Are you happy?

Sometimes I think about how my dad treated me with relationships. How different it was, in comparison with how he treated my siblings.

Let's just be clear that he didn't treat me badly about it.

When I was a teenager, I think the first time my dad and I talked about dating was because he was a single father getting flack about me. Like, I didn't date, didn't want to date, and therefore according to other parents, he was “turning me gay” because I didn't have a “woman's influence” in my life. At that point, my mom wasn’t around, and hadn’t been for the vast majority of my childhood; he was all we had.

This man raised three teenage girls on his own, bought all of our “feminine products” on his own and made it to as many school and sporting events as he could. Which considering he was self-employed in the construction business, well. It wasn’t as many as any of us would have liked, but he tried and that was more than I could say for the parents who had the time but didn’t show up.

I had a uterus - unfortunately still do, accursed thing - and he was a trooper about it, even if I think of myself along nonbinary lines these days. All of those “uncomfortable” things that I hear other people’s boyfriends, siblings and other male relatives give them grief about, my dad carried out with a quiet sort of dignity. Including bringing spare clothes when my body betrayed me at a friend’s house, and I hadn’t exactly planned for it.

He was a standup guy about that, but he also wasn’t, well. Interested in my personal life, especially in my romantic life – or lack thereof.

So my first, and only, incident with him asking me why I didn't have a boyfriend – I think his exact words were "Why don't you get a boyfriend?" – was both shocking and in hindsight, hilarious.

The whole situation was ridiculous, honestly.

I perfectly remember the slow horror movie turn of my head to look at him as we're driving him from what I think was a volleyball game or practice. My hand was out the window doing that thing we all did – riding the air waves – and I was so stunned I stupidly left my hand flat outside the window. I got hit by a bee, or some other kind of weightier insect, because it hurt enough to startle me into bringing my hand inside.

I had a welt, but my dad had my undivided attention.

He looked like he'd swallowed something bitter, like he’d bitten his tongue and then eaten salt and vinegar chips. He looked ten thousand times more uncomfortable than I was feeling through my shock.

I just remember going "Why would I want one? Isn't that a lot of work?"

As if boyfriends were something of a trend going around and I was too thrifty to make a purchase.

Mind you, at this point I had no idea I was asexual or potentially aromantic (I'm still not sure on the second? Life is a learning curve) and the idea of having to spend energy on acting like I cared was horrifying. I was of the firm belief that everything from romance to sexual attraction were things made up in the media, entirely exaggerated things meant for entertainment. Just like all the school stereotypes in all the movies, real life just wasn’t like that.

Obviously no one actually felt like that, fell in love, wanted to be intimate with people. That would be crazy!

Haha.

Anyway, he looked somehow even more like he wanted the earth to open up and swallow him as I stared at him in morbid fascination while we're driving down the road. This was a man who didn't speak about anything actually personal like, ever, other than weird childhood shenanigans. Most of the personal thing I learned about my dad, I learned from my not as estranged mother when she came back, and my Aunt, who’s his younger sister.

He literally hated each and every one of my older sisters' boyfriends, my brother's girlfriends, and I think my oldest sister going out and partying was the reason for most of his distaste for butting into my “issues”.

Of which there were few.

I was my dad's easy child. Not to say that I didn't have my own problems, but after seeing all the shit my siblings did, I was firmly in the “Don't want to do that” category. I made new and interesting mistakes, not the ones they did, innovation at its best.

Woo!

Watching my dad ask, with all the reluctance and teeth gritting determination of a man born in the fifties, next "... Girlfriend?" like it pained him, but he had to ask was. Well. It was funny later.

At the time I was more thinking Wow is that allowed??? because school and TV had made it seem like it shouldn't be. I'd seen Tara die in Buffy, and Willow's following romantic partner – who I can't remember, currently – made me want to scratch my eyes out.

Also, the fact that most queer-coded people were killed off on TV or were considered “bad guys” it was firmly subconsciously planted that gay = dead or obnoxious or evil.

