A Gift I Wasn't Expecting

My dad called tonight, a surprising enough event that when the phone rang and the call display showed the number, I automatically answered, "Hi Mom." But it was Dad, greeting me by a childhood nickname, "It's Dad," he said.

He was calling, he said, to tell me just how much he enjoyed having Pynchon and Munchkin and I spent the week of Christmas Way The Hell Up North with him and Mom. He wanted me to know, and he didn't think he'd made it clear enough, how nice it was to have us. How thoughtful our gifts were, what pleasant guests we made, what a delicious and unexpectedly fancy Christmas brunch I made, and how he had polished off the last of the leftovers today. What a great job I'd done on the homemade 'bits-n-bites', that I'd made from his recipe. Munchkin was a genius and loads of fun. Mostly, amazingly, he was calling about me. Thanking me. Praising me. Making a point of saying something kind, something that was clearly heartfelt, simply to be kind.

How did it come to be that the parent who best nurtures me, who most praises me, who seems most genuinely interested and enthusiastic about me is my dad? My stepfather, a man who married my mother when I was seven and whose presence I actively and vocally resented, whose authority I flouted, whose educational attainments and verbal dexterity I mocked, whose presence in our family I made sure to question in no uncertain terms, at every opportunity?

Let me be clear that in my family, everything is all about my sister and her kids--try to tell me different, it nevertheless remains that she has always been my mother's favorite, and the crisis of her early pregnancy cemented her position top-of-mind and top-of-conversation (never mind top-of-wallet) for the last decade and a half. Let me be clear as well that my stepfather and I have been like oil and water--or, probably, more like oil and fire. A relationship both highly combustible and generating more heat than light.

And yet, somehow, over these last five or six years it dawns on me that we've reached a point somewhere beyond grudging mutual acceptance. We've reached a point where his preference for me--me!--seems clear. He asks my advice on matters of practical communication, and on matters of cultural politics--and he follows it. He brags about me to others. He seems happy to eat food that I prepare (this in contrast to my mother, who before this summer, was never before seen eating my cooking and even now only grudgingly ingests it). He even--how did this come to pass?--seems to work hard to mediate between my mom and I in conversation, smoothing out the edges of her silences and declarative sentences to find a kernel of praise to amplify for me.

I've spent years chasing my mother's affection and attention, and nearly as many trying to put this man in his place. Not my dad, not as smart as me, not part of the family that is my sister, my mom, and me. What an ass I feel like now, as my career and family ramp up and he prepares for a quiet retirement with my mom, to discover that I'm carrying ill-will twenty years out of date when he has so graciously moved on.

Do you know, I still have to be coaxed (by Pynchon) to hug my Dad and tell him that I love him?

I thought my best gift this Christmas was the eight weeks of yoga lessons Pynchon arranged for me. But maybe my best gift is this new realization, this opportunity to build a new relationship with my Dad. I think I might, if I'm brave enough, wait for a couple of days, and send him a private little card, telling him how much his phone call--how much his support these last years--has come to mean to me. I could never have imagined reaching out like that, but maybe I can. I really begin to feel like I should. Thirty years into our relationship and he is my dad as surely as my mom is my mom, with all the history and baggage that family carries with it. It might be time to take some of those bags off the carousel, you know?

Huh. Who'd've thunk?