“It’s ok son. Don’t listen to her. Your mother is fucking insane.”
Who?
Some parents are just not woth the title.
I know my comment was low effort. I appreciate the supportive response anyway, even if it wasn’t that well deserved.
Thank you.
It’s deserved, everyone deserves love from their parents and when it’s not there it’s really jarring.
So from a complete stranger, a tiny bit of love and support <3
I have so many stark lasting memories of my dad, good and bad it’s hard to pick the one with the greatest impact.
Maybe the time I watched him have an allergic reaction to an ssri that ended in 6 cops beating him unconscious and dragging him to jail.
Maybe the time he unprompted pulled $800 out of his wallet and handed it to the lady at the laundry mat who was stressed about paying her rent that month.
Maybe the time my friends and I showed up at 2am with bath salts and he did a little toot with us.
Maybe the time he sat with me in the kitchen until the wee hours of the night playing chess while I cried about being broken up with for the first time.
Coming everyday to sit with me in the hospital for a month; from the ICU all the way to the general ward until he walked out the front door with me.
I always knew my dad loved me but he wasn’t great at expressing it, but it was never more apparent than during that time.
I was a loser who didn’t seek a real job until I was 25, and didn’t get my shit together and move out until I was 30, but despite all that my dad always loved me and never so much as pushed me. Gentle encouragement from time to time, but always just glad to have his boy around. I live in a different country with my wife now. I have a beautiful daughter and a decent, stable job. We flew my dad out a few years ago and I’ve never seen him so proud of what I’ve become. He loved my daughter so much. We took him out to the Canadian Rockies. That trip meant the world to him.
He had a heart attack and died two years ago.
As tragic as it all is, I watched the emotional shit he went through over the way his father raised him, and his father’s suicide when I was too young to remember, and he made it a point to make sure I never had to wonder if he loved me or was proud of me. He was.
I hope his soul is flying through the universe somewhere and has seen how much my daughter has grown, and has seen my awesome new house. I sprinkle his ashes around my flower gardens every spring just to keep him around. I hope he’s around.
Love you, dad.
When I found out he had neglected to tell me that I have an inheritable disease that will suddenly just outright kill me one day, unless I get regular checkups. Other than that there just isn’t that much I know about him, he never told me about himself and we rarely meet.
Realizing that my father was a coward killing goat herders from a billion dollar jet, not a hero like I thought growing up.
My dad is… complicated, and I could tell a lot of insane stories. But the memory that is haunting me is how he said “we won’t wait when war starts”, in Russian. It made no sense. I overheard it as a part of some conversation with my mother (maybe other grown ups as well) when I was a kid and I asked what he meant and he claimed he didn’t remember saying that. I believe him that he didn’t remember. But it was odd, it’s not something he would say. Neither he, nor my mom, nor their friends are political people talking about war, ever. It was said casually, but no one ever casually talked about war or politics over here. This was 25 years ago. I kept thinking about it for years and years again, trying to grasp what it meant, what it might have meant, and why it stuck with me so much, why I couldn’t get it out of my head, why I couldn’t let it go.
It was also painfully screaming in my head when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022. It’s like it was an eerie foreshadowing but I still don’t know. I have so few memories of my childhood, why did this one stay? Why do I see and hear him say this? What did he mean with “we won’t wait”? Did he mean we won’t wait for the war to start or we won’t wait when the war will have started? Both are possible interpretations in the Russian wording. What are we waiting for? Are we still waiting? What should we be doing?
I keep going back to this one stupid sentence and this memory is ringing in my ears. What does it want to tell me to do? I know I need to do something, I just can’t figure out what.
This could all depend on where you’re living. I get the impression you’re in a country that may have been or may currently be an enemy of Russia (or thought of as a threat by those running Russia right now). If that’s the case, could your folks be Russian ops in some form?
They would have stopped having those sorts of conversations around you as you got older and they’d deny that they said anything of the sort for those you did remember.
The phrase “we won’t wait (for) when the war starts” could mean that they’re going to do whatever they need to do even if there’s no actual guns, bombs and fighting going on. You know. Cold war things.
There’s that phrase that Khrushchev allegedly said about the US, for example. Putin has revived all of that. Assuming it ever went away.
My mom would always fuss that I’d drip water on the floor after a shower. After one such fussing, my dad took the time to actually give me advice on how to towel off properly, so as not to drip. (LPT: start from the top, work your way down)
Anyways, he was the more patient parent and would try and help you succeed.
I don’t think he ever quite readjusted to civilian life after his time in World War II. He talked of it constantly, watched documentaries and war pictures.
I farted in front of him trying to get to the Master bathroom. He caught my left arm and yanked me onto the bed and raped me. I was under 4 years old. I don’t sleep well and my body still hurts at age 34. Don’t remember much.
My father died when I was a baby
When I was starting to hit puberty, my mother got a severe depression, culminating in a suicide attempt. I remember her for the following ten-ish years as just sitting on her chair and reading or in her bed. When she managed to have a shower, it was a great day for her.
My father managed it all. Still had his taxing job, but now doing all the household, cooking, raising the kids and being supportive for my mother. He was there as father, as provider, as a husband. Eventually my mother was healing and back to her former, energetic self.
I don’t know how my father did it, honestly. My wife and I are struggling with managing our two children as is, if my wife were out of the equation I’d collapse immediately. Granted, my sister and I were a lot older than my kids are now, when shit hit the fan, but still…crazy impressive.
So yeah, basically he is a role model in perseverance and a lot of other things.
It’s a tie between him repeatedly raping my sister in our shared room while I was present and when he shot my viszla in front of me. Good times, dad. Happy father’s day.
I’ll never forget being around 12 years old and hearing my dad address another adult by Mr+surname. It was Mr Palmer who organized the little league I grew up playing in and my dad coached. In school we were forced to address teachers and staff as Ms, Mrs or Mr but at that instance I realized treating others with respect is a choice
