i gotta beat up my dad.
CONTENT WARNING: Brief mentions of physical/emotional abuse, violence
On an April Friday, I went to my audiologist's office to pick up my new hearing aid. Earlier the week before, I lost my left one on the floor of some millennial-core restaurant with mediocre burgers. While I was at the office my audiologist--a middle-aged Chinese lady who knew me since I used to shit my pants--wanted to take a trip down memory lane. Together, we flipped through the many reports and charts in my file, chuckling to ourselves over the image of little, chubby-faced Rango having these massive instruments stuck into my ear.
While leafing through my toddler years, I noticed my last name and address had changed at 2 years and 7 months old. Around that time was when my parents divorced. My audiologist began recalling that appointment with vivid clarity, as if it happened just yesterday. My mother spent the hour crying at the table we were currently sitting at while toddler Rango, blissfully unaware, sat in her lap.
My audiologist then asked if I had talked to my father recently. I have not seen him in the flesh for at least 2 years now, and I saw no reason to reach out to him first if he wouldn't either. In my mind, it didn't seem right that I had to make the first move, as if it wasn't his responsibility as my father, my life-giver, to maintain a connection with the child he was meant to protect and guide. When I told her this, she pursed her lips for a moment, before suggesting that I ought to contact him before I go leave for school.
I still haven't texted or called my biological father ever since that interaction with my audiologist. I don't know when, or how, I will. What can we talk about? I know next to nothing about this man other than his various personal and health issues, relayed to me secondhand through my aunt. The only thing we have in common is our hearing loss, our anger, and our blood.
Maybe I do contact him before I go to Toronto. Then, likely, I won't talk to him again. And then what? More years after that?
When I was a kid, I used to imagine scenarios where he'd return dramatically--tears streaming, excuses flowing, begging for forgiveness. By thirteen, these fantasies had hardened. I would imagine my fist connecting with his jaw, the satisfying crack of bone, the way his eyes might widen in surprise that his son--his blood--had grown strong enough to hurt him back.
I think violence lingers in our household like a stale smell you stop noticing until someone points it out. I began to realise this after my grandmother told me, at the age of maybe 9, that my father physically and verbally abused my mother. It explained a lot: my mother's sharp edges, her quick temper, the way she'd sometimes look at me like she was seeing someone else. I realized I was wearing his face, carrying his mannerisms in my body. Every night I wish I could've met the person she was before him.
Sometimes I still dream about it. The confrontation. The reckoning. Me, standing before him, finally tall enough to look him in the eye (not going to happen; he's 6'0 and I did not inherit that). Finally strong enough to make him fear me the way he made others fear him. I imagine I look very stupid when I rehearse those scenes in my bedroom or in the shower.
Something I learned about anger is how good it feels. How it fills you up, gives you purpose, makes you feel powerful when everything else makes you feel small. I mean, that shit made Achilles bring the Trojans to their knees after his beloved Patroclus died.
I've spent so many years nurturing this anger toward my father that it's become part of my identity. Who would I be without it? What would fill the space it leaves behind? It's the one thing of his I've mastered, the one inheritance I've claimed. Without it, I might have to face the harder truths--that he might never change, that my mother might never heal completely, that forgiveness might not be possible or even necessary, that I need to move on.
I think about all the energy I've wasted fantasizing about confronting my father. All those shower arguments, all those imagined scenarios where I finally make him understand what he did to us. It's exhausting. And for what? So I can feel like I've won something from a man who never bothered to show up for the game?
I don't want to be defined by his absence anymore. I don't want my future children to inherit this anger like some fucked-up family heirloom.
Will I call him before I leave for Toronto? I don't know. But I do know that whether he's in my life or not, I'm done letting him determine who I am. The anger and resentment can go. I've carried it long enough.
I don't need to beat up my father to overcome him. I just need to become a better man.