I came out to him over christmas 2 years ago and that’s the last time he’s spoken to me. His last words to me before he read my letter were “Love you always”
I’ll be your dad, if you want. 🫂
This is the type of story I was expecting on Lemmy
He doesn’t deserve you.
Yeah it’s sad realizing my parent’s love really was conditional
I was a loser who didn’t seek a real job until I was 25, and didn’t get my shit together and move out until I was 30, but despite all that my dad always loved me and never so much as pushed me. Gentle encouragement from time to time, but always just glad to have his boy around. I live in a different country with my wife now. I have a beautiful daughter and a decent, stable job. We flew my dad out a few years ago and I’ve never seen him so proud of what I’ve become. He loved my daughter so much. We took him out to the Canadian Rockies. That trip meant the world to him.
He had a heart attack and died two years ago.
As tragic as it all is, I watched the emotional shit he went through over the way his father raised him, and his father’s suicide when I was too young to remember, and he made it a point to make sure I never had to wonder if he loved me or was proud of me. He was.
I hope his soul is flying through the universe somewhere and has seen how much my daughter has grown, and has seen my awesome new house. I sprinkle his ashes around my flower gardens every spring just to keep him around. I hope he’s around.
Love you, dad.
My dad, my brother(13) and I (16) were on a resort scuba dive (we borrow their gear, and get a ride on their boat, and follow their leader during the dive). Descending down a line, with my dad following the dive lead, then me, then my brother.
About 60 feet deep, I see my dad jerk suddenly, followed by a bunch of bubbles. I see him grab his octopus… Another spasm and more bubbles.
I watch as he swims down to the dive leader, and grabs his octopus, taking in and releasing a breath. He signals to dive lead he needs to surface. Dive lead grabs his octopus and replaced it with my dad’s original regulator… Another spasm, and he begins emergency surfacing. My brother and I follow. Dive lead has a Merry dive all alone.
At the surface, we find that the rubber bits on my dad’s equipment (regulator, and octopus) had deteriorated, and broken at depth. He had lungs full of water, and spent the next half hour barfing and coughing it up.
That’s about all I got, still brings me to tears twenty some odd years later to just think about it
I had to look up what “octopus” means in terms of diving equipment to alleviate myself of a mental image of each of you diving with a little sea creature friend snuggled up on you, which for some reason you’d grab if distressed.
Thank you. I was really confused and had to read it a couple of times. A first read made me think the dad started jerking off with an octopus and this went downhill.
That would be nice, maybe this would work? Blavingad
I hope you all sued the resort.
That negligence nearly cost your dad his life.
It was in Mexico. No dice 😑. That being said, we didn’t have to pay for any of the dives, and they offered to buy dinner for him. He was ill for a day or two, so we didn’t get to exercise it
When I was starting to hit puberty, my mother got a severe depression, culminating in a suicide attempt. I remember her for the following ten-ish years as just sitting on her chair and reading or in her bed. When she managed to have a shower, it was a great day for her.
My father managed it all. Still had his taxing job, but now doing all the household, cooking, raising the kids and being supportive for my mother. He was there as father, as provider, as a husband. Eventually my mother was healing and back to her former, energetic self.
I don’t know how my father did it, honestly. My wife and I are struggling with managing our two children as is, if my wife were out of the equation I’d collapse immediately. Granted, my sister and I were a lot older than my kids are now, when shit hit the fan, but still…crazy impressive.
So yeah, basically he is a role model in perseverance and a lot of other things.
When he died, we all could finally breathe.
Unfortunately for mine, that stubborn son of a bitch is still hanging around into his 80’s, while the rest of his miserable family had the decent common courtesy to kick it in their 60’s & 70’s. I went no contact about a decade ago, but I still get to hear how much of a piece of shit he is from the rest of the family.
The only positive that came from him is that I turned out to be a better father than he did. I have a good relationship with my nearly adult kids.
some fathers suck
that man is a racist, misogynistic, child beating, wife beating, cat killing, rapist piece of shit.
my very first memory, punching him in the nose and bloodying it when I was a 4yo because he wouldn’t stop picking on me and calling me a chicken-shit. He was proud of me and stopped picking on me after I finally hit him because I wasn’t acting like a chicken shit. He was likely drunk.
I dunno if he’s still alive but I hope he’s sad and lonely today because nobody on earth likes him much less his children.
Who?
Some parents are just not worth the title.
I know my comment was low effort. I appreciate the supportive response anyway, even if it wasn’t that well deserved.
Thank you.
It’s deserved, everyone deserves love from their parents and when it’s not there it’s really jarring.
So from a complete stranger, a tiny bit of love and support <3
So my Dad’s an impressive guy, at least to me. Dropped out of high school after getting into an argument with a nun about divine authority, had a kid (me!) out of wedlock, married my mom and joined the military to provide, had a moment of self-reflection when child me did some math with fruit, did night school to get his high school diploma, after several deployments and changes in trade got a four year degree done in two years, became an officer, rose through the ranks and is now retired from the military, doing civvy stuff that protects the rights of servicepeople under the law. Beyond all of this, he is always trying new stuff: baking cookies, making his own clothes, repair on all sorts of shit, wilderness stuff, writing, painting, drawing, programming, photography, Qigong, studying philosophy - the list goes on, to this day (he’s currently on a motorcycle repair kick). I basically watched this guy transform from a disappointed, angry young man to a character you could find in a Heinlein novel and say “Jesus, there’s the competent man trope, right on time”.
