I sat down to write because I needed to. I’ve had a thing bouncing around my head for days and I just need to take a second and work it out. So, here goes:
I think it was a fortune cookie that initially set me off. The nice bartender at the PF Chang gave me an extra to take home with my leftovers. So, while my beef with broccoli was doing its thing in the microwave, I took the opportunity to live like the adult I am and ate the cookie first.
The fortune said something about how I was going to reconnect with a person I’d lost touch with. I honestly don’t remember the exact wording. I read it, thought, “Huh, ok,” then being far more interested in the delightful, vaguely vanilla crunch of the cookie, threw away the fortune.
I went on to engage with various pieces of technology, I am traveling for work after all, while having my lunch, not giving another thought to the fortune. A bit later I was pretty mindlessly packing everything up to move on to my next appointment and it kind of hit me. Reconnect with someone? Huh. Who? Am I supposed to reconnect with someone?
Now, I’m certainly not prone to giving most fortune cookies any credence. But, this just seemed to stick. I usually have a pretty cluttered mind that’s buzzing with Kesha songs, anxieties, and picking apart every way I’ve entered into the world today looking a hot damned mess. But this wouldn’t leave. Reconnect.
I don’t usually disconnect from people. Thanks to social media, even my friends that have moved away still feel close. And the people I’ve grown really close to, I’ve kept around. The people I really liked in middle and high school? Still see ‘em all the time. True college friends? I interact with them on social media a few times a week. Hell, I even still talk to ex boyfriends.
There’s only one person I’ve ever completely unplugged from, only one person who was so toxic and terrible that I made a decision to remove him completely. A person I truly have no fond memories of, no warm and fuzzies, no “but that one time was really great” moments. My dad.
And you guys, he was pretty awful. I won’t turn this into some laundry list of indictments into how and why he was awful. But, I will say that I’ve never regretted the decision to never speak to him again. I’ve gone so far as to warn family and friends to never to give him my contact info, even when they've been the bearer of messages from him asking for it.
I do not feel my life has been anything but enhanced for having made this decision. I’ve been free to live my life without the tumult that speaking to him would certainly involve. I feel nothing but happy with this decision, and only wish I’d done so earlier in my life. (I was 20 when I stopped speaking to him. I’m 35 now).
At this point, he’s in his 70s. I don’t really want to know anything about him, but my mom and sister occasionally hear a thing and pass a tidbit of info on to me. He’s apparently not in great health. He lived hard for a time, so that’s not necessarily surprising.
I don’t have guilt. When I think of him, I don’t have some sense of longing to make the past right. I honestly don’t believe he has the capacity to do any kind of atonement for things he did. Happily, I don’t need him to. I’ve made my peace that he is who he is and I’ve made a better life without him.
I don’t have anger. I did once. But, I learned to let that go. I came to terms with the fact that he was probably doing as best he knew how given his own mental health and what had been modeled for him. That isn’t to excuse him. But, it’s a way to move on without wanting to throttle him.
I don’t have any words I need to hear him say. I don’t need an apology, or some admission of wrong doing. I’ve healed without that. Enough time has elapsed that it wouldn’t mean much anyway.
But there’s this thing that keeps sticking in my head. Reconnect.
I saw a few signs in stores recently that mentioned Father’s Day. That hasn’t really meant much to me in 15 years, so I had to google what day that was. Turns out, it’s coming up. I honestly thought it’d already happened.
And no, I don’t plan on trying to have some Father’s Day reconnection. Honestly, when my mom and sister have tried to reconnect with him, it didn’t go well and they’ve shut him out again. I don’t have any delusion that it would go any differently for me.
Also, my life has enough general chaos in it without inviting in some other brand of crazy. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in that movie, I’m all stocked up in that sense.
But yeah, there’s no pretty ending to this little diatribe. It’s mainly an effort to remove a thing that’s been bouncing around my head. Maybe I’m hoping it’ll finally put this particular train of thought to rest and I can go back to Kesha and obessing about how this tucked in shirt makes me look fatter than I am.
For now, I’m gonna listen to Rufus sing “Dinner at 8,” then pack up my stuff and move on to my next appointment.
