Explaining my Father is a kind of perpetual quest for me. He’s an interesting guy by anyone’s standards but he baffles most, myself included a good portion of the time. Anyway, this particular story defines baffling and a few other choice adjectives I could throw in for good measure. More to the point it explains a lot about my family, and life, and how things got to be the way they are, in an incredibly condensed form.
Picture the scene:-
A small coffee shop in inner city Sydney at about 9am on a Wednesday. 2 weeks before my University entrance exams begin…
I took my best friend E. with me for moral support. I had no idea what to expect you see – this being the first time I’d seen or heard from my Father since he’d left the house some 4 months previously. I couldn’t imagine divorce proceedings had done much for his overall mental stability. So dear old Dad had forgotten my 18th birthday, which is the big deal, become an adult birthday in Australia. Anyway, he figured he’d bring along a present or something vaguely resembling one to soften the blow of the news he also wanted to pass on.
Dad shows up about 20 minutes late, drunk off his skull and looking like something the cat would’ve been seriously ashamed to have dragged in. He managed to sit and chat for about five minutes, basically incoherently before needing to run to the bathroom to throw up. A “migraine” don’t you know? At that point he shoved a large white plastic box in my hands. I discussed with E. whether or not there was any point in checking it out. Curiousity inevitably got the better of us both so I opened it to find…
1. A plain, white shirt button on a pink string.
2. A teeny, tiny book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Highlighted, in pink of course, were all the homoerotic references. There are more than you’d guess.
3. An eight page, tear soaked letter that was my Father coming out to the world as gay. For the first time ever, to anyone.
After Dad came back from the bathroom and saw I’d opened the box he sat down for another 10 minutes. I held up the button and raised an eyebrow. Apparently it was his favourite button. So there you go – I learned something: people have favourite buttons. It’s the little things?
Dad left, and E. and I fell about ourselves laughing. It took about a half hour before I actually worked up the nerve to read the letter, and it dawned on me what he was saying beneath all the flowery rhetoric and careful turns of phrase. I took the letter home to my Mother, as I well knew I was supposed to and played a precarious round of don’t shoot the messenger. She wasn’t as shocked as she could’ve been but then perhaps having an answer on which to blame things helped, in the end. Anyway, life went on and I had the exams which would decide my future to focus on so at some point all such revelations fall by the wayside.
And yes, people do tend to use the phrase ‘at least it wasn’t a button’ around me a lot now.
If that is a sampling of your father, well, it is no wonder that you would have a difficult time figuring out “normal.” However, some of the things you share do make quite a funny tale. My head keeps thinking, “a button?” You definitely had an upside down world growing up.
You write well. I am not sure if this is fact or fiction, but certainly held my interest. If true, it is not a parent at any cost.
Your Dad certainly has his own demons. So, my thoughts are to hold him in your heart, but move on.
Writing is a wonderful way to get the pain out.
LOL Yeah, CC that’s pretty much my reaction still.
And Elizabeth, it’s fact – unfortunate as that may be.
Wow. That’ll make you sit up and take notice. I wonder if he knew it all along or if it was a revelation that struck him at one time or another. Poor man. I feel sorry for him. That would certainly be enough to drive somebody to drink.
Eeek!
Thank you for sharing this story with us, CK!
Wowza.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up.
You’re inspiring me to tell you some of MY stories.
;) Coming soon to a blog near you.
He sort of thinks he knew, Lou but was in denial for a very long time or something.
LOL Yeah, Ash, if only my imagination was this good – I’d be a rich woman.
Anyway, looking forward to some of your stories! I like that this bit of total craziness can be inspiring. It’s unexpected but in a great way.
I’m sorry to hear that the relationship with your father is so strained. I have struggled on and off with my father for many years until we both found that common ground of both our lives in which we could peacefully exist.
Family dynamics are TOUGH….it sometimes seems easier to look at the relationships that other people have in order to find the compassion the we all need within in our own personal relationships.
I know my father has his own demons, was only able to give me what he had been given and that in his own twisted distorted way loves me…But damm some days there still is a part of me that wants to choke the life out of him for being such a human being.
The greatest lesson my Father ever taught me unknowingly is for me to realize that I don’t want his stuff, I don’t want my world to be limited the way his was, I don’t want to pass on all his emotional garbage…so now I sit and deal not only with my crap but all of his as well…the payoff in the end is that I stop the cycle of insanity that has been passed on from generation to generation and I get to embrace the freedom of self that sadly enough he will never, ever even know exists for him to experience as well…it’s sad really.
BTW Happy Birthday!!!!
I’m so posting you a button for your next birthday :P
~Shiv
Wow, nice one Dad! Sheesh! Parenting for Dummies – how not to tell your child you’re gay…!!