for my dad
Listening to a voicemail left by my Dad last night, I heard a slight catch in his voice. He’d just landed in Austin on a business trip and I didn’t have the chance to talk to him before he got on the plane. Instead he left me a voicemail to remind me how proud he is of all of us. Voicemails like these aren’t atypical. As easily as he communicates his love for us, it is also true that at a certain point in his life he didn’t think he would ever have a wife and kids.
While the details are (unsurprisingly) fuzzy, I do know that my Dad spent most of his early twenties in a drugged out stupor. Caught between his addictions and his predisposition towards depression, he assumed that his life wouldn’t add up to much. It took a year-long inpatient rehab center for him to get sober. A few years after that, he finally met my mom. They dated for 6 weeks before getting engaged, and have been together for all of the 31 years that followed.
I love my Dad in a non-negotiable sort of way. In my mind, he’s on a pedestal because he deserves to be. Still, our relationship hasn’t always been an easy one. There was a year in high school where he and I fought incessantly. He was justifiably angry at me and was terrified that history was repeating itself in the life of his son. I, on the other hand, was 16 years old and completely unrelenting in the face of his anger. Even then, even as we found each other to be intolerable, I do not remember ever questioning whether or not he loved me.
There are memories like those, and then there is the memory of his shaking voice as he told me in no uncertain terms that it was not OK for me to be cheated on. That I deserved better. That he was so, so sorry for what I was going through and didn’t understand why it had to be this way. My heart was broken so his broke along side of it.
There is his face when he sees his kids after too many months between visits.
The way he watches my mom when she’s not looking. How proud he is of her accomplishments.
For as long as I can remember, my Dad has publically acknowledged how bad things were in his 20’s to explain why it is that he cherishes so deeply, the life he has now.
He is not the only one.
I will forever be grateful that he managed to beat the odds. That he married my mom, loved her, and created a life worth living. I am proud of him for being the man that he is and for the strength that it took him to become the person I now know. It is the combination of that strength and his willingness to get teared up over his kids, that sets the standard for every other man in my life.
We are the lucky ones, Dad. You are the cherished one.