With all of this in mind, what sticks in my head is what he said when I did some bogus (probably) IQ test as a kid and ran up to him with a good result: “IQ is just a measure of potential. It’s what you do with that potential that’s the important part”. Whether I’ve lived up to that idea is a separate question, but it still comes to mind these days.
This is also coupled with memories of near blows/fist fights over stupid shit growing up, but that’s also offset by watching him make a real effort to learn and account for/manage his temper. He’s a remarkably chill person at this point.
Love this guy, he is a rock fucking solid dude.
I have so many stark lasting memories of my dad, good and bad it’s hard to pick the one with the greatest impact.
Maybe the time I watched him have an allergic reaction to an ssri that ended in 6 cops beating him unconscious and dragging him to jail.
Maybe the time he unprompted pulled $800 out of his wallet and handed it to the lady at the laundry mat who was stressed about paying her rent that month.
Maybe the time my friends and I showed up at 2am with bath salts and he did a little toot with us.
Maybe the time he sat with me in the kitchen until the wee hours of the night playing chess while I cried about being broken up with for the first time.
One time I fell backwards from the ladder to the treehouse my dad built. I summersaulted backwards like twice as I fell but I was completely fine. But the look of worry and how fast he ran is something I’ll never forget. It made me realize how much he cares.
I flat celebrated my father’s death. The upside was he instilled equality of gender well, and considering the 80s that wasn’t common around middle USA.
Father’s Day is complex for me. Balancing my adult daughter bringing it for me vs memories of mine takes effort.
My son is my step-son and his biological dad has hispanic and black ancestry. My dad once told me that “It’s too bad he’s black” meaning that it’s too bad he’s black as his life will be more difficult for him and he won’t have as high of achievements due to this fact. Great, so you have just accepted that we have an unfair and imbalanced society yet continue to tell me that this country is too woke and everyone has an equal advantage and there is no such thing as racial injustice. No old man, you are a fucking racist piece of shit.
We haven’t spoken for 3 years.
My dad wasn’t perfect, but he always did what was best for my mom and I. He worked his ass off doing a number of labor jobs (carpentry, mechanic, electrical, plumbing, etc) and was a jack of all trades. He dropped out his sophomore year in the 70s to help support his parents when his dad had a stroke and just kept working the labor jobs. He was well known enough in the plumbing business that when Disney was planning another hotel they asked for him by name to lead the plumbing project.
When all that hard labor caught up with him and he had his back surgery, it threw him on his ass and disability. He still kept working on stuff after recovering, rebuilt his uncle’s Willy’s he had found, swapping motors out of his truck when he eventually killed it, doing home renovations, everything. All while trying to teach my dumbass some of what he knew so I’d know something useful. I learned a lot from him, but not nearly all of what he knew. He was a stubborn hard ass so he liked things done a certain way and would sometimes get frustrated if I wasn’t doing it right, but never in a “I’m going to scream at you because you fucked up” kinda way.
It took me until he was diagnosed with cancer to realize why he had always been a hard ass and pushing me to do better, he didn’t want me to follow his footsteps and he stuck doing these hard labor jobs, destroying my body like he did his. Sorry that didn’t work out, old man.
It’s not really a particular memory of my dad that impacted me, it’s basically his whole memory of him that did. I’ve had lots of great memories with him, but everything he always did was for his family first, he was very selfless. I wouldn’t be who I am today without my dad.
Happy father’s day, dad. Miss you.
I don’t have many happy memories of my father growing up. All he knew his entire life was hard work and he leaned into that, because his dad died when he was eleven. I am grateful to him for a few things he did that made a major impact on my life:
- He and my mom got my eyes fixed when I was four years old, before which I was legally blind.
- He put the first $1000 I ever saw in my hand to pay a college tuition bill so I wouldn’t have to quit.
- He made sure I had everything I needed growing up in terms of material needs.
But there are a wealth of shitty memories too. He was drunk for most of my childhood and adolescence and verbally abusive. There were times he’d show up to my baseball or soccer practices and games and beer cans would be falling out of his truck. (Never had an adult intervene there, though.)
Most annoyingly, he and my mom have “borrowed” my car for a year to work for DoorDash. They’re too old now to get jobs anywhere else and have to survive.
The best thing I can say about him now is that I know he regrets all of it. On the rare occasions I have him over he always has a gift of some sort. It’s usually something small, because they’re very poor. Last time it was a container of oatmeal. It’s his way of saying sorry, because his stoic, 1940’s and 1950’s upbringing produced a man who doesn’t know how to actually say he’s sorry.
There are few greater antipoles to me and “my whole thing” than my dad, but… He taught me the value of being cautious, and to take time to extensively evaluate pros and cons before I made important decisions. I took that ball and ran with it, and now I am routinely praised by my peers for my ability to foresee potential pitfalls and preemptively negate them, and reflexively I think of my dad who would suggest that it was just common sense.
Of course it’s not just “common sense” – but rather a curious mindset and an intentional thought process – and you instilled that in me, Dad. Thank you.
