my father’s daughter

I didn’t realize that I had forgotten how to be my father’s daughter until we ate dinner and I remembered.

It was another meal at another steakhouse, a glass of Riesling to sip on and a Caesar salad to start, our most familiar routine, my filet mignon cooked medium rare because that’s how my mother always ordered it for me growing up, but it wasn’t until hours later, when I described the evening as surprisingly good, that I understood how subtly comforting it had been. There are no more shoes waiting to drop.

I don’t think I have ever wanted my father to come home. I’ve wanted my family back, and sometimes when we talk I wonder if he does too, yet despite the three decades of love he and my mother shared I have always heard a finality in the word “divorce.” I have asked why? without wondering what if? because part of me has always understood that my mother’s destiny could be different.

There were sides, in my parents’ divorce, with the lines drawn by morals, and over the years I grew so accustomed to being my mother’s advocate and my brother’s defender that I forgot how to be my father’s daughter in a space where I declared myself my mother’s. I tend to think in black-and-white because it’s easier, my brain struggling to accept the grey scales of human behavior, and maybe that’s why I find comfort in a crisis, the chaos grounding in its familiarity. I don’t always know how to behave when I can breathe freely.

I didn’t realize how much I missed being my father’s daughter until I felt like her again.