His First "I Love You"

As far as I can remember, I was eighteen years old the first time my dad told me he loved me. It was after my high school graduation and it came with an awkward hug and kiss on the head. It was completely momentous and completely too late. I was student senate president and had just given the student address. I was on cloud nine, feeling all the excitement that graduates feel on that night. But then my dad did that thing and distracted me for the rest of the night. In a sense it made me angry. How dare he choose my special night to do the one thing I’d dreamed he’d do since I was old enough to think about it.

Five hours -- that’s how far I was moving from home to go to college. I couldn’t wait. Couldn’t wait to get out of the small town in which I grew up. Couldn’t wait to start a new life at college. Couldn’t wait to get away from the uncomfortable relationship with the living ghost that was my dad. I suppose his profession of love toward my twin sister and me that graduation night was his way of saying he’d miss us. I don’t really know though since he never said it. When he and my mom dropped us at college in the fall, he responded with the same awkward hug, kiss on the head, and “I love you.”

I didn’t know what all that meant. Those words and that affection from him were so foreign to me. Maybe he was realizing for the first time what he’d lost, and what he was still losing. The time he’d wasted during our childhood – time spent drinking and avoiding instead of spending time with his kids. If that’s the case, I can’t imagine the enormity of his regret. To this day it hurts my heart to think about what he must have felt. Throughout our time in college, Dad would make grand gestures. Our shared car would have problems and our mechanic father would drive the five hours to and from our college in one day to make the necessary repairs. I didn’t understand why he would do such a thing when we were perfectly capable of taking our car to a mechanic. He wouldn’t stay for lunch or dinner nor any longer than it took to fix the car. He would also give us money that I knew he didn’t have to spare. Now I understand that he was trying to make up for time lost. He either didn’t understand or couldn’t follow through on what we always knew though. We just wanted his love. We didn’t need any grand gestures. We needed him to apologize, to admit that he wasn’t the father we needed him to be. We needed him to get help and heal the wounds caused by his time as a soldier in Vietnam. We just needed him to get better, so he could be a “normal” dad. Whatever normal looked like for a family touched by PTSD for more than three decades. We buried my dad eight years ago today. I think about the military funeral, about the cemetery, about all the men and women buried there with him. And I wonder how many of them also had trouble saying "I love you."