Trying: What I want for her, what I want for me.

You’re a good dad. Despite whatever discrepancies I might notice in what an
ideal consciousness would involve, let me say that you’re a good dad. I say
“are” because of the present reality of your ever-evolving love and pursuit of
us. It’s not a textbook perfection by any means. It’s convoluted and contrived
at times. It’s awkward and haphazard and clumsy. But it exists, this particular
perfection you carry around inside of you. You try. That’s the core of it. You try.


You try to be something, to express something, to hold something to the light
and call it what it is. Be that pride, or love, or expectation, or disappointment,
or understanding. You walk towards the creative expression of what you feel.
And, this stands out in the face of your reality; jilted and underdeveloped,
lacking vulnerable role models to show you how to love yourself and through
self-love to love those around you. Your world was dogmatic and liturgic, with
no value to be placed on honesty or transparency. I didn’t learn those from you,
as the world tells me I should have. You never taught me to emerge from the
shadows. You never taught me to truly see myself as I am, or to let that self be
seen unashamedly. I learned to hide and run and build walls, mostly from your
running and hiding and walls. That has been my growing up, undoing that which
was done. But through all of it, you were there, trying your hardest, working with
your hands and the raw materials you were given, imperfect as they were.

You tried. And in your trying I learned something. I learned that people could
be loved. I learned that that love is worth working for. I learned that love is
manifest in presence, agenda-free, non-utilitarian presence. I learned that
we all work with the raw materials we’ve been given, until we discover that
those raw materials are incomplete, and we go to find new materials to work
with. That which you were given were ideal for building walls and saving face.
But, now in the setting of the sun, you try. You try to start over. You try to dig
deeper. You try to communicate that your love is part of you, that it coexists
with your fear and your failure and your doubts. It coexists with the ugliness of
being, the stains on your hands, the convictions of your murder trials. It is there.
And you try to let it out, let it all be seen. And, in complete honesty, you’re
terrible at it. But, you’re getting better. And that’s why you’re a good dad.
Because it’s worth it to you to get better. It’s worth the tears and the pain and
the awkward conversations to show your scars and let them thus be redeemed.
And what it says to me, to us, is that we are loved.
That’s why you’re a good dad.