Blessed Are the Soft Hands

My father could not have genuinely been my father until he realized that his pride could not be the currency for my affection.

Given–his assessment is fair. That was the currency his father gave before him, and his father before him, and so on. I can see why the confusion settled in comfortably, and why a daughter ill-suited him. Gentleness was more of an obscenity than a necessity, and so he raised me to be just as hard and rough as his hands were when he ripped up my hand-written stories in front of me to teach me a lesson.

“The world is a terrible place,” he would say, without any idea that my home was also turning into a formidable rival.

I can’t say that it was all bad either, though–it is my father who first set my hands upon an Xbox controller. I connected with him by plugging into a game system, latching onto this newfound tether from father to daughter as obsessively as I could. It was me begging to be looked at. “If my father thinks that I am cool, then we will see each other more than twice a year.”

I remember being fifteen. I had just become a Christian after being an athiest for a very long time, and I always wondered how I was supposed to interact with God as a father when my own was so absent–and why that seemed more ironic than sad. What is a father? How do I trust one when I have not yet had the chance to be my father's child?

I am still figuring it out, I think.

Who is my father?

How does he think?

What does he fear? Me?

Is that good or bad?

I also think of January 1st of 2023, where we came face-to-face after I packed up and moved states without telling him. He’d always threatened to come looking for me if I ever got out of hand, and the sicker parts of me wanted to see if that was true (I also wanted a doctorate, but that is besides the point, I think).

He did not.

I know now, with surety, that my father and I are frighteningly similar, and frighteningly different. When we last spoke, he told me that softness was not part of his family–or what little there had been of it. He recalled a man who would drive by, slowly, almost as if he wanted to stop, as he would walk to school. The man would hand him money, and continue to peel down the street, either half afraid or half ashamed–or all of both.

I am not sure my father forgives his father.

I am not sure if I am meant to know.

It was then that I saw my father as human, and not the grand protectors that we often make fathers to be. It does not excuse him–but he did not know. How would he know? Who would teach him to be gentle? Who would teach him that, while the world is a terrible place, he did not have to be? Who would teach him that pride and affection are not currency and that it is okay to forget what the truck looked like, peeling away from him on the street?

I have warred with myself for a long time over it. This is not my responsibility. I am not a parent, and maybe it would be better to allow him to heal on his own. That would be most beneficial to him. That would give him room to grow into the man he always envisioned for himself, the man that he parted ways with a very long time ago.

But who will show him how to heal? Who will show him how to welcome back his hope, and how to apologize–first to himself, for giving up on it? How will he know that it is not too late to buy a truck of his own, drive down the street to my house, and fully park?

Who will be soft-handed with my father if not me?

Who would have made me find and demand gentleness if not his own callouses?

Blessed be us both--someday.