Realizing that my father was a coward killing goat herders from a billion dollar jet, not a hero like I thought growing up.
When I found out he had neglected to tell me that I have an inheritable disease that will suddenly just outright kill me one day, unless I get regular checkups. Other than that there just isn’t that much I know about him, he never told me about himself and we rarely meet.
Who?
Some parents are just not woth the title.
My mom would always fuss that I’d drip water on the floor after a shower. After one such fussing, my dad took the time to actually give me advice on how to towel off properly, so as not to drip. (LPT: start from the top, work your way down)
Anyways, he was the more patient parent and would try and help you succeed.
I have so many stark lasting memories of my dad, good and bad it’s hard to pick the one with the greatest impact.
Maybe the time I watched him have an allergic reaction to an ssri that ended in 6 cops beating him unconscious and dragging him to jail.
Maybe the time he unprompted pulled $800 out of his wallet and handed it to the lady at the laundry mat who was stressed about paying her rent that month.
Maybe the time my friends and I showed up at 2am with bath salts and he did a little toot with us.
Maybe the time he sat with me in the kitchen until the wee hours of the night playing chess while I cried about being broken up with for the first time.
One time I fell backwards from the ladder to the treehouse my dad built. I summersaulted backwards like twice as I fell but I was completely fine. But the look of worry and how fast he ran is something I’ll never forget. It made me realize how much he cares.
My dad is… complicated, and I could tell a lot of insane stories. But the memory that is haunting me is how he said “we won’t wait when war starts”, in Russian. It made no sense. I overheard it as a part of some conversation with my mother (maybe other grown ups as well) when I was a kid and I asked what he meant and he claimed he didn’t remember saying that. I believe him that he didn’t remember. But it was odd, it’s not something he would say. Neither he, nor my mom, nor their friends are political people talking about war, ever. It was said casually, but no one ever casually talked about war or politics over here. This was 25 years ago. I kept thinking about it for years and years again, trying to grasp what it meant, what it might have meant, and why it stuck with me so much, why I couldn’t get it out of my head, why I couldn’t let it go.
It was also painfully screaming in my head when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022. It’s like it was an eerie foreshadowing but I still don’t know. I have so few memories of my childhood, why did this one stay? Why do I see and hear him say this? What did he mean with “we won’t wait”? Did he mean we won’t wait for the war to start or we won’t wait when the war will have started? Both are possible interpretations in the Russian wording. What are we waiting for? Are we still waiting? What should we be doing?
I keep going back to this one stupid sentence and this memory is ringing in my ears. What does it want to tell me to do? I know I need to do something, I just can’t figure out what.
This could all depend on where you’re living. I get the impression you’re in a country that may have been or may currently be an enemy of Russia (or thought of as a threat by those running Russia right now). If that’s the case, could your folks be Russian ops in some form?
They would have stopped having those sorts of conversations around you as you got older and they’d deny that they said anything of the sort for those you did remember.
The phrase “we won’t wait (for) when the war starts” could mean that they’re going to do whatever they need to do even if there’s no actual guns, bombs and fighting going on. You know. Cold war things.
There’s that phrase that Khrushchev allegedly said about the US, for example. Putin has revived all of that. Assuming it ever went away.
Coming everyday to sit with me in the hospital for a month; from the ICU all the way to the general ward until he walked out the front door with me.
I always knew my dad loved me but he wasn’t great at expressing it, but it was never more apparent than during that time.
I flat celebrated my father’s death. The upside was he instilled equality of gender well, and considering the 80s that wasn’t common around middle USA.
Father’s Day is complex for me. Balancing my adult daughter bringing it for me vs memories of mine takes effort.
I’ll never forget being around 12 years old and hearing my dad address another adult by Mr+surname. It was Mr Palmer who organized the little league I grew up playing in and my dad coached. In school we were forced to address teachers and staff as Ms, Mrs or Mr but at that instance I realized treating others with respect is a choice
some fathers suck
that man is a racist, misogynistic, child beating, wife beating, cat killing, rapist piece of shit.
my very first memory, punching him in the nose and bloodying it when I was a 4yo because he wouldn’t stop picking on me and calling me a chicken-shit. He was proud of me and stopped picking on me after I finally hit him because I wasn’t acting like a chicken shit. He was likely drunk.
I dunno if he’s still alive but I hope he’s sad and lonely today because nobody on earth likes him much less his children.
When he died, we all could finally breathe.
Unfortunately for mine, that stubborn son of a bitch is still hanging around into his 80’s, while the rest of his miserable family had the decent common courtesy to kick it in their 60’s & 70’s. I went no contact about a decade ago, but I still get to hear how much of a piece of shit he is from the rest of the family.
The only positive that came from him is that I turned out to be a better father than he did. I have a good relationship with my nearly adult kids.
His fists.
I thought that my Dad always killed flies with extreme force, until I saw him releasing them outside from his fist.
There are few greater antipoles to me and “my whole thing” than my dad, but… He taught me the value of being cautious, and to take time to extensively evaluate pros and cons before I made important decisions. I took that ball and ran with it, and now I am routinely praised by my peers for my ability to foresee potential pitfalls and preemptively negate them, and reflexively I think of my dad who would suggest that it was just common sense.
Of course it’s not just “common sense” – but rather a curious mindset and an intentional thought process – and you instilled that in me, Dad. Thank you.
