I see my dad on a weekly basis now. Unless he's sick or one of us is sick, we will have a visit every week. I've come to enjoy these visits a lot more. There was a time when I really dreaded going to visit him and felt burdened by having to do so. At the time, each of these visits would leave me drained and sometimes angry. I never wanted to go because I'd leave in a foul mood after.
It's taken years to reach this point, but my relationship with my dad is the best it's ever been. Now "best" is relative. We're on a low scale here...by best, I mean we see each other once a week, we don't yell at each other, and we can have some surface-level conversation. Maybe sometimes more than surface-level. But honestly, if we're talking at all, and it's not yelling or reprimanding, that's a positive.
I never got to have an adult relationship with my mother. When she died, I wrote a letter. In the letter, I listed a series of events and experiences she would miss from my life : my high school graduation, my college graduation, my marriage, the birth of my children. All of these have happened. But one thing I didn't have foresight into: both of us would miss having an adult relationship with each other. She would never stop being my mother, but the relationship of a mother and child is not the same as the relationship of a mother and an adult child.
I have a vivid memory of being in middle school. I trace the timeline back to about 7th grade because I don't remember my brother being with me. My mother had driven to pick me up from school. I don't remember when she stopped driving, but 7th grade was less than a year before she died. She never waited in the carpool line because traffic was horrendous. Instead, she pulled up a street around from the school, and I'd walk down and look for her car.
Upon opening the door, I got in the seat and loaded my violin and backpack around me. Immediately, I got yelled at because my violin was in the way of my mother's ability to drive. I got angry she snapped at me. We drove home in a sour mood and didn't speak to each other. I vaguely remember her later explaining to me she couldn't reach the gas pedal properly due to my violin being in the way, and that was dangerous.
She was right. All these years later, I know she was right. I was just being a bratty teenager who didn't want to be corrected, and in that moment, I was annoyed at how bulky my backpack and instrument were. As an adult and mother myself now, if my child did the same thing, I'd be snapping at him/her in an instant, too.
I never had the chance to drive my mother around. She died a year and a half before I received my driver's license. I've driven my dad around a number of times on adventures with my children. I often wonder if it's strange for him to see me now doing things for him he used to do for me. For a while, I resented the fact that it wasn't her. Why didn't my mother get to be the one to play with my kids and hear their laughter? Why wasn't my mother the one sitting in the passenger seat beside me as I drove?
I learned to stop asking why. No answers will ever suffice for these questions. For now, I'm just glad my dad and I have time.
No comments:
Post a Comment