The Day I Told My Dad I Hated Him

"I thought you hated me," my dad said to me. It was almost 2 in the morning, we were standing outside of my sister's house after my other sister got married in the backyard. The conversation took turns that I hadn't expected and my already thin filter was gone thanks to Mike's Hard Lemonade and tequila shots.

"I did," I responded. There wasn't a look of shock or hurt on Dad's face with the revelation. It was as if he expected the words to come out and there was nothing he could do about them.

The road to admitting that at one point I didn't love my father was a long and winding one. The journey was littered with disappointments and harsh words slung from both of us, half apologies that were meant to get someone else off our backs rather than actual contrition for whatever behavior caused hurt.

Though he never said the words, I always believed that I disappointed him by not being born a girl. When my mother was pregnant with me, both wanted a baby girl. They thought it would be easier to raise than a boy. This is one of the times when I think they were right.

My parents were not ready for a boy like me. I was stubborn, feisty, and did not allow foolishness. Sports were not for me. Like my grandmother, my nose was always in a book.

And I am gay.

Something that neither of them were prepared for, which isn't their fault. It took me a long time to come to this and the conclusion was helped by the career pivot I took. Which is also thanks to my father.

Shaping Me

When I was younger, a teenager, I was furious with my dad. He always seemed to put my sisters above me. If they wanted to see a movie, we would go see that movie. Every single time. It hurt my feelings but I kept them under wraps because he always said that boys don't show their emotions.

When I stopped visiting him on his weekends with us, he said nothing. Slowly, I grew closer to my stepdad. At a barbeque to celebrate Memorial Day, I intentionally called my mother's new husband dad in front of him. It was a direct hit and the sadness played across his face.

But he said nothing.

Our relationship continued to be strained. When I graduated high school, his first words to me were that he hoped I could pay for college because there was no money for my tuition. He didn't know that I'd passed on a full-ride scholarship to a major university because of my mother, at least not at the time.

He took me to a private school near where I lived. During the meeting he tried to talk for me, telling the advisor I wanted to major in business. When I spoke up and said that wasn't true, that I wanted to do something creative, the look of disgust on his face told me everything.

I needed to follow the path I wanted.

Coming To Terms

Whether he realized it or not, my dad was teaching me to go my own way. Underneath everything, I think that he knew what he was doing. He's never said as much but as I've reflected on our complicated history and we've repaired our relationship these past few years, I have come to see that he was making choices that he thought would help me.

"I didn't know how to be a dad to a boy," he told me one night, fighting back tears that threatened to spill out of his eyes. "Especially not a dad to a gay boy."

The candor shocked me. I took a step back and started to see things through his eyes. When I came out, being gay wasn't accepted and could be dangerous. His words indicated that he was proud of me for coming out, and for being courageous enough to share my truth.

That was another of the lessons that he taught me. Being true to who I am and not caring what other people say about it is something that he tried to instill in me when I was a kid with my book in a Clive Barker book and my classmates were confused about why I wanted to read such a thing.

Nobody was shocked when I announced that I was rebranding my writing career. For years, I would write whatever interested me but in recent years I narrowed it down more and more. Now, I write history and crime almost exclusively, with a few personal essays for good measure.

But if I didn't have someone teaching me that it's ok to be me, would I have ever gone the route I did? It's doubtful. And for that person to be my dad, it's icing on top of the cherry on the sundae.

The road was tough. Emotions were high. But at the end of the day, everything happened for a reason and the anger I felt towards him was just my resistance to lessons that needed to be learned.