It’s a strange feeling realizing without realizing that your whole life’s story has been a lie – one of those optical illusions you’ve spent decades thinking is a bunny and you find out it’s been a duck all along. You’re never able to find your footing, always feeling slightly off-kilter, like an existential inner ear infection.
The image above showed up in my inbox last week. That’s me, with my dad and my dog. I hadn’t seen this photo since 1985.
I spent most of my life without my dad, which is odd, considering the mutual adoration that’s clearly evident in this picture. When I was little, my dad was my whole world. The sun rose and set when he told it to, because he was my dad and I was his “kiddo”. He bartered for LEGO playtime by playing Barbies. He never complained when he stepped on a tiny Barbie heel. I used to watch in awe while he organized his Oxfords in Roy G. Biv order, a rainbow of detail and precision.
I forgot about this moment but I can still touch it. The butterfly on the wall behind him hangs in my dining room. The glass shadowbox below it is wrapped in one of my old baby creepers and stashed in my cedar chest. It’s my parent’s wedding invitation – I rescued it from the trashcan sometime in the mid 1990s. The copper etchings on that wall are my dad’s artwork. I saved those from the same trash can. They’re on my bookshelf next to copies of Dostoyevsky. Inexplicably, The Brothers Karamazov was a bedtime story from him when I was little. I still love it. Echoes of my dad are everywhere in my house if you know what you’re looking to find. It was the only way I knew how to hold on to them.
So much of my adult life has been stealing my past from the trash can.
My parents split when I was nine. It was an ugly divorce that took years of court proceedings to settle. They cite it in law classes now, so maybe someone is getting something out of it. I saw my dad less and less after that, until eventually, I didn’t see him at all. He was scrubbed from my childhood home, except for the few trinkets I’d hidden away in the back of my closet and that rainbow mug from the photo that somehow escaped notice. I still loved him, I just couldn’t tell anyone. It was like he had ceased to exist.
But that meant the first decade of my life was erased as well. I had to recreate it and hold on to it using only frayed memories that I could never talk about. I don’t really feel comfortable talking about this part of my life yet. I was raised by someone who couldn’t cope and I was caught in the undertow. It was harder and harder to remember that there was a time when I was happy and safe. I desperately wanted someone to notice how badly I needed saving but didn’t want to lose the last bit of family I had. I hid in plain sight. I overachieved in school because I knew college was my ticket out – I had to save myself.
I moved out. Snuck out, really. I had a few boxes, nothing that wasn’t clearly “mine”. No photos, no past. In a lot of ways, I ran away from home but I had no idea where I was going. I’ve spent the last decade not looking over my shoulder.
Last Christmas I had an unexpected, uncomfortable conversation with someone I hadn’t seen since I was very small. It was the first person in nearly two decades who knew me, my family. And still believed me. She shared my concerns and strained love for whom I left behind and validated what I’d seen and felt.
I’d mentioned that I didn’t have any family photos. Starting the next day, and frequently in the weeks that followed, old photos would show up in my inbox. Photos of my dad. Love. Things that I’d been convinced never happened.
Suddenly, my memories didn’t exist in a vacuum – they actually happened. Slowly, it was as though 20 years of confusion and pain started to heal. She gave me my childhood, and my innocence, back.
I looked up my dad in the phone book when I was 21. We’ve spent our time since then taking tentative steps toward erasing the past, apologizing for the hurt with every action, sentence, and cup of coffee. He’s still my dad. I’m still his kiddo. We’re learning how to continue the conversation that was cut short in 1991.
The gift of those family photos acted as a salve on long-scarred wounds. I am learning what it feels like to really, deeply forgive.