It's weird to feel like a daughter again. For so many years, I was only a mother, a sister, an aunt - I never really thought that I felt something was missing. In the wake of my parents’ divorce more than 30 years ago, the relationship with my dad was so painful and fragmented that I just let it go & decided to live my life without him in it. After all, there were many tumultuous years prior to the divorce and maybe I was using those as an excuse to excise him from my life. I know one thing. The minute my mother died, I felt as though I ceased to be a daughter of anyone.
Following her death in 1983, I used to dread my dad coming back to San Francisco for a visit. I resented him for being the one who was alive when my mom wasn’t, for leaving her five years earlier, for causing my nuclear family to implode like a mushroom cloud, leaving so much emotional debris everywhere. Time passed, life went on, and the relationship remained tattered and tenuous.
And then, in 2007, my dad turned 80 and something I didn’t anticipate happened: I decided to finally visit him. My sister and I flew to Portland, rented a car and showed up for this milestone birthday. It was peculiar, as neither of us felt particularly close to him, and yet we both felt it important to mark the occasion, and going together made it that much easier. Soon we found ourselves sitting in his living room way up in the northwest corner of Oregon, talking about the past and listening to him talk about his life.
While he was talking, I watched him and listened intently to him talk of dreams both met and unfulfilled and his hopes for the rest of his life, "no matter how long that might be." I felt an overpowering and undeniable sensation in my chest. I realized that it was my heart starting to crack and break. For the first time in close to 25 years I realized that I actually did love my father. The reality of his one day passing away and my never having expressed my love for him was suddenly unimaginable to me. The more I opened my heart, the more able I was to accept him and all his eccentricities.
When I came back home to San Francisco, two-way communication started slowly and then began to flow. I talked to my own kids about what happened that weekend, and the more accepting I was, the more they began to open their hearts. Much like my realization that I might actually need my father, my kids realized that they enjoyed the idea of having a grandfather, too. My dad played the role well and with passion, remembering everyone's birthdays with a calligraphy card, making each kid feel special with his beautiful artwork.
Now, some four years later, the love has blossomed and the dread of his visits is gone, replaced by anticipation and happiness. This year, despite breaking a hip in January and then having a stent inserted after a heart attack in November, my dad still wanted to make the trip down to see us. He can still be aggravatingly righteous, imparting spiritual principles by which he lives his life and thinks that everyone else should too. But I can forgive this and accept it and now feel comfortable enough to tell him how I really feel about his proclamations - that they sound like so much b.s. to me. And that type of honesty, generally only reserved for those you feel closest to feels great. It's real, like an authentic relationship.
I guess the lesson is that people really do change. As my friend Jeri says, sometimes it takes 80 years to really grow up. But it's also about my role in the dynamic between us and my ability to forgive, to understand, to feel compassion and to give this new relationship a chance to breathe on its own. And I admit, I like the feeling when I ask him, "How are you feeling, daddy?" and get to reclaim my role as daughter.
