For all my flaws and virtues, I am my father’s daughter.
I remember full rooms of people, milling about our home– talking. Every conversation seemed to include a lie, and every lie stood out to me, obvious and confusing. Some people accepted lies, and some couldn’t hear them at all. Across the room, I’d make eye contact with my dad and he’d smile reassuringly at me. He could hear them as loudly, but he trained me to hear beyond them. He showed me to accept these lies as the first sentence of a story, and to reserve my judgment until the entire story unfolded. He taught me to be kind to those who accepted all manner of lies, and to listen to the comforting lullabies that they used to block them out.
No one– no matter how much love or time is shared– knows someone else completely.
No one knows what truth is whispered to you by yourself in the first hush of sleep. No one knows your stories the way you know them.
Thus, no one knows why we lie– about how we are, and how school is going, and what we ate for breakfast, or whether or not we are happy.
I am my father’s daughter, and I accept this. I hear each and every lie with an accuracy that surprises most– a skill crafted at my father’s side– and I truly accept it. I smile, I listen, and I store the lie away as the first line of a story that I one day may be honored to hear. But I don’t believe the lie, not for an instant.
He is patient, and fond of saying so– but he is not a fool.
I love you and your brothers and sisters, more than anything in the galaxy and beyond.
This particular lie has become my lullaby, the lullaby has become my memory, and I’ve been known to hum the tune to myself without realizing it. It has seeped in, but for all my flaws and virtues– I am my father’s daughter.
I will not point it out, but I won’t ever believe it.
He holds my hand as he asks for tea– with real cream and sugar, the way he likes it. We smile at each other in the hospital room, and we both hear the lie in the action.
Our love is a galactic empire, but a thousand grains of sugar overrun us every day, and my dad is holding the door open.
He doesn’t care if he dies.
That cup of tea is worth it, you see.
It is worth more than an extra day with me, or an extra hour, or an extra year.
Few people are lucky enough to have their worth so clearly mapped for them. My value in the life of someone who loves me more than the galaxy itself is still small enough to fit in a tiny bowl.
I have heard that people need to enjoy their life, or what’s the point of living. It’s something my father says, too– with a smile, over scoops of melted cheese as he offers the bowl to those around him. The cheese matches the colors of the crisscrossed scars over his heart. I wonder if people would be so quick to partake if their hands were stained with his blood as those wounds were being made. I wonder if they would smile at the tales of survival if they gave up their savings, and scholarships, and friendships to give those wounds time to heal into scars.
Even I, with his inherited memory, forgot the first time the doctors cut into his heart. It was harder to forget the second time. It’s impossible to forget the memory of every time after.
If I focus, I can think back to the eye contact we would make with each other. In the midst of those busy parties, my father’s eyes were like his father’s eyes, and my eyes were like his. People would say they were sunken with understanding and sparkling with arrogance.
Now his eyes are foggy mirrors of what they were once were. Burst blood vessels and murky veins cover them entirely. He is blind and there are many who know us now that never knew us when our eyes matched.
He let an army of bad habits in, and they trampled our empire down. I wonder if people hear the death of our kingdom, as I hear it– and if this part of my story echoes in their life, too.
It is an all too common tale, though the army takes different forms in different stories. My father’s army is sweet, but some armies are intoxicating and others are addictive. They are different, yes– but all too much the same.
My father’s weakness pushes him to the precipice of a cliff every day. He tells me he is going to jump because he wants to. He says he loves me. I know which of those is a lie.
I reach out and people pull me back. It is his choice, they say. It is inappropriate to ask someone to sacrifice an ounce of joy in their life, they say.
They see it, too, then. The smallness of me.
A spoonful of sugar is worth a day of me, or perhaps a month, or even a year or ten. My worth fits in a sugar bowl that I share with my siblings and their beautiful children.
Ask anyone.
I am told that this lie is the start of a story I will never understand, even if I the story is shared with me. I am not a parent. I cannot be a parent.
Let it go. Let it be.
Let him jump. Accept it.
Applaud the fall.
It is glorious and only the cruelest of hearts would begrudge such a journey.
It’s just a spoonful of sugar. Let it wash the medicine of truth down.
Source: VisualPhotos.com
The truth is, you probably won’t be murdered in your sleep– a senseless and random death. You will make choices that will lead to your death. Most people do. You will choose death because you don’t care enough about what’s here in front of you in order to live. You will choose death because you are afraid to fight the weaknesses that push you to the cliff.
My father says he wants to be a good father, to be here for us, but the lies ring across a busy room, clear as a bell. His lies are in the actions he takes, and the actions he refuses to take.
I love you and your brothers and sisters, more than anything in the galaxy and beyond.
If I focus, the lie is blinding and painful, but if I simply accept it as the beginning of a story I don’t have the perspective yet to hear, I can almost drown it out with the hums of the lullaby crafted in my own mind.
I love you and your brothers and sisters, more than anything in the galaxy and beyond.
We love each other. More than anything in the galaxy and beyond. Perhaps he really does need this. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that I will be mourning the loss of my father far before anyone else my age, because perhaps then I will hear the end of the story. Maybe, just maybe– standing over him as his scars and tissues and blind eyes burn away– I will hear a whisper of the truth he once told himself while he was alive. The lullaby that sung him to sleep when he was more than just a past-tense footnote in my memories.
I suspect he is a hostage to that army, and simply doesn’t want me to know. I hope he doesn’t borrow my strength simply because he is protecting me, not because he doesn’t think I have it to spare.
I hope that his lullaby is quite similar to mine. I hope in the quietest moments of his truth, he hears:
I am loved– more than anything in the galaxy and beyond.
So it seems that, though I am patient like my father’s daughter should be, I am a little more than that.
I am also,
clearly,
a fool.
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For February’s peace challenge, Kozo asked us to write to a family issue. This immediately came to mind, but it took me some time to put into words. I don’t know if I tackled the prompt correctly, but there you have it– it was the first thing that came to mind.
http://everydaygurus.com/2014/02/03/monthly-peace-challenge-we-are-family/
Check out the other entries for February, too:
Brain Sweets – Dearest Daughter
silent kim
Meredith
Appletonavenue
The Camino Plan
Delightfully Different Life
Electronic Bag Lady
walktalker
Wandering Voiceless
Goldfish
seeker
E J Judge – Becoming a Writer
Inspire The Idea
The Asymmetry of Matter
Glorious Mettle