"Isn't that more work?" I had asked with all the alacrity of a teenager whose worldview was getting dumped on its ass.

Because small towns plus gay kids didn't have a good rep.

And that was the end of that conversation, to both of our relief, because he kind of mumbled “Well, if you do find someone, I wouldn’t be opposed” in a way that said he’d rather step into a bear trap. I had apparently managed to assuage his worries enough that it went back to being a non-issue. And a fun story to tell to embarrass him later on, but that's altogether different.

That was literally the only time my dad questioned my lack of interest in dating. Via the pressures of other people, he made both of us uncomfortable, but himself more so, because other parents had made him feel self-conscious about how he was raising us. Me, specifically. Probably because I was the youngest, the tomboy, and I had had less time with my mom, since she split when I was little.

He told me about it later, the reason for asking me about it at all, in not so many words, but I can read between the lines.

There were a lot of “concerned moms” out there just “trying to help” and honestly? I think about half of them were trying to sleep with my dad, which is kind of also horrifyingly hilarious.

My dad and I were a lot alike, but I'm not quite sure he noticed a lot of them.

Anyway, my dad would also encourage me to go hangout with friends, whereas he'd ground my siblings for hanging out with people he didn't approve of. Usually because there was unrestricted access to alcohol and weed provided by whoever had access – which for one of my sisters was hard to hide, since she's allergic to the devil's lettuce.

Rashes for days, not at all inconspicuous. She thought she was very sneaky.

Considering I was an introverted homebody nerd – and yet somehow also a jock, I did lots of team sports because dad wanted me to socialize – and my siblings partied hard and even disappeared for days at a time, this was wild. My dad would threaten to make me do group events if I was bad, whereas my sisters got that ‘privilege’ taken away from them.

My punishment was getting my books taken away. Or the inability to buy a new book, which was what I figure was my form of an allowance, now that I’m older. I didn’t think that that was something that people actually got in real life, though, an allowance. Thought that was also something made up from movies and books until I grew up, honestly, and I didn't get grounded.

I was sent to a friend's house and forced to interact with people as a punishment.

Present me is flabbergasted, but past me was so salty about the books being taken especially. Sometimes there were no convenient bookmarks, and I wasn’t the kind of anarchist who dogeared the corners. I had to find my place all over again when my punishment was over, and it was like an extra punishment.

I mean, yeah, sure, when I was little I’d get a swat for every year that I’d lived if I did something really bad – like feed the expensive fish in the tank to the cats... – but that was kind of just how the nineties went. Spanking was part of the parenting process, and not one I found anything unusual about.

Fast-forward now, to me learning about asexuality from a friend at her wedding and being like “Wait a minute that's a thing” and that light-bulb ding ding ding moment where I realized it wasn't me being weird or everyone else being weird. I was more than just “waiting for the right person” because society decided I should be simply because I didn't want to do the horizontal tango.

I told my dad, and I'm not honestly sure he understood what it meant, but he asked me "are you happy?"

And it.

Felt.

Great.

I was terrified that this man who had raised me and never spoken to me more than once about relationship stuff would suddenly flip his lid or something.

He didn't.

Why would he have? my logic brain always tells me, even as the emotional brain screams about what could have happened. So many horror stories from friends and acquaintances about getting into screaming matches with their families, with getting kicked out of their homes for not being “normal”? Yeah, I was terrified that I’d be one of those people as well.

That my dad wouldn’t love me anymore, because I didn’t look at people the same way that other people did.

And that is not what I got, thank god. I knew I was lucky then, and I still know it now. It could have been just what I was dreading, but my dad wasn't like that.

He just got that same slightly uncomfortable look on his face of oh God why do we have to talk about personal stuff which I inherited from him. And asked if I was happy.

When I said "I don't know, but I think I could be" he just said:

"Good. Then there's nothing else to say."

Which may seem kind of terse to other people, but my dad was a quiet kind of guy. He only really got hyped about sci-fi shows and theories. And occasionally sports, but that really just depended on his mood.

