Time spent alone with my dad is always a source of considerable anxiety for me. It’s not just because we live in realities at opposite ends of the social and political spectrum. It’s not just because he’s a 79-year-old wandering cowboy and I’m his 39-year-old renegade daughter (though certainly with a little bit of cowgirl in me). Not because he’s a species of apocalyptic evangelical that gives me the shivers and that, to some degree (no surprise) I study for a living, while I’m a species of new age spiritual seeker that, if he really knew, would make him fret endlessly for my wayward soul.
Certainly, many of us define ourselves against the “other” that is one or both of our parents. But it’s not that. It is because we have a relationship that I consider, in certain important respects, broken.
I don’t know if he sees it that way, but I’d think he’d have to. He may be a bit of a nut, but he’s not stupid. No doubt he notices that we don’t talk about personal or intimate things at all, that I haven’t shared any of my personal relationships for about 20 years, except to introduce him to girlfriends when he comes to pick me up or drop me off. He’s probably noticed that I haven’t had a child, but he’s never asked me about it. He can see that I live alone, but never asks me if I’m lonely or happy. (He asks me how my house is.) We can talk about what I do as a professor at the university where he got his Master’s degree, but we don’t talk about my research on evangelicals and race and reconciliation.
I’ve never formally come out to him, because it does not feel–and I don’t think it is–safe, though I’ve had him to dinners with all lesbian couples, that he recognizes as couples (again: not stupid). And I think he knows about me but, of course, we don’t talk about it. Nor do we talk about religion or politics anymore, because I don’t want to, because it makes me so angry and sad to hear an endless lava flow of exclusivist and bigoted things come out of his mouth that I finally had to set a boundary around it. We don’t talk about a lot, and mostly that feels like the only way I can continue to engage at this point. I would be willing if I thought there was some flexibility, some room for meaningful exchange, but that hasn’t been my experience.
Even as I write this, I know I’m only capturing a tiny slice of the truth. My relationship with my dad is hard to explain. “Hard to explain” is the phrase that circled again and again in my head as I spent last weekend with him, but I’m going to try to capture something of it.
So back to the beginning of the weekend. I woke up Saturday morning, the day we were taking off for southern Colorado, all ruffled and anxious about having to spend first 4-5 hours in a truck with him, then hours at a campground, then hours on a train the next day, then hours home. It felt like walking into a two-day trap, a weekend in emotional Hades. Tanya brought me a green tea frappuccino in the morning and sat there listening to me whine and buck. She coached me about making a little room for my “true” self in the presence of my dad, trusting him to be able to handle it, trusting myself to not be completely shut down. I was grateful. Later I talked to my brother, whose advice (Mom, plug your ears) was more to the point: “Dude, take a Vicodin and you’ll both be much happier.” Aha! And luckily a certain nameless good friend has a lot of Vicodan for her bum neck, so let’s just say I came up with a pill and a half that I stashed in my backpack, just in case.
I feared that it was all going to go very, very wrong when we were not 10 minutes away from my house, barreling down University Avenue in his grumbling 1989 Ford F350 (duel back wheels) when he said, “Hey, did you hear this one? ‘Guns kill people, just like a spoon made Rosie O’Donnell fat.’”
Pause.
Get it? Guns don’t kill people, and Rosie is fat because she’s a pig. A big, fat, lesbian pig that gun toting NRA conservatives get to hate with abandon.
I took a deep breath and remembered T’s advice to make space for myself. He was saying, “I got another one–” when I said, “I think that’s just mean.” He didn’t make the second joke and I’d popped half a Vicodin before we were even out of the city. That made for a very pleasant lunch in which I ate a gargantuan breakfast burrito and he listened intently (truly, because hateful is only one side of his personality) while I chattered about my pleasant work at the university.
The ride south toward Alamosa was pleasant. Feeling no pain, I let the breeze blow through the windows over my brain and breathed in the scenery as we wandered down one of my favorite Colorado highways, 285. He reminisced as we passed an old ranch he cowboyed at in his twenties in the high mountain valley. We eased into small talk, and I could tell how happy he was that I was coming along on this, an annual pilgrimage for him.
The man does love me tremendously. Like, heart-breakingly; like, he never loved more than when he was actively parenting me and my brother, even though he fought my mom viciously and unlovingly for custody of us, which he won. He was what the court would call my “primary parent” from when I was 9 until I moved to live with my mom at 16. And I love him. If you were a fly buzzing around in the truck during this part of the trip, you’d think we were quite a close father-daughter pair. He constantly says, “I love The Lader,” [prounounced Lay-der, which means Lady, and is an old nickname for me], and I reply, “I love The Dadder, too.”
