Home for the Holidays
The problem, as I see it, with fathers, is that they are very hard to shop for. In my family all affection is expressed through our, admittedly limited, pocket books. As such, I worry that at some point my father will feel I loved him less, when in reality I just never knew him. I love him as much as one can love a quiet stranger who wields a great deal of responsibility in one's life, but I am certain he will die having served mostly as a silent buffer for the decades long unmanaged mental illness of my mother. It's a foreseeable regret that I haven't the tools to derail. I'm not a daddy's girl. I'm not an anybody's girl, really. Still, every birthday and every holiday I engage in the futility of searching for the perfect gift. I wrack my brain for something meaningful, for a memory, for a feeling. I struggle toward the inevitability of buying socks hoping to climb out of this thoughtless routine. I yearn for something, anything, that might say "I se...