A Mirror on a Trail

It wasn't until I straightened myself out in young adulthood that I realized who my father is. My father is me. No, I am not parthenogenetic. I am not a nematode. What I mean is I have a father who, for the longest time, I failed to acknowledge fully. I sought him out in various ways as I walked along a trail unknowingly structured for me. It wasn't until I had found myself along that trail that I realized my father was leading me. Only feet ahead, he kicked away acorns, parted thick brush, and pointed out stumps and roots to avoid tripping. I had always assumed I must walk this path alone. As children would, I had slowed to stillness, so the adult was out of sight. I was left to spin in circles, sigh with boredom, collect pebbles of significance, and pull bark off trees - what kids do along trails that seem endless and without clear direction. I had unknowingly imposed emotional distance and a lack of direction. With that distance, I created a profile of my father severely lacking in depth. He was the obstructed figure ahead of me I followed with apprehension.

I was blind to our similarities. The love a parent had for their child was apparently not enough for me. I didn't see how validating our relationship already was. It was easier to focus on the unavoidable negative interactions that came from raising a child, and my father was not keen on digging through the roughage of a troubled child's psyche. He did what worked for him as a kid, like most parents do. That practice was not always sensitive to my wild anxieties. I longed for a connection I didn't acknowledge. Maybe it was because the realization didn't hit me like ice water to a warm crotch, I denied its existence in the first place. What I didn't see, or maybe didn't want to see, was that it had already come to me in the formation of my own habits, opinions, interests, and deviations.

I didn't realize who my father was when my mother shook her head and told me I was just like him, eyeing me top to bottom with humor and slight disdain.

Nor did I have that realization when my wardrobe consisted of the same three pairs of worn pants, long socks, and various button-down flannels.

Even after I found passion for art and history, or became vocally agitated at the news, or found myself reheating the same cup of coffee for the second time, that specific type of come-to-Jesus (more like come to father) moment flew straight over my head.

Pre-realization, he was chiefly my dad, a man of few words and subdued emotions, mystified in my mind as a person I would fight all my life to know. When I got to know him, I hoped he would understand me. I felt extremely misunderstood - that appeared to be the basis for our disconnect in the first place. I supposed I would have to demolish the perceived walls surrounding him. Ultimately, I didn't know what would have to occur, but it had better happen soon.

Sometimes, I imagined the beast of mutual understandings would burst from murky, unexplored waters and swallow me whole. I would fall down the throat of that beast and in its barren belly would sit my father, vulnerable and peering sideways through knees tucked to his forehead. I would put my hand on his shoulder and sense who he was. He would sense who I was. Shut up, I'm dramatic.

Rarely did I acknowledge my own walls. My womanhood, my shift towards leftist politics, my odd tastes in foreign animation - all seemed to be huge points of contention from the get-go. I found myself both envious and repulsed by my "daddy's girl" peers and disturbed by pink camo. I was too much of a withdrawn perfectionist to see any less-than-successful attempt to bond as anything more than total and utter failure. The ball was in his court. I was in the bleachers, stewing about how miserable I felt, bleeding and abusing eyeliner.

My father was, at the time, a person I wanted to embody for various ill-understood reasons. I figured if I was more like him in practice, it would be easier for him to approve of me. I didn't realize he already approved of me.

I figured I could get into politics. So, I read the paper. I watched the news. I read books. I studied history. All of this casually through the lens of political satire and liberal media. Unsurprisingly, this only seemed to divide us further. 

I carefully observed his daily habits. On days off, he woke up every morning and went downstairs to puff on a cigarillo, watch the news, and drink a cup of coffee. He ate an English muffin, reheated his coffee, and talked to our cat. Soon, he was out the door to grab a newspaper and an armful of groceries. Then he was back home, working on the yard, toiling in his vegetable garden, or tinkering in the garage. He spent most of his hours doing home maintenance, briefly returning inside to reheat another coffee, brew red rose tea, or quickly scan the television. As a teenager, I couldn't fully emulate most of these habits, and so my remaining time was spent locked in my room on the internet, watching trashy TV, or stress eating snacks. 

