Just Like Him in I am I Said.

One day in the Spring of 2014, I received a letter with the familiar handwriting of my father. I didn’t need to see the return address to know it was him, I knew his precise printing as it was familiar to my own. I didn’t open it immediately – I wasn’t going to open it. But, I left it on the kitchen counter instead of throwing it away. I don’t know what made me not throw it away – and it sat there for a couple of days – calling for me to open it. I did and in the letter was a request that I visit him in the halfway house with his phone number asking me to call him. So many thoughts and feelings raced inside my head and heart that day, I knew he needed me and that was why he was reaching out. A part of me, the vengeful part, wanted to turn my back the way he had done so many years ago, but I had softened some with time, I guess, and curiosity got the better of me because I picked up my phone and I dialed. His telephone rang, “This is your daughter, ” I said with caution in my voice when he answered “this is Tom.” His scratchy voice, older than his years, replied, “I didn’t think you’d call. How are you doing?” “I’m fine. How are you,” I said, fighting to overcome that familiar lump that seized my throat whenever I thought of him. He was in Lawrence in transitional housing after spending 5-years behind bars, he wanted to see me. I told him I needed to think about that and promised him I would. I did and on Easter morning I went to visit him. Upon arriving at his room in the transitional housing unit of the Essex County Correctional Institute, I saw his door was open. I took a deep breath and I walked to the door. As it popped open, I stood in amazement, confronting a face like mine, only 20-years older, but still so familiar. “Hello. How are you,” I said, nervously extending my hand. “It’s good to see you, Tammy,” he said. “I prayed for this moment for years.” I didn’t know what to say to that. I don’t remember what I said to that. Before me stood a broken man, full of regret, unwell and older, softer than I had ever seen him. Before me stood a key to my past, present and future. It was hard having him invite me to sit and harder still to hear him say, “Please tell me every single thing that has happened in your life since you were in first grade.” And I did, I told him all of it; the good, the bad and the really ugly. How hard I had to struggle through life for everything. I watched his eyes fill at certain times and I could feel the guilt and regret emanating from him - it was like a tornado of darkness storming inside my soul coming from him. I struggled with what to call him. “Father” was too formal, “Dad” was not earned, “Tom” was just wrong, he was, after all, my father. I told him that I referred to him as “The Sperm Donor” and I watched the flames of anger first appear in his eyes then those flames softened to a deep hurt I was immediately sorry to have caused. I told him, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” and he cut me off and said, “don’t be sorry, that’s how it is.” I promised him I would not call him or refer to him as that anymore. It would be an irreplaceable day we would spend together. We laughed and talked the day away. I made several mental notes of our similarities. He, too, hated being called “Tommy” as I had hated being called “Tammy” a name I had changed to Tamara when I emancipated myself at 15-years-old. I was frighteningly like him, though we were nearly strangers. We ate the same strange combination of foods, we had the same tastes even. Lasting images were formed that day in that shitty transitional room in Lawrence.

Over the next year I would finally get to know the entire man that my father was. Not just the cruel, vicious, abusive man I had known and was terrified of as a child. Not just the “criminal” who spent a lot of his life in and out of jails. Not just the “rotten, evil bastard” or “sonofabitch” I had heard him referred to my entire life by my mother and her mother. He was no longer a person I feared - my heart didn’t race, I was no longer shaking and my mind didn’t scream for me to flee this time. He was just a man, my father, scarred by a life I was yet to learn.

Our relationship jelled after that Lawrence reconciliation. I picked him up upon his final release and it was initially an awkward drive as I told him, “I cannot bring you to my home to live with me, I am not emotionally prepared for that, yet. I’m sorry, I will help you find a safe place to be and I will help you get set up and help you in all ways I can.” He did understand but I could tell he was disappointed. I asked him to give me time to wrap my head around this developing relationship. I know it was hard for him, it was hard for me, but we managed somehow to come to an agreement and it fit us well. We laughed as we sat in that shitty bar, his home away from home, sharing a drink as adults when I said “Hey, this is a totally functional dysfunctional relationship, Dad.” When he heard me call him “Dad” I saw him cry. I had never seen my father as a person with emotions other than anger and rage. His tears hit me hard but they also healed my heart.

I started to let down the old walls I had built between him and I as I learned more and more of how things really came to be and why he was the way he was. It was a bitter, bitter pill learning the things he had to tell me. I was sick, again, at just how dysfunctional everyone was in my family. It hurt to have the mother I thought I knew laid out before me in reality.

I was surprised and touched when he reached into his wallet and showed me a very old picture of me as a child. It was taken from a distance outside of my elementary school. He told me for a long time he would follow behind me in his car and watch me walk to school. I had never known that and in my adulthood, that small bit of information started to heal the broken heart of the little girl I once was. I was wanted, I was loved … I could see it and I could finally feel it in his words. It was a lot, I admit, and I oftentimes came home and sat down and cried after we’d have a father-daughter ‘date’. He really was tickled when I’d call him or see him and we’d plan out our next date. I hear him still proudly announce, “I’m off on a date with my daughter,” as we’d exit that hole in the wall bar he loved so much.

He was so proud of me … and that was something I had never felt from anyone in my family. Not from my mother, not from anyone who was close to me growing up. I saw his face and eyes light up now when I would walk in to get him. Everyone at his bar by now knew I was “Tom’s Daughter” and everyone welcomed me and told me how proud my father was of me.

The older I get, the more I understand the endless ways parents shape their children’s lives — whether they be absent or present. I had always believed their divorce never really affected me other than the hands beating me now were only those of my mother instead of my father’s. My father was a hothead who made some poor choices. Those decisions cost him a marriage and family. Those decisions cost him a great many years behind bars.

I cherished the fact that he never once apologized for who he was or what he did. He did apologize to me though, with tears in his eyes, for all he had done to me as a child, for not fighting my mother and her mother more to stay involved in my life. It was they that had driven him away and kept him away. He gave up fighting an endless battle with my mother and her mother. I gave forgiveness and a chance to build some kind of real father-daughter relationship.

Father’s Day has never meant much to me, but that year it was different. Through his death, I realize I am truly my father’s daughter. I am a spitting image of him. I walk, talk and laugh like he did. We have the same childlike love of pulling pranks on people. We have the same hands even. I remember that first day, looking at his hands, wanting so much to have something uniquely me and finding instead, more of him. Sometimes I feel his rage in me. Although his body is gone now, I don’t know that I will ever really bury him.

I miss you Dad, I miss you so fucking much it hurts. We only had a year to get to know each other, I only had a year to love you without fear. I thank you – now I do not look in the mirror and hate the face we share, I smile knowing that you live on, inside of me. THAT, the truth and that last year of feeling loved was your final gift to me.

Love,
Your Daughter

Last updated June 01, 2016