Selfish Dads

Hello,
I would like to submit a complaint about my dad. He’s the most selfish and entitled person I’ve ever met. I try to see the good in him, but it’s difficult. I feel like he doesn’t even actually care about us kids. I don’t understand him. I do love him, but I just wish he showed that he cared more.

Dear Trying to see the Good,

People we don’t understand are just these distorted mirrors showing back to us all the parts of ourselves we don’t have the grace to understand and let be. But it’s also like a fun house from hell. I don’t understand your dad either. It’s all just an invitation to you, from you, about you. You have to turn toward love. The kind of love that is made from nothing. The kind of love that is for you, from you, despite having a father who doesn’t care the way he should. This empty space is so painful and awful and you just have to survive it.

Selfish and entitled is just gonna be selfish and entitled and you don’t have to spelunk those caves, wearing your fingers down to the sinews and bones trying to find a sliver of gold or something worth while. You rather have to just hold your breath if you can as you drive through the tunnel. Did you every play that game as a kid? When you would drive through a tunnel you were supposed to try and hold your breath all the way through. What a strange game. A bit of micro-dosing death. A bit of playing with mortality. A bit of pushing the body to the limits.

Also though, the joy of the inhale once you have made it through the long and dark tunnel.

There is no answer here, but I think this is the answer. Just an intuition of mine.

Hold your breath through the cave and get through it as fast as you can. And relish that big inhale like a lost treasure finally found.

It’s all so painful and it’s a horror really to have the person who is supposed to love you unconditionally not even care. Maybe that’s why those silly games were invented in the first place. It’s a bit scary to drive through a tunnel—the light goes away and time and space make less sense and until you are almost through it’s just dark and windy and haunted. So we come up with games to survive it.

So play. So dance. So hold your breath and celebrate your victory when you emerge into the light.

—with love for all the places in you that aren’t being loved

The Complaint Department