, when I tried to report my friend’s parents for abuse and neglect when they moved to another state and left her alone in their home, and I was sad because the police officer, who openly stared at my teenage breasts, told me there was nothing he could do because even though my white friend’s white parents had neglected her, they hadn’t physically bruised her in a way that credibly mattered.

You said this when I complained about my sister’s parenting.  You said this any time I found fault with abusive parents.  It’s bad writing to repeat yourself, but I’m going to let those sentences stand because, thanks to you, it’s hard for me to name names.

I’m a parent now.  Not that you knew.  But you’re so right.  I didn’t understand before I became a parent, but I get it now.  You were so much worse than I could ever comprehend.  

My child’s name isn’t listed on the public obituary under the grandchildren you loved.  When I heard about your death, I first thought of your mother, a woman I don’t remember at all.  I thought about the fact that you used to be a baby.  Maybe your mother, like me, suffered post-partum anxiety.  Maybe she fearfully watched your chest rise and fall obsessively throughout the day and the night.  There was a time when it was a very big deal that you tracked objects with your eyes, that you sat up, that you pulled your little body up, that you ate solid food, that you slept through the night, that you pointed.  And, now you are gone.  

When my child was first born, and I had learned what it means to be born, I was stunned to realize that every person walking around had been born.  That every person breathing at this moment was birthed, a gaping wound on a mother somewhere.  I looked at my tiny, precious baby, and I thought, “One day, you will be fifty, and you’ll send an annoying email, and someone won’t know how much you mattered to me in this moment right now.”

My baby’s feet look like yours.  

On an objective level, I’m so sad for you.  I heard you died alone, in a lounge chair, on a Thursday night.  You didn’t show up for work, so my sister came to your house.  And, she found your body.  On an objective level, I feel so bad for her.  That is a hard trauma to carry—discovering your parent’s dead body.

On a personal level, I really hate you.  You chose dying alone in a Barcalounger rather than ever trying to fix things with me.  I wasn’t worth it to you; but, I know I’m worthwhile.  I mean, I know I’m supposed to tell myself—that bottle of wine is mostly gone now—that I’m worthwhile.  I’m supposed to stand over your grave and say things like, “You missed out.  I’m a great daughter.  I’m a great person.  I do great things.”  I’m supposed to believe those positive affirmations, but I’ve never said a positive affirmation aloud because I think they’re kind of stupid and self-indulgent.  I just know that this is the line I’m supposed to read at this point in the script.

The problem is that you raised me, so I know I’m not a great daughter.  I mean, if I were my own friend, I would tell her she is a great daughter.  Objectively, I tried to be a good daughter to you, even when it came at the cost of my own principles.  I wanted you to love me so badly that I would have, and did, trade my principles in exchange for a quiet dinner with you.  I wanted a dad.  I wanted to be a “Daddy’s Girl.”  Those types of girls seemed so secure and effortlessly stable.  I would have thrown away a dozen social movements to be important to you.

It’s such a head trip to be a woman with a shitty dad.  First, your dad fucks you up irreparably.  You go through your life feeling forgotten or unloved or afraid or all of the above.  You are hobbled.  You don’t even know what you missed; you don’t know what you don’t know.  You try to figure it out on your own as you get older, but you mess up.  You’re too soft sometimes and too hard other times.  You miss the social cues sometimes.  Maybe most of the time.  And, then, you learn you’re the brunt of a whole genre of misogynist jokes and plotlines.  You have “Daddy Issues.”  You’re promiscuous but also frigid, an unreliable narrator, a pitiful mess, an understandable punching bag, a statistically likely candidate for capital crimes. You’ll always be a victim too predictably tragic to really deserve sympathy or you will be an emasculating villain.  

But Daddy’s Girls always have a healthy sun tun and clean white socks.  They move effortlessly through the world and don’t catch predators’ eyes because theirs aren’t lingering in the wrong places, looking for things they don’t have at home.  They don’t make everyone too uncomfortable to speak.  They’re easy to love because they are already loved.

I’ve never heard a Daddy’s Girl tell a good joke, though.  Even still, I’d trade the trauma.  I really, really wanted you to love me, to be interested in me, to show up for me.

