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Today is Sunday, June 21st. It’s laundry day. It’s another day of summer vacation. It’s drumsticks and potatoes day. It’s anything in the world but Father’s Day.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my father before on my blog or in my writings. I don’t have much to say about him. He’s the man that my mother had two children with. The man who was fired from multiple jobs, who had a stubborn attitude, who drove me around town with the radio on after school, the reason I have lighter skin than my mother, who gave me curly brown hair and my unconventional name. The man whose decisions are the reason why I have nothing to celebrate today.

This will be my last Father’s Day spent without him, but that statement depends on how the next year proceeds. He’s been in prison for the last five years come October. Up for parole in three months. I have tried my very best to ignore it, laugh it off when my mom decides to remind me, enjoy the summer days best I can, indulge in distractions. His parole outcome is as guaranteed as the sun rising tomorrow, but he will likely come out on good behavior or something like that. 

If you ask me how I feel about him, I’d ask you the same thing. We’d be stuck wondering that question for a while. I genuinely don’t know. I speak a bit ill of him, I make fun of his circumstance, I say “my mom” more than I do “my dad”. He is less of a person and more of a concept to me, a societal achievement that I do not have. Like a house or a license. I don’t outright hate his guts, because then I feel guilty thinking about the good times and how lonely he must be now. But my empathy runs dry when I remember that he brought this all upon himself. The cheating, the drug use, the recklessness and the violence he all caused. Nobody made him. He wasn’t in danger. He was stupid and now I pray he has learned his lesson. 

Five years is a lot. This wasn’t like the six month stint he did when I was six. He has been gone for what have been the most formative years of my life. I’m not sure how else to emphasize that. I feel like I have lived a hundred different lifetimes since I was 12. I’ve moved cities, I’ve had a whole relationship and breakup, I’ve met so many new friends, I went to a concert, and that’s not even the whole of it all. He calls me every few months. Last time was in March. The last time I saw his face was at my uncle’s funeral. I hate when he calls because I get all consumed with guilt. Guilty for growing older. Guilt for having a life, for lying about where I live, for having a bitter and stoic tone when I pick up the phone. 

I hate when he calls me. Because then I am reminded that he is alive. He is not dead. His mother is, his brother is. Mine are alive and see his release as something good. I feel ashamed for wishing he was dead, for seeing his incarceration as something necessary. My mom still speaks highly of that man, as if he didn’t break the doorframes and her heart. She has no reason to keep up the compliments, no reason to delusionally minimize those arguments as if I wasn’t there to witness the plate smashing, the officers handing me cards, the venomous words spat from the mouths of teenage lovers who were this close to marriage before he fucked it all up. 

Nobody knows why I hated Sundays for so long when I was younger.