Things Dad and I Never Said
Even taking a secret to the grave doesn’t mean it isn’t revealed.
My relationship with my father was complicated at best. The easiest way to describe it was “he’s not good at being a father”. His good looks and easygoing charm meant he made friends wherever he went, and he was a philanderer from the day he married my mother, fifteen years before I was born. By the time I showed up on the scene, the youngest son with a bunch of older siblings mired in this dysfunctional family, our household was a mess.
My parents officially split up when I was three.
I learned the word divorce when I was five.
When mom explained how the word meant that mommy and daddy wouldn’t live together anymore, I remember responding with a shrug and an, “Oh, ok.” I mean, my life wasn’t going to change. He was never around anyway.
We lived with Mom, and Dad was supposed to provide money and see us kids regularly — like every other weekend, or something along those lines. That’s not quite how it worked out. He constantly disappointed me. I’d sit on the stoop, excitedly waiting for him to show up, only to have the phone ring and Mom come out to tell me there was a change of plans. We’d see each other a couple times a year. There were adult fights over missing child support money.
After many years of this, I became a bitter and angry teenager who hated my father and was convinced I meant very little to him.
Skip ahead to adulthood; Dad’s not been a significant figure in my life, and our communication was infrequent. I’ve now grown into a man with my own life. My own, complicated life.
I met my now-husband in my mid-twenties but didn’t come out to my family for several years. Despite my father’s lack of fathering, he and his Italian-American background were the dominating force in our family culture. He came from a very male-dominated family.
Women were objects to be collected and controlled, men were men and expected to be tough and manly.
So when I realized (finally admitted to myself) that I’m gay, well…I wasn’t sure how that would play back home. I kept my secret close, for a long time, trying to find the right way to reveal the truth.
When I did come out to my family, unexpectedly at a family gathering (without Dad), they hardly blinked at the news. Not because I was flamboyant and obviously gay from the start — in fact, I’m not at all — but because they weren’t bothered. They were relieved I wasn’t single and they liked my boyfriend!
But I never told Dad. Not directly, anyway, and we never discussed it. I wasn’t keeping it secret from him though, not any longer.
We didn’t talk often — maybe once or twice a year on the phone, and we lived several states away. Dad learned through someone else, likely one of my siblings. Or maybe he just realized it when I showed up on a group family trip to visit him with the boyfriend in tow, and the rest of the family, including all my nieces and nephews, were just treating him like part of the family. Between me and Dad, it was kind of our own little “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement.
Over the following years, whenever we talked on the phone, he’d ask about my partner. As I was approaching 40, I started to think about really creating a better relationship with Dad and healing some of that pain, so for the first time, I made plans to visit him without the pretense of a family reunion. I bought plane tickets for me and my partner and told him we were coming in a couple of months.
Dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and died before our trip.
As often happens when someone dies (or, at least so it seems in my family) secrets get revealed. In this case, my siblings and I learned we had a half-sister out there somewhere.
Because Dad having fathered another child was statistically expected, the only surprising thing about this was that some extended family members already knew. He had said it was his info to share with us kids, and he would when the time was right, which hadn’t seemed to happen in the interim 40 years.
(I know, right? That’s a whole other tale for another time.)
Thinking I might learn more about her, or about how and why she was such a secret, I turned to Uncle John, who was very different from my father. Whereas Dad might’ve been described as distant to his children and emotionally stunted (although quite emotional), his brother was loving, welcoming, and kind.
It was at Christmas that I called, and Dad had been gone for only a couple of months. After the small talk, I told him I had learned something about Dad since the funeral that I wanted to ask him about.
Before I could say anymore, Uncle John jumped in — “Oh, don’t you worry about that! It doesn’t mean anything! He used to call me up, crying, after he’d talk on the phone with you, and he’d go on and on wondering what he’d done wrong and why it is you turned out gay! I told him that wasn’t important at all…..”
I was stunned. I had no idea that’s what my father felt. Honestly, in that moment I’m not sure which was more surprising: that he felt enough for me to cry about me or that he was so ashamed of my being gay.
Yet another secret he kept from me.
In his machismo world, I suppose his son couldn’t — or shouldn’t — be a homo.
I managed to hide my shock, annoyance and hurt. I brushed it off. “Oh, well. No, that’s not what I was going to ask you about.”
Turns out my uncle — or so he said — didn’t know about this sister of mine. If he was shocked, he hid it as well as I just did. We wrapped up our call without acknowledging the topic of my father’s reaction to me.
I’d like to think that a good father would’ve loved his son unconditionally. I do think that in his messed up way, he loved me, even if he couldn’t express it. So maybe the best he could do was to hide from me his disappointment or disgust or whatever it was that led him to cry on his brother’s shoulder.
That was over fifteen years ago. Today, I don’t know if I understand Dad any more than I did then, but I do know there’s no changing any of it, so I don’t give his response much weight in what I carry around. It’s just another factor of that now-archived relationship, perhaps fodder for character study, and there’s nothing to resolve.
I’m at peace with my Dad’s reaction. I am who I am, and I’m proud of that.
And no, I’ve not learned more about that sister, although I did find another one!
That’s a tale for another time.