That’s part of why it hurts so much when people misunderstand your disowning me.  Even though, yes, it ultimately was a relief to live my life without you, I did not choose to do so.  I always wanted you—maybe not you, but definitely a Dad.  I wanted the idea of you.  I wanted you to think I was funny and smart and worthwhile.  I wanted you to find me charming and talented and, maybe, even a little incredible.  I wanted you to be interested in my interests, to be proud of my accomplishments, to be wary of my love interests.  I wanted you to want to share your life with me.

Already someone has commented on your memorial page.  She has written, “You were a father to everyone at our workplace.”  God, I hate her.  I feel entitled to whatever she got from you, but maybe it’s nothing.  Maybe it’s just empty, kind words, written on a public obituary.  But, did you tell her, “Good morning,” every day?  Did you wish her happy holidays and know her birthday?  Did you ever buy her breakfast?

When I was very little, you used to buy us all donuts sometimes on the weekend.  It felt like such a treat to come downstairs and see a box of a dozen donuts on the kitchen table.  You used to get me a frosted pink donut that no one else was allowed to touch.  The idea of that donut carried such mythology for me for so long that I forced my future spouse to buy me one and put a candle in it for my nineteenth birthday if he truly loved me (and even though I actually don’t care for strawberry frosting) because I do not care for cake but those donuts held such a special place in my heart.

You didn’t sign my birthday cards until I tearfully confronted my mom about it when I was a teenager.  I told her that I knew I didn’t matter to you, and—looking back on it—I knew I couldn’t even broach that need to you. Everything about me seemed to irritate you.  She shushed me and told me generous lies that would undermine every impression and belief I would ever carry for the rest of my life.  When you disowned me, I felt somewhat validated in that I had always known it would be easy for you to cut me out.

I carry a lot of these little lessons from you—Gifts from My Father, I thought I would name an essay about them.  You taught me my innermost truths that I am actively struggling to unlearn: that needing people is weak, that loving someone sincerely is foolish, that expressing needs is dramatic, that saying no is dangerous.  Not everything was terrible all of the time.  You taught me to fish with Wonder Bread, to throw a punch with impact, to read the book if I liked the movie, to paint a straight line without painter’s tape, to drive in an emergency when I was eleven and for real when I was fifteen.  If you hadn’t raised me, scary men would intimidate me more and all men in general would intimidate me less.  If you hadn’t raised me, my intuition would not be as finely honed.  I would not be as funny.  Mean comments from strangers would hurt me more because I hadn’t heard worse at home and, still, sometimes, a lot of times, in my head now.  

My capacity for empathy is deeper because you raised me.  I plucked my child’s middle name from a fictional character, who is probably on the spectrum, who surrounds himself exclusively with fantastical beasts, with whom he is most at home.  There is a line the writers’ room developed where his former love interest says, “You’ve never met a monster you couldn’t love.”  When I chose this name, I had thought in my heart of hearts that I was the monster my child would love.

But you were a monster I loved.  You taught me to love monsters.  Unlike my sisters, I would not go on to marry men who beat me.  The physical abuse I took in romantic relationships was statistically small in comparison to what my upbringing would have predicted for me.  When I say that you taught me to love monsters, I mean that I have a deep well of compassion, even (and especially?) for people who have done heinous things.  I can (and have) sat across the table and beside people who have done unspeakable things.  I have spoken for them when they could not speak.  I have pleaded on their behalf when even my favorite podcast threw them in under the bus.  I learned that, sitting beside your hospital bed, watching the villain of my childhood brought low by heart disease, an unseeable presence that kept popping up to upend our lives every August.  You were the lion with a thorn in his paw; I kept believing—but never admitting because that would be both weak and foolish—that I was the little mouse who could help you and, finally, earn your love.

You didn’t love when I chose that career path.  In fact, you hated most of my choices.  You’d have thought I would have gotten comfortable with that, but I always felt a zing of excitement whenever I inadvertently picked something that made your ears perk up.   It’s so embarrassing; I wanted your interest so badly.

You taught me to feel ashamed and unimpressed by success.  “What?  You think you’re better than me?”  Remember when I first got straight A’s in the fourth grade, right after I finally got glasses.  You said, “What do you want me to do, kiss your ass?”  Remember when I got into every college I applied to and picked the one farthest away.  You said, “You’re paying those professors to teach you.  Don’t let them treat you badly.  You’re their employer.”  Let that be a lesson: don’t expect applause, but don’t get robbed, either.

