I don’t have the closest relationship with my dad. I’m not going to go into specifics, but if you know me, you know my issues. If you don’t know me, you just need to know that I have issues. He has made decisions that I have never been able to understand. However, as I’ve grown older, I realize that I was just a kid and unable to grasp the concepts and complexities of life when everything went down. And I’m not going to tell you that now that I’m an adult, I completely understand. Because I don’t. But what I can tell you is that I no longer blame myself. Or him. It just is what it is.

What I have recently come to realize is that while my dad and I have never really had a close father/son bond, I’m not sure that at this point in time, I can count on anyone to come through for me more than him. Over the past few years, he has always been there to break any fall and soften any blow that life may deal me. We’re still not exactly friends or have a relationship close to where I’d like it, but I always know that I can depend on him to come through when I make that call.

I’ve been trying to think of why that is. What I’ve come up with is that the rest of my family doesn’t really know me. They have their beliefs and their religion and it doesn’t quite jive with my way of thinking. I feel that some of them think of me as a heartless shell, looking for the next opportunity to fuck something up.

I don’t get that feeling from my dad. He gets me. And as time goes on, I’m finding this less strange. If you’d have told me at any point in the last 20 years that I would grow up to be like my dad, I would have responded with an “absolutely not.” But here I am. More alike than not alike. I hope he looks at me and can see how I’ve made different choices than he did at my age and that he is proud of them. That I learned from some of his mistakes. That I tried to break a pattern. That I tried to be an example.

And I know that he would go back and do some things differently if the technology existed. But it doesn’t. So all we can do is continue to make the choices ahead of us, learning from the choices we’ve already made and the choices of those around us.

When all is said and done, we are all just people trying to find our places. Trying to make sense of it all. Doing what we can to survive another day. We both understand this.

I hope that one day we will have a relationship built on more than me calling when I’m in a bind and him bailing me out. But until that day, I sleep a little better at night knowing that he’s out there and that he’ll answer when I call.