It is not because my father died a week ago this past Saturday. Our family has been on this road for the past year. There was no revelation here. We could effectively see it coming.
It is because I have such mixed feelings about the man who donated his sperm to make me. I've got these mixed feelings because I should remember my father in all of his positive light that he deserves.
But I'm a selfish sissy fag. I am a fudge-packer.
I should be so appreciative of the life that he gave me, yet I cannot escape the feelings of an eight year old boy who happened to find another boy a curiosity and my hands and his found their way between our legs and grasped our fully clothed crotches in an excitement and glee that marks the beginning of a path not desired by a father.
Here I am nearly five decades later still living the confusion and embarrassment of the words of my father who discovered my interest in males when he had opened my diary - a gift that prior Christmas - and read about the words that I had penned as a young lad dealing with confusion of desiring another boy.
I don't know how long he knew, but I did know that he knew for he was remarkable in his brevity of expressing his point to me.
"Normal boys don't do that."
And with that exchange, I never wrote my thoughts down again until well out of control of my father and his prying eyes. Thankfully I was able to chronicle in a new journal about the difficult journey I took in my early 20's as I confronted my homosexuality head first after doing everything in the prior decade to hide and to deny my desire for males.
I say that I have mixed feelings because I did love my father even though we were virtually opposite in many things though were both so stubborn and opinionated (figure that!); and while he never got the son he wanted (I remember as a five year old getting a Green Bay Packer helmet and jersey and can't remember ever doing anything with them), he got a son nonetheless gifted in so many things that I never was an embarrassment being involved with drugs, crime, or knocking up a chick before high school graduation.
He was proud of me for sure, but he wasn't expressive of his feelings as was common for a man of his era. I was the sensitive one who reviled going fishing (ick) or hunting (killing). I loved cars and we shared a fondness for the same football, hockey, and baseball team. I loved car racing and we went to races together over the years.
I know he loved me.
But he loved only the part of me I showed. For I knew his true feelings on what I was - a fudge packer - and he spent enough time expressing his celebration of catching sailors packing fudge as his second career as a Naval Base Police officer rising to management.
Fudge-packers.
Dad was short on words at all times. My sex education was in the front seat of his F-150 Super Cab as we came back from a store.
"Do you know about sex?" he blurted out of the clear blue.
I answered, "Yes" in a moment of honesty punctuated with a 13 year old's WTF moment.
My Dad worked so hard to keep a roof over our head - sometimes three jobs were his actions to show his love to us. He was in the Navy for 20 years never rising above first class because he was expressive of telling people what was wrong and not finding a mink glove to mask the punch of his words. During that time in the navy he cleaned fast food places at night or worked as a security guard or both. My Dad was never short on commitment to his family and his love was never expressed with a hug with his bear like arms. His love was expressed in time he spent away from Mom, my sister, and I.
I have such mixed feelings after his death because I can value with profound understanding how hard my Dad worked to keep us in that house and how he never had a new vehicle in the driveway like my friends' dads did. I could glean from his actions that I was more important than what he drove unlike today's parents who drive $50k vehicles and whose children are second in almost every consideration.
Yet, my conflict comes from my own selfish inner pain of that point in my life when I discovered I liked boys instead of girls and I was made to feel defective without any recourse - without any true understanding of what I had done and what it would evolve later in my life. I didn't even think of a sexual ramification or perspective of grabbing another boy between the legs and enjoying that he shared my interest; I don't know what became of that lad or if he became a fag like I ended up being, but I do know that that seminal moment of discovery of boys was a true outgrowth of who I was.
And that fact of being genuine with myself ended up causing me no end of replaying the situation over and over for decades. Had I not written my feelings, then what would have I become? Would I have been strong enough to tell my parents that they had raised a Nancy beyond the one named the same thing that they had actually produced 13 months after my own hatching?
I have shed some tears and had some moments of pain, but nothing like when I lost my beloved Richard some 25 years ago - whose death had yanked my heart out and had reduced me to a serial crybaby for weeks.
Dad's death was not unexpected as he had Parkinson's dementia so he was first disabled on the physical side as he would fall often and soon became more of a burden upon my mom than she could bear and she had him placed in a home; there were always moments that Dad would show glimmers of his old self, but as time progressed, his physical weakness was exceeded by the empty look in his eyes - a look that I noticed on Father's Day this year in which I knew the end was close even if I wasn't told so. For a brief moment I felt a connection to my Dad that I had never felt and there was a certain honesty in our shared experience that has also never left me to that day.
Rest in peace, Dad. You never knew you were Pappa Thunderpussy. I was so much more than you knew or cared to know. And I was a coward denying you a chance to be more.
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