This is an ancient routine for us. My dad’s dad, Grandpa Sport, didn’t express love out loud, so Daddy, as we call him, was always sure to do so. Annoyingly sure. But I’ve found that love expressed verbally is not the same as love expressed in other ways, like by being available when times are rough, like by offering a little guiltless financial support during a really barren time, like by being an emotional pillar. In other words, it’s not the same as the kind of love I might have expected from a father.
But love isn’t necessarily about having one’s expectations met, is it? Especially with parents and children.
Gorgeous, moody summer thunderstorms pounded our windshield several times before the sky began to clear and we found our way to a random little white-trashy campground at the edge of the Great Sand Dunes National Park. We ate a meal at the “dining room” of the campground that he thought was “pretty good” and I could barely choke down. It was pleasant, though I was distracted by a 6-point buck mounted to one of the walls. One of his horns had grown almost directly out of his forehead and then bent back to stretch into the rack. Strangely, mutantly beautiful–and very dead. Found a campsite and I showed my dad how my tent could be assembled in under five minutes, which he thought was “just dandy!” We walked around the campground for awhile, and then back to the site where he tucked into a sleeping bag in the back of the truck, next to the 1,000 gallon extra tank of gas he’s installed back there, and I cuddled into my tent. The rain gently resumed. I was woken only by a crazy-beautiful chorus of coyotes howling at the moon at 3:30. You could hear all these pup voices practicing their barks and yowls, and it made me smile. Me and my dad, in a tent and a truck about 10 feet apart, with coyotes and a bright moon.
The narrow gauge trainride on the revived Cumbres-Toltec Railroad the next day was something maybe only Americans would come up with. We started at the train station in Antonito, piled onto a bus, drove an hour through curvy mountain roads to Chama, New Mexico, then hopped on the train and took six hours to chug-a-chug back. But the scenery was splendid: sparkling aspens and Douglas Firs, high curving passes, plunging gorges, emerald valleys, deer, prong-horn, and sagebrush. My dad was a pig in shit (unlike Rosie O’Donnell), and I enjoyed his happiness. Who cares that we were puffing loads of black coal dust into the pristine mountains for the sake of tourism and I was finding dried embers not just in my eyelashes and hair but my bra. It was good, “clean,” historical fun and I enjoyed taking pictures with my old film camera, walking back and forth through the cars with Daddy, and hanging off the caboose for a hour with a handsome Mexican family.
The only thing that made me bristle was when this docent/tour guide guy came and talked to us about three-quarters through the ride. We were all marveling at the beauty of what was, he pointed out, National Forest land. Then my dad made some remark about nasty environmentalists, and the docent goes, “yeah, we don’t like them, do we?” I was shaking my head back and forth, trying to keep breathing until I remembered Tanya’s advice again. Carve out my own space. “Oh yeah,” I broke in, “we would just HATE to have to preserve this beautiful land by actually conserving it. Too bad Teddy Roosevelt, that ‘crazy environmentalist,’ had to go and set aside all these parts of the country to conserve them.” And so we got into a little thing about Roosevelt and conservation and how, as the docent put it, “but these days [the enviornmentalists] go too far!” and all that. But it felt good to shut them down for a second. Both of them backed off like teenagers in front of a crazy lady with only one eye.
I popped the other Vicodin half right about then.
After the six-hour ride, we have four and a half more to get back to Denver, and this is the only part that makes me feel really cagey. I try to conk out with a nap, at which point my dad decides to blast a CD of traditional Hawaiin music, whistling along as loud as he can. Even my iPod can’t drown it out, so I finally give up and enjoy his enthusiasm. Then he gets sentimental, reminiscing about the train ride we’d just finished, talking about how he thinks maybe he’ll get around to buying some land way out here (it’ll never happen; never has happened) and we can do a lot of horseback riding (not). He keeps telling me he loves me and reaching over to pat me, and it’s hard to explain, but after so much of that I start to feel this combination of guilty and sad and annoyed and I just want to scream “I LOVE YOU TOO, BUT CAN WE START HAVING A REAL RELATIONSHIP NOW??? DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO I REALLY AM BEFORE YOU DIE?”
But this is as real as it gets, isn’t it: me and my born-again, libertarian, fuel-guzzling, deep-loving, emotionally muzzled, wounded, armored, Iowa farm boy, Wyoming cowboy father, who loves me in every cell of his soul but doesn’t know how to know me. Who I love, as a little girl will always love her daddy; who I know is so, so vulnerable even in his bravado; who I stayed up with to keep awake on marathon roadtrips through the sprawling west all through my childhood. Who is who he is. And we both continue to fumble our way in the dark, through the mystery train ride of trying to love, unconditionally, these people who bring us into and out of the world, into and out of our hearts, without really knowing how. Broken or not.
And so I crank my seat back up and together we sing cowboy songs all the way through Pueblo and Colorado Springs, as the moon rises in the East and the earth continues to turn.
p.s., May you have that infernal “Ride the Train” dance song (post title) in your head all day long, like I have for four days.
