My dad called last night at about 8:30.

“Are you doing your show?” he asked.

“Yep. Do you have to assimilate to be American.”

“Oh, um,” he hesitated, “maybe I won’t listen to that one.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I’m kind of… well… I’m probably a little conservative on that,” his voice took on that goofy quality it always does when he’s revealing something semi serious about himself.

“Yeah?” I laughed, picturing him squirm a little on the other end of the line.

“Yeah, and, well, I’d guess you’re a little more.. um.. liberal. Maybe not though!”

I laughed again. “No, Dad. I definitely am. You’re right. But that’s OK, you don’t have to agree with me to listen,” I was smiling while we talked.

A few minutes later I hung up the phone and prepared to do my weekly radio show with Avitable. I got a message on Facebook later that night that Dad did listen. No commentary, just a quick note. “I did listen.”

It’s enough.

In fact, it’s more than enough and probably more than it would mean to most people. I suppose if you grew up with your dad and shared a childhood with the man, you might not hear all the things tuning in to an Internet radio show can say.

Like, “I love you”.

And, “I’m trying.”

And, most importantly, “being in your life matters.”

I hear that in every phone call now. When he calls to tell me that airline tickets are on sale right now in case I’m looking for flights any time in the near future. Or when he calls back a few days later to tell me he got a great deal on a couple of seats and will be down for four days in April. It’s not just that he spent the money to come visit. It’s that he checks the prices and has the girls at work let him know about any deals they see.

It’s that he thinks about us every day now.

It wasn’t always like that. And that’s no longer a judgment on him or a dig at his parenting, it just is. He lived seven hours away from me for most of my childhood and he had his own family to try to take care of.

I have a family now. I know how all consuming it can be just to stay afloat. I know how hard it is to see beyond anything but what’s right in front of you right now.

I know, now, that it wasn’t about how much he loved me or loved someone else more than me.

But, again, I didn’t always know that. I didn’t always see that he came to every football game I cheered at when I was in highschool because he wanted to, because he lived closer and he could then. I was glad to have him around more, but leery of when he’d leave again. Suspicious of his motives. He’d gone months without so much as a phone call before. It was hard for a 16 year old kid to let go of that simply because now things were different.

You’d think I would have been more understanding when I had my own child. You’d think.

But I didn’t see that he drove two hours straight from a training class so that he could sit and hold his first grandchild for hours. I missed the look on his face that said that was exactly where he wanted to be at that moment.

I was too focused on how much I loved this baby of mine, how nothing in the world could have kept me from him. And wondering how in the hell it had been possible for my own parent not to feel that for me.

“I don’t understand,” I told him once. “I could never be away from Devin. I don’t understand how you could go so long without me.”

“You can’t miss what you don’t really know,” he tried to explain. And it was painful to hear, but it was honest.

He misses us now – all of us – because he knows us. He makes a point of knowing us.

I credit my step mom with a lot of his new found parenting skills – his ability to say and show love, to put forth more effort than I do in my own day to day life. She loves her girls the way my mom loves me – actively, and it never occurred to her that he’d be allowed to be less than an involved parent.

But it’s just the tools she gave him. Not the love. Now, finally, I can see that. Now, at damn near 30, I can appreciate the relationship we have for what it is – instead of holding it up against what it didn’t use to be. I can let go of the resentment and the comparisons he was never going to win – or redo – and be grateful for the father I have now.

Ironically, now it’s me who has so much going on right in front of me that I neglect to be the one to call. I don’t take the time to reach out.

He reminds me to call my grandmother.

There is no big revelation here to wrap this up with. No eureka moment to tie the strands of the story together for you. Life isn’t like that except for when you write about it. And relationships, especially, aren’t linear enough for neat beginnings, middles and ends.

I guess I just wanted to say…

Thanks, Dad. I don’t know if you could ever know how grateful I am every single time we talk. I don’t know if you could ever know how thrilled I am that my daughter loves the Green Bay Packers “just like Lil’ Papa!” But, thank you. You are a really, really great dad and an amazing grandparent and one hell of a father-in-law too, if you believe anything Jared says.

And I can say it here.

Because he reads my blog.

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Posted in Friends and Family, Personal - Growth and Things I'm Trying To Learn Tagged: dad, family, father, grateful, judgment, love, parenting, relationship, relationships