So on I putter, ignoring the following conversations with my siblings and my mother, all of whom gave me the “You'll find someone” line during their conversations. They've since dropped that way of thinking but at the time my dad's “are you happy?” is really what kept me afloat.

There's other stuff, of course. I was in a poly-amorous relationship for a while, and my dad said as long as he didn't have to hear about it - my sister is an over-sharer - he was happy for me. When my mom asked me when I was going to have kids I said never, because I honestly don’t want any – and I’ve since found out it would be very dangerous for me – and she said I'd change my mind.

My dad said "Oh, good. I have enough grandchildren."

He had eight at the time, so, like, I think he was covered.

But it's just like, he would never let my sisters do some of the things he made me do, or he'd talk to them about things he never talked to me about. They got lectures and warnings that I never did.

For a while, it kind of hurt that I didn't get that kind of parenting. That we never really argued and made up, that we didn't have these long conversations about problems and fixing them, and then I realized what it was. Well, what I’d realized between our conversations solely about sci-fi shows like Babylon 5, and Stargate. About the potential for aliens out there in the universe.

Trust.

My dad trusted me. He trusted me to know myself, know my limits, know the rules. To know I could go to him if I needed to, because while I watched all of this strife happen with my siblings, I'd learned what not to do.

And he'd seen that.

We were all different people – very different – and we needed different parenting strategies, and for a man who was born in the 1950's he was super progressive. And accepting.

My mom's not not accepting or anything, she just wasn't a big part of my childhood, and also she's... Hmm. Some people don't have the maturity to be parents, is all it comes down to. Or the mental stability.

My dad was my rock, my hero. My sci-fi buddy who had been the most silently supportive person for every personal decision I've ever made. The man who gave me books and had the power to take them away, but always gave them back in the end.

He trusted me, and that's what makes me so irritated.

Not with him – not never with him, but that's par for the course – but with those other parents. Those other people.

So many people talk about “not letting other people mess with how they parent their child” and yet they do the exact same thing? Put pressure on someone doing their best because they don't see a child doing what they think they should do, and they blame the parent. Say things about him “turning that girl into a man with a man's interests” simply because I didn't care about dating?

That’s messed up.

Not that I didn't jokingly call myself my dad's “boy child” just to piss off my brother, but it's not the same.

We probably never would have had that super awkward conversation about dating if he hadn't had been pressured into it by other “concerned parents”. In turn, I probably wouldn't have been so terrified to talk about being asexual, being different, with him if I didn't have to remember that conversation.

Because I can't imagine him saying anything else other than that “are you happy?” and the fact that it – that fear of rejection – came from a bunch of strangers just really pisses me off. It hurts, under all the anger and frustration, of course it does, but mostly it hurts for him who was the target of all that.

My dad treated me and my siblings all differently. We each needed something else from him, even if we didn't know it.

He wasn't perfect. He never was.

But he was ours. Awkward sci-fi gremlin ranting about obscure old TV shows and singing songs he remembered from when he was a boy scout.

My dad was a quiet man until you got him talking, an introvert. He was handy with a hammer and before he could finish a semester in college – for architecture – he had to drop out to take care of my grandma and aunt. He was a good man, if not always what other people wanted him to be, and he was always willing to go to bat for us, no matter our differences.

My dad loved me, he loved all of his kids, and he trusted me.

My dad had survived cancer on three separate occasions prior to his death. Bladder, brain and then brain again. It took two different types of aggressive cancer at the same time, after going through hip replacement surgery and over half a decade in remission, to take him out. Lung and brain cancer had to gang up on him in the months since his last tests, to take a quiet and unfalteringly patient man from this world.

I hope that wherever he is now, he’ll be proud of me. That if I ever have the chance to talk to him again, and he asks me “are you happy?” I’ll be able to say “yes, dad, I am”, because I’m doing what I can to be happy, even in a world that's trying so hard to prevent that.

My dad wasn’t perfect, and neither am I.

But he was the perfect dad for me.