New Conversations
with Dad

There is a silence that exists between people who have known each other a long time. My father and I lived inside that silence for most of my life. We'd occasionally have a deeply philosophical talk every year or two but most of the time it was a surface relationship. Not from lack of love. But because we didn't have any other example.

What finally broke it open was a phone call from a stranger, the morning after a psychedelic experience, asking me where I needed a breakthrough in my life. I knew immediately. There was a conversation I had never had with my father. Decades of it, unsaid.

That day I sent him a voice memo. I said: I want to tell you everything I've been scared, afraid, angry about. Will you just listen and repeat it back? He texted back: Yes. I love you.

I wept before I even dialed.

That night, somewhere in the middle of ninety minutes of saying everything I had never said, I shared a memory — him angry, me terrified. He said he didn't remember it. I said, I'm not claiming it happened. I'm just saying I remember it. And he said: well, I guess that's what matters here anyway. What you remembered.

In the weeks after that conversation, something unexpected surfaced. The wall of fear between us had fallen — but so had something else, something I hadn't anticipated. I realized there was a fear I had of people in general that had also quietly decreased. My fear of him had translated, without my knowing, into a fear of everybody. When I told him this, he was still for a moment. I didn't know, he said.

More than a year later, we were in a workshop together — something that would have been unimaginable to me not long before. It was there that he told me about his own mother. How after he started school, she never cuddled with him. How when he had a bad experience and wanted to talk to her, she would say: be brave, trust the system. What I really wanted, he said, was to be held.

I felt something open in my chest listening to him. You missed out on that, I told him. And yet somehow you gave it to me anyway.

What I didn't know, until I finally asked, was that my father was reaching too. That he had been reaching his whole life, back toward a mother who told him to be brave, forward toward sons he didn't yet have the language to hold. The love was never in question. It was always the distance between the love and the skin.

I think about power differently now. Not as something you have over someone, or something withheld to protect yourself. Power, I've come to believe, is the capacity to initiate. To go first. To say the thing that has never been said and trust that the other person's love is strong enough to hold it. My father had that capacity all along. So did I. We just needed someone to go first.