Lullaby

(best speech assignment for FI 112)

            My father is the typical manly man, who considers “good reading” to be Dick’s Sporting Goods catalogs and NRA magazines and watches the Ultimate Fighting Championship religiously. He would rather spend a day hiking in the mountains than a week relaxing at the beach. He is popular among my friends for the enormous gun safe in our living room, the two Boa Constrictors that take up residence next to our television, as a sideshow of sorts, and biceps that are much too large for a 55 year old man who has lost the majority of his hair, not to mention a noticeable portion of his hearing. My childhood was spent wrestling on the front lawn and practicing martial arts on judo mats in the living room.

This being said, my father and I have profoundly different tastes. He watches westerns, while I prefer tragic romances. He takes three-minute showers while I indulge myself with thirty-minute soaks, taking four times as long to get dressed. His opinions are finite, while I avoid decisions as a general rule. He is strongly Republican, while I chose to be labeled an “independent.” To him, spontaneity is a dangerous lack of organized thought, while I am a firm believer of fate leading the way. He prefers the concrete. I prefer the abstract. If you were to create my father’s opposite, you would get me. As overly analytical and dangerously emotional as I am, he is just as lost for words when it comes to the sensitive and touchy-feely. This is where the problems occur.

My father would have been satisfied with a daughter who wanted to discuss politics and fishing or go hunting, which involves no talking at all. Instead, he received a feminized version of a chattering teeth toy. I am forever seeking approval for my continuous trains of thought, all of which are, simultaneously, my number one priority- a collision of explosive emotion that is beyond overwhelming for my father. We learned, many years ago, that the safest tactic to avoid our daily civil war was to just skim the surface. Don’t ask, don’t tell, and, if you must tell, do so in such a way that completely annihilates all possibility for disagreement. Stick with light jokes and previously approved topics. I was convinced that my father hated me. He argued against my reasoning for every thought I had, so I rejected any attempt he made for a truce. Eventually, we both stopped trying.

My father works the evening shift, and does not come home until after midnight, each night. Being a man whose habits die hard, even in my adolescent years, he would peak into my room to check on me when he came home, as he did when I was a child. One night, when I heard his key turn in our front door, for no obvious reason, I buried my face in my pillows and pulled the blankets tightly around my neck, feigning sleep. I saw a sliver of light sneak its way from my doorway onto my bed, as my father peeked into my room. Surprisingly, he fell for the act and inched the door open, carefully stepping into my blackened room. Once, he had maneuvered through the dark, successfully reaching my bedside, his hand reached out and blindly made its way to the side of my head.

My father stroked my hair gently, like he was touching a china doll, afraid to leave even a scratch, and tucked a curl behind my ear. “I love you, Mary,” he whispered. “You are smart and funny and pretty, and I am proud of you. You are a good girl, and I am proud to be your daddy.” Leaning forward, he kissed me on the side of my face and walked out of the room as silently as he had entered.

It took years for me to grow out of my self-righteous teenage state, and at least as long for my dad to begin to understand it, and, even then, agreeing was uncommon, but from that night onwards, I would wait. I would stay up late and wait for him, so that I could pretend to be asleep and listen to his tuneless lullaby, just to have some kind of verification of the feelings we both knew to be true but had not, yet, learned to express. We have taught each other and learned from each other, growing up together. I don't live in that house, anymore. I don't need to be checked on or tucked in. Phone calls suffice for communication, during the times that I am away. When I do come home, my dad will still come in to check on me, like he used to, and sometimes, I still pretend to be asleep… just in case.