Always, I missed the chance to catalog various details of his life with care as the information was relayed to me: He was passionate about making jewelry but found it hard to support a family on such an independent venture. He began traveling across the South doing various construction jobs, sleeping in various motels and trailers, returning to his home only for a brief respite. He enjoyed learning about American history, specifically, the Civil War. He expressed a deep interest in antiques. He felt strong connections to local history, and often briefed me on fond or funny memories from his childhood.

As I got older, through family friends and my mother, I learned he liked to party. He kept those details to himself and divulged information only through the lens of a life lesson. I knew that he had given up that lifestyle shortly after deciding to start a family. I did not understand exactly how and why that transition occurred, only that it did, and I longed to know the person before my existence. A bittersweet feeling persisted inside me.

My parents paid for me to attend art school. Although I graduated, my education was coupled with excessive partying. This cultivated a distance between me and them both geographically and emotionally. I felt a shame stifled with self-affirmations that my partying habits were normal and expected. I picked up smoking. It was the most depressing connection I had to my father, but I held onto it with the feeling of breaking down one wall with a stinky hammer. He told me how it concerned him, and I could tell it was not the connection we were fated to have. Typical of me, I forced it anyways.

I moved out into an apartment with my boyfriend. The emotional distance felt like a self-imposed gut punch. The physical unavailability I created only poked at the bruise. I wondered if that would change how my father interacted with me. I didn't realize that, once again, I was still that same kid in the bleachers, bleeding considerably less due to birth control, but still fussing with that metaphorical eyeliner. I had grown closer to him now that I was old enough to understand him as an adult, but the conflicted feeling I grew accustomed to lingered.

You're just like your father, my mother commented, as I relayed to her the general state of disrepair our rental was in. Her voice echoed in my head as I reheated my coffee, brewed my tea, spoke to my cats, puffed on a cigarette, shook with anger over the news, buttoned up my shirt, put on one of my identical pairs of work pants, and tinkered with the house. It echoed as I came to terms with the unviable career path I had chosen, as my pens ran out of ink, and as I decided to do various labor jobs in the city.

The partying was no longer a demented way to reward a growing mind in a structured environment. Post-graduation, it was up to me to structure my own environment. Partying had filled in the gaps in my schedule. It eventually ganged up on my tasks and rendered them unrecognizable and fragile. When you party for too long, you see your life in pieces, parts forming separately without apparent relation to one another. My life as a young adult had materialized. In harsh realization I discovered it was not the form I wanted. I knew it was because I neglected myself. The partying had to stop. I decided to ditch a few habits in the tangled brush lining the path. The veil of intoxication burned and twisted in the sunlight. With unobstructed sight, I saw the crumpled guide to my soul-searching trail at my feet. It had been there all along, penned in part by my father. Why I had misplaced it in the first place, I cannot remember, but it appeared to be done out of frustration.

That crumpled guide led me to a mirror. Peering back was none other than my father. I saw him in my reflection and beyond the frame. Still kicking away acorns and marking tangled roots, he had been keeping track of me all along in his peripheral vision. This was the ice water to the crotch I had been bracing for. I saw we were both different and one in the same. This lifted an immense weight off my heart. That newfound lightness quickened my pace towards him. I realized I could not stumble through the trail doing whatever suited my impulses, or I would certainly get lost again. I needed a focused plan more than a prayer. I needed consistency more than therapy. I needed to disperse the self-imposed fog to begin to fully see myself. Only then did I see my father staring back at me in the mirror. Only then did I decide that we were closer than ever before, because I had taken the steps to reduce that distance.

Still a man of few words, I hold in my heart an unspoken bond that needn't be expounded on. It needs no further clarification. When I tell him I love him, it means far more than before, because to love him is to know him, and to know someone is to know oneself. I don't need to be in the belly of a beast. I certainly don't need him to tell me any more than he already has. For I know I am living, in part, his life. With that understanding, I know beyond words that he knows who I am and accepts me for all I am. With no regrets, I only wish I had the sense to face that truth sooner.