Angst I

I wrote this piece for one of my classes in college.  I wrote a lot of personal pieces like this, that we would then intimately discuss in a group every week.  It was a growth experience for me, to let out angst in front of people who were basically strangers.  I feel like it let me feel more comfortable presenting an honest image of myself to people who matter to me.

My father and I have never been close.  We still aren't, but I still ponder trying to be.  What does it feel like to have that desire to talk to your parent?  What does it feel like to have a "Dad?"

I don't remember a time when my parents were happy together.  I wasn't surprised when my father moved out of the house.  My depressed, semi-schizophrenic mother ended up raising me.

I continued to live with my mother.  My parents were still married.

In the mean time, my father tried to spend time with me, his only son.  I don't think he knew how to interact with me.  I was quiet, introverted, precocious...I'm sure different than his perception of a "boy."

He would take me to Carnegie, a state park where people hill-climbed on their dirt bikes.

I can't tell you exactly how many times he took me there, but I'd say he took me almost every weekend.  Was he just desperate to connect with me?

But, the truth is, I wanted to connect with my father, too.  I wanted him to be my "Dad."  I would willingly go every weekend, hoping that I would find something in my father to connect him to that definition of "Dad," of "Fatherly Love."

But, I never found a "Dad" at Carnegie.  

My father would go off, riding his dirt bike with his friends, and I would stay behind in his gray, 3-seater Nissan truck playing my GameBoy.  I almost considered the Nissan my friend.  I had become very comfortable spending time in its cabin.

Often, I would preoccupy myself by collecting bricks.  Carnegie Park was once the site of a brick-making factory.  I would walk around in the 100 degree plus heat, searching through the rocks for those bricks that had "CARNEGIE" imprinted on them.  Unsurprisingly, I had acquired quite a large collection of bricks in the garage at home. 

But, on one trip to Carnegie, my father introduced me to his girlfriend from Iowa and her kids.  He wanted me to play with them while he hill-climbed.  My parents were still married.  I just wanted to collect bricks.

Sometimes, my father would let me ride on his dirt bike with him.  Sometimes there would be pits of depths of 700, 1000 feet.  I was always so scared.  I would have rather been playing video games.

___

On my eleventh birthday, my father bought me my own dirt bike.  I was scared.  I was scared that I wouldn't be able to ride the bike, scared that I would fail to connect with my father.

I knew there was something about me that would prevent me from being able to ride that bike.  It was something that I had always felt about myself since kindergarten, but not something I could ever put into words because I didn't have those words yet.  

And, I sucked.  I sucked because of fear; I feared because holding the handle bars of a dirt bike didn't evoke the same sense of comfort as holding a game controller in my hands while in the Nissan.  I would have rather been playing video games.

Why was dirt bike riding not for me?  Why did being around my father and all his male friends make me feel uncomfortable?

The truth is that I had no problem balancing on that bike.  I could have ridden it.  But, every time I would get going, I wanted to stop.  And, I did stop.  I never rode the bike for more than a minute without stopping.  I stopped riding all together within a week.  Dirt bike riding signified my ultimate insecurity, but also represented two of my ultimate truths. 

One truth was that I despised my father.  My father abandoned me. 

One day, my father carried a baby into the same house in which he left my sister and me to rot.  He introduced it as our new sister.  I refused to hold it, and, instead, held  my video game controller in my hands while my sister held our new sister in her own.  I tried so hard to block out the the reality that my sister was holding my half-sister in my own bed.

My father hurt me.  A dirt bike couldn't mend that father-son connection.  It was irreparable.  The dirt bike represented the irreparability of that "father-son" relationship.  Dirt bike riding represented that inability to connect with the most important male figure in my life.  There was no need for further effort.  I accompanied my father to Carnegie less and less.

The second truth was that dirt bike riding signified what I felt like I lacked in masculinity.  I am gay.  I had another identity that I didn't know how to reconcile.  My father, his straight male biker friends, my mother, my sister, my video games, nor that dirt bike could teach me how to deal with this realization.

My father loves me.  Unlike a majority of the world, my father doesn't care that I am gay.  Unlike his usual self, my father cried after my valedictory speech.  I know my father loves me, but, to me, my father is often just an obligation.  

This summer, my father had a brain aneurysm.  I felt indifferent, but hundreds or thousands of my hair follicles might contest otherwise.  He survived.  He survived without any loss of brain function or physical movement.  One could call this a miracle.  I believe I am indifferent.  But, my lost hair follicles say I'm fairly indifferent.

I drove him back from the hospital.  From Stanford to Tracy--a route with which we were both unfamiliar.  

We got lost.  We were driving up in the mountains, along windy, one-lane roads, and ended up along the same back road that took us to Carnegie.

As a child, I always hated this back road.  I was always scared we'd turn a corner and fall into a ditch at whose bottom remained a ghostly, abandoned van for as long as I can remember.  

I've been driving for four years, but this was the first time in eight (as rider or passenger) that I had been on this road.  The roles were switched:  I was the one driving my father along the windy back road I once feard as a child.  I wasn't scared to drive it, though.  I drove like a natural--cutting across the lane divider in order to ease the effects of inertia as if I had been driving on the road for years.  

Then, I noticed that the van had finally been removed.

Maybe I felt comfortable driving on that road because I left a part of myself on it.  (To this day, I still feel like this.  Since my Gramma moved to Tracy, the freeway entrance is just along the road that leads to Carnegie maybe 5-6 miles down, and I always feel like I'm sort of called forward onto that road).  Unlike the van, my hope could never be removed from that ditch, although it still existed.  

He was still my father to me--not my Dad.  I would have cried had I lost my father this summer, though, those tears would be tears of completely losing the opportunity to have a "Dad" and not tears mourning the loss of love.  

My father and I never dirt-biked together.  My father and I never connected.  Still, though, how do I make my father my Dad.  What does it feel like to have a "Dad?"

---

Partly thanks to you, my father is becoming less of a strictly father and more of a Dad.  Your talk with me allowed me to open my heart to him somewhat, and ever since I've felt a slowly growing spark of what may be love for him.  And, it's easier to accept him as my "Dad."