I told my father last weekend, calmly and without blame, that I had spent my childhood feeling like I had to earn his full attention. The telling took about a minute. We were sitting at the small Thai place near my apartment in Bangkok, the one we have started going to whenever he visits, and the lunch crowd had thinned out enough that the restaurant had settled into that mid-afternoon quietness that makes a difficult conversation feel slightly less exposed than it otherwise would.
I am thirty-eight. He has just turned seventy. The conversation was, by every available measure, several decades overdue. The overdue-ness was, in some real way, part of why I had been able to imagine having it. The conversation that would have been catastrophic when I was twenty-two had, by virtue of the intervening sixteen years, become something more like a conversation between two adults who had finally accumulated enough evidence about who they each were to be able to have it without it ending either of them.
What I said was specific. I did not say that he had been a bad father. I did not say that he had failed me. I did not, in any sense, lay out a list of grievances or rehearse the various small episodes from my childhood that the conversation could, in principle, have been built around. I said that I had spent my childhood feeling like his full attention was something I had to earn, and that I had carried the feeling into the rest of my adult life in ways that had taken me thirty-five years to begin to identify.
He wanted to defend himself. I could see it. The defending wanted to come out as the various reasonable explanations a man of his generation has available for what he was doing in his thirties and forties, the financial pressures, the work demands, the particular wider culture of fatherhood he had been operating inside, all of which were, in their own way, structurally accurate. He could have offered any of them. The offering would have been understood by both of us as the conversation defaulting back to the previous configuration, in which his explanations were the substance and my experience was a kind of weather that he had been dealing with rather than something he had, in any structural sense, produced.
He did not offer them. He sat there. He nodded, slightly, in the particular way he has of registering that something has been said that he has not yet figured out how to receive. He did not, in any meaningful sense, respond. He finished his pad see ew. We talked about other things. The lunch ended.
What he has done in the six months since
That was six months ago. We have spoken since, on the standard Sunday calls we have been having for fifteen years. He has not, in those calls, brought up what I said. He has not, in those calls, tried to relitigate it. He has not, in those calls, offered the explanations he had wanted to offer at the table. He has, more accurately, just continued having the calls with me, in the way we have been having them, while carrying what I had told him quietly underneath whatever else we were discussing.
I noticed something, across those six months, that I have not, in any earlier period of our relationship, noticed before. The calls have been slightly different. The difference is small. The difference involves the way he asks how I am doing. The way he had been asking, for the previous fifteen years, had been calibrated to surface-level reporting. How was work, how were the dogs, what was the weather doing. The way he has been asking, since the lunch, has been calibrated, in some small but real way, to a slightly different register. He has been asking how I am, in a way that allows for the possibility of an answer that is not surface-level. He has, in some real way, opened a small additional channel that the previous configuration of the calls had not contained.
He has not used the channel to talk about what I said. He has not used the channel to apologize. He has not used the channel to do any of the things the contemporary self-help register would say a father in his position should be doing in response to having received what I told him. He has used the channel, more modestly, to be available, in case I want to use it. The availability is the change. The availability is what he has been quietly offering for the six months since I told him.
What I am beginning to understand about the sitting
What I am beginning to understand, on close examination of these six months, is that the sitting-with-it is, in some real way, the most useful thing he has done as my father in fifty years. The framing is not, on close examination, an exaggeration. I am thirty-eight. He has been my father for thirty-eight years. The doing-of-father-work he performed in the first thirty-seven and a half of those years was, in most cases, the kind of doing his generation understood as the work. The providing. The being present in the household. The various small acts of practical support that constituted, in his understanding of the role, what fathers were supposed to do.
The doing was real. The doing has, in many small ways, structured the conditions under which I have been able to build the adult life I currently have. I am not, in any sense I want to articulate here, dismissing the doing.
The doing was also, on close examination, not what I had needed from him during the parts of my childhood that have, by long delay, finally surfaced into the kind of conversation we had in Bangkok. What I had needed was the kind of attention that he was, by structural design of his generation and his temperament, not particularly equipped to provide. The not-providing was not malice. The not-providing was, more accurately, the structural feature of who he was, operating inside the structural features of the wider culture that had produced him.
What he has done in the six months since the lunch is something he was not, on the available evidence, doing in any of the previous fifty years of being my father. He has been sitting with something I told him about how his presence affected my interior, without defending himself, without trying to fix it, without trying to make it small, without trying to convert it into something he could handle by the standard tools his generation gave him to handle things. He has just been sitting with it. The sitting-with-it is, in some real way, the first time I can identify in our entire relationship in which he has done that particular piece of work.
Why the sitting is, on close examination, harder than it sounds
I want to be honest about what the sitting has cost him, because I do not, on examination, want to romanticize what he is doing or pretend that it is easy.
What he has been carrying for the last six months is, in some real way, the information that the way he had been doing the father work, across thirty-seven and a half years, had not been adequate for what at least one of his sons had actually needed. The information is uncomfortable. The information is, by every available measure of how men of his generation tend to relate to information of this kind, the kind of thing that the standard repertoire would push him to either reject, minimize, explain, or compartmentalize. He has, on the available evidence of the last six months, done none of these. He has just carried it. The carrying is, in some real way, the structural expression of his decision to receive what I told him rather than to deflect it.
What I want to acknowledge, because the acknowledging seems important, is that he had not, in any of the previous fifty years, given me any particular evidence that he would be capable of this kind of receiving. The conversation in Bangkok was, in some real way, a gamble I had decided to take on the small accumulated evidence that he had been mellowing in recent years in ways that suggested the gamble might be worth taking. The mellowing was real. The mellowing had been visible across the previous several visits. The mellowing was, however, considerably more modest than the kind of receiving the lunch turned out to require of him. He met the requirement anyway. The meeting was, on close examination, more than the previous evidence would have predicted he was capable of.
What this is, finally
What the last six months have been, in some real way, is the first six months of a different version of our relationship than the one we had been operating in for the previous thirty-seven and a half years. The difference is small. The difference is not, in most ways, visible from outside. The Sunday calls still happen at the same time. The conversations still cover roughly the same surface material. The structure has not, by any external measure, fundamentally changed.
What has changed, more modestly, is that there is now, between us, a small acknowledged space that did not previously exist, in which the parts of my childhood that I had spent thirty-five years carrying alone are no longer, in any deep sense, only mine to carry. He is also carrying them now. He has been carrying them for six months. He has not, in those six months, asked me to make the carrying easier for him. He has just done it.
I am, on the available evidence of my own internal weather, doing better in the six months since the lunch than I have been doing in any equivalent period of the previous decade. The doing-better is not, on close examination, dramatic. The doing-better is, more accurately, the small structural relief of no longer being the only person who knows what my childhood with him actually felt like. The relief is real. The relief is, in some real way, what the willingness to sit with it has produced.
He has been my father for fifty years if you count from his own perspective, since he became someone’s father before he became mine. He has been doing the work of being my father, by his own understanding, for almost all of that time. He has been doing the work of receiving what being his son actually involved for me, in any structurally honest sense, for six months. The six months is, by some honest accounting, the most useful thing he has done as my father in any of the fifty years. I would not have predicted this at any earlier point in my life. I am still, in some real way, working out what to do with the fact that it has, against the available evidence, finally happened.