You inadvertently taught me how to handle men with big egos and how to quietly appease the discomfort of emotionally phobic people when your Orphan Annie syndrome upsets them.  Don’t talk about yourself too much or in too real terms.  Let them gaslight you; it’s easier and better for everyone.

You chose to become a monster, I think, because it was the easier path.  I understand that now that I am a parent and now that I am old enough to see how the world hurts you, turns you inside out, and hurts you again in new and more interesting ways.  Loving other people makes you vulnerable.  Sometimes, I feel absolutely flayed—especially, when I am choosing to keep meeting certain people in my life with compassion and openness, even though the disappointment is inevitable.  It is not something you would do.  You would not “meet people where they’re at.”  You would smirk if I said that to you.  

Loving my child and my spouse absolutely cripples me at times.  And, that makes me hate you a little because… why couldn’t you love me like that?  Maybe because it’s hard to do and hard to bear, especially when you understand loss, and the simple truth was just that you were too weak to do it.

I know that your life was indelibly marked by loss.  You lost both of your parents by thirty.  You lost siblings, and your best friend died when you were fourteen.  I know because you once got drunk and told me as you drove around aimlessly after another funeral and I treasured this secret knowledge, which you spoke out loud in the car as if I weren’t even there.

You taught me that, sometimes, things get fucked up and the rules don’t apply.  Because you raised me, I’ve always had a sense that the Every Day is just an ostentatious game of improv.  That means I don’t get undone when crises arise.  I know already what it is like to have the foundation of your life crack.  But it means that stability makes me uneasy.  Sometimes, normalcy undoes me.

I will forever remember you crouching down at your parents’ graves when we visited the upper Midwest on vacation when I was sixteen.  The intensity with which you hacked at the weeds crowding over the flat tombstones with your raw fingers still hurts my heart.  It reminds me of my half-brother, your son.  I wonder if you used to be sweet once, too.  I think you probably were, not because I want to misremember you as someone better than you were but because you would have had to have once been sweet and empathetic in order to be as intelligently and creatively cruel as you became later in life.

I have a cruel streak, too.  Sometimes, I am filled with white-hot, burning rage, which seems to creep in slowly at the edges, so that I don’t notice it at first.  And, then, all of a sudden, I want to burn down relationships without a second thought.  I feel it a lot for people who seem to have it easier than me, and I think I get that from you because you always used to tell me how much easier I had it than you and because, whenever I did something praiseworthy, you implied it wasn’t that big of a deal because I never had to work as hard as you did.  

For a long time, I used to say, “Ugh, you can tell their parents loved them too fucking much,” about upper-middle class classmates and colleagues, who were too confidant, too functional, and too happy for me to like.  In my view, all of their success was attributable to how much they had been coddled by parents who didn’t actively sabotage them, physically beat or intimidate them, unhouse them, or belittle them.  I used to think having good parents meant you were privileged, which is to say that these people enjoyed an unearned benefit that came at the expense of someone else.

Love is not something that can be earned.  Earning yours was my Sisyphean task.

Now that I am a parent, I’ve changed my tune a bit.  I still kind of hate my peers with good parents—I still find them selfish and ignorant and unintentionally cruel at times, but I know that my friends with bad parents, including myself, are also self-indulgent, arrogant, and exactingly cheap with their compassion at times.  So, I don’t think having loving parents is a privilege, an unearned benefit that comes at our expense; it’s a blessing that exists separate and apart from another child’s deficit of love.  I wish we were all so blessed.

So now, when I sit with my deficit and indulge in feeling all the ways in which having you as a parent crippled me, I try not to hate everyone who had nothing to do with the way you chose to parent me.  Even though doing that used to be a great distraction.

You tried to teach me to swim when I was four.  You took me in your arms and walked out to the middle of our above-ground pool, which reached a depth of almost six feet.  The water crept up to your chin.  I still remember what your skin felt like, the prickle of your mustache.   God, I fucking hate mustaches.

“You’ll have to swim to the edge from here,” you said.

“I can’t swim,” I said.

“You’ll have to,” you said, simply.

“Why?” I begged.

“Because I’m going to go under.”  You said, simply.

“But you’ll die,” I said, scared.

 You shrugged.  “You better swim, then.”

That would be a powerful ending, right? To stop right there.  But, annoyed, you brought me to the ledge when I became hysterical, and then my mom paid for swim lessons at the park district.  And, now I know how to swim.