My Dad Was Absent

My dad was absent.

When I was in high school, he rarely made it to athletic events, even missing some playoff games. He worked too late, too much, and was trying too hard to get his own business going. He didn’t show interest in my writing, unbothered whether I pursued it, or higher education at all. By college there was a great divide. He overstepped some boundaries, and I attacked back at him, probably crossing some of my own. I blamed him for a lot of things, decisions that affected me in to my twenties.

Last fall my wife and I had our first child. To say it was eye-opening is an understatement. I’ve felt more and deeper emotions than ever before. I’ve become very attuned to our baby as well. His expressions, his different cries, his excitement at eating potatoes, I see it all.

And I hear him through my sleep. White noise machine humming across the hall, me dead asleep, exhausted from taking care of this beautiful baby boy, I hear his faintest cries in the dark. I can be up in an instant to be by his side, half-awake, but fully prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect him.

We often think of protection in a physical sense: fighting off an intruder, keeping a wild dog at bay, avoiding a dangerous driver on the road. And those are all protection, but a parent has a deeper responsibility than just keeping their child alive. Protecting their emotional state is just as important. Waking up hungry lasts a few minutes, but feeling abandoned can affect you for a lifetime.

And that’s when I realized that my dad hadn’t been absent.

When I was young, I remember doing animal run-ups, a game where he would stand at the end of the yard and my brother’s and I would do some sort of “run”, super-fast like a cheetah, lumbering as an elephant, hopping like a kangaroo. At the end we would jump as high as we could, and he would catch up in mid-air.

He was a teacher, so he had a lot of late nights. Most times the sun was setting by the time run-ups were in full session. I never considered the energy and strength it took to catch us over and over again after a twelve-hour day dealing with teens and an under-funded school system. You could tell it was exhausting, the job and our run-ups, but he did both for years.

It’s a crazy thing, but when my younger brother and I were growing up, we would knock on the wall for him when we had a nightmare, were feeling sick, or needed comfort. And he always showed up.

He was present at 2 AM when I had nightmares, when I couldn’t sleep because we saw a scary movie. He didn’t tell me it wasn’t real, he put on a calming movie and stayed up with us for the entire two hours. He didn’t tell me that there weren’t spiders running around in my room, he cuddled with me on the couch in the cold and dark because I didn’t want to go back to my bed where the nightmare had happened.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe he could even hear my knocking. You might as well have called him Batman with supersonic hearing like that. He was upstairs on the other side of the hall, a big old box fan blasting cold air louder than an airplane engine. But now that I’m a dad, I get it. It’s anything but shocking.

Because I would do the same exact thing.