paternal difficulties

it's hard to articulate the daddy issues i used to pretend i didn't have but lately i feel like if i could just circle him with the perfect words and describe him in the ways i never could, maybe i would not feel so powerless. maybe i would own my insecurities and be able to sit through christmas eve without checking my phone and ducking out early. maybe my knucles would not turn white on the steering wheel when i wait for twenty minutes outside the atm at the third bank i have driven him to.

Daddy,

i used to dance on your feet and you used to turn me upside down and call me princess in my footie pajamas and children can only ever see the way their father shines when he laughs, and i loved the way i felt special that you knew the man at the movie store and the chinese restaurant and the blue moon diner where we got pancakes as big as my face. sometimes you had days when you asked me things six times and i never thought it was strange how many afternoons i waited after school for you or how many different cars you crashed and sometimes you forgot to pay and walked out of the store and i would stay up late drawing you pictures until charges were dropped

Daddy,

the pictures get clearer every time my mother drops an offhand hint about our past, as a child i couldn't see it but piece by piece i have learned about your lingering depression, your mob connections, your drug abuse and your chemical imbalances. when you moved out i was young and i was not sad, i knew it would stop the yelling and that was good enough for me. but when my mother moved me to the suburbs i found that my new friends all had two parents and it bothered me more and more each day. it did not help that my visits to you were filled with signs of your poverty and i ate ramen and poptarts every meal at your house and insisted it was my favorite while you carried on laments about how you still loved my mother and she should never have made you leave us- Daddy, I was too young to hear that.

Daddy,

when you tell me your story you give it such detail you could be talking about what happened last week. but that was thirty years ago, Daddy, and every time you paint yourself the hero and the victim but you can't have it both ways. you have gained no wisdom from your life, Daddy. your perspective is so narrow, you don't consider that there are other people who are as multidimensional as you. you are so quick to forgive your laundry list of mistakes, when will you forgive theirs? when will you forgive mine?

Daddy,

it is lonely on this pedestal. i do not have your son's patience for your bullshit, but somehow i am the one burdened with guilt for the silence on my end of the phone. i can only call you from the road so that i can say, "Daddy, i'm driving" and make a quick escape. sometimes i find myself weeping becausei want to talk to my Daddy- but i do not want to talk to you.