On dads that want to love their daughters but never learned how

My dad is just about to hang up the phone:

How is the faucet I installed, it’s not leaking right?

Nope, not leaking.

And the handle has stayed on tight?

Yes.

And the water warms up properly?

Yes, Dad… I love you, too.

I think my father only loves me as an extension of himself. His hopes, his dreams, his happiness. I’ve forgiven him for it.

Once, my parents and I were having a conversation and my dad sighed that we weren’t his little kids anymore. He wished for nothing more than when our tiny fingers would reach up to wrap around his calloused thumb. My mom argued, but don’t you love having conversations with them now, as adults? With their own thoughts and opinions?

No. He just wanted his children. The same way he wants us to come home to visit so that he can go to bed knowing we are safe, sleeping across the hall. But during the day he doesn’t ask us about our friends or our hobbies or our goals.

I am loved for who I am in his life, not who I am as an individual. It’s an odd thing to accept. Maybe because I know he only learned how to communicate through fixing leaky faucets and rusty screws.

He only knows how to box up his own version of happiness and give it like a gift

without considering that I’m left handed

and actually, I liked the cold water handle

on the other side.

Inspiration and parallels for this piece:

“Parents can accept us only after they succeed in dismantling their original representation of us in favour of the person we are turning out to be. This means not being disappointed with us for breaking a bargain we never made.”

-David Richo, from How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“It would be a hard dynamic to disrupt, since people do almost anything for love. Whatever role we are loved for in our family, we will continue to enact it, despite the toll it takes.”

- Catherine Gildiner, from Good Morning, Monster: Five Heroic Journeys to Emotional Recovery

“My father could not love, but he believed he could, and that must be enough, because perhaps half the world feels that way. He believed he loved me, but I could tell him how untrue that was, I could list for him the number of times he had placed me squarely within the jaws of death; I could list for him the number of times he had failed to be a father to me, his motherless child, while on his way to becoming a man of this world. He loved, he loved; he loved himself. It is perhaps the way of all men.”

- Jamaica Kincaid, from The Autobiography of My Mother

You know that Ada Limón poem where she’s like “I can’t help it i love the way men love”? my dad recently confessed to me that he became a shoemaker because they buried my grandma shoeless

-Anonymous, via tumblr

never have i felt more understood in my life than this morning when i saw a post that said, “parents. they want the world for you but they never stop to think maybe you don’t want the world.”

-deadithurts, via tumblr (original post unknown)