brow furl

I had a con­ver­sa­tion with my fa­ther the oth­er day.

He is a vast­ly in­ter­est­ing man with won­der­ful sto­ries, but he’s al­ways been a bit emo­tion­al­ly de­tached.

Him and I are the same in this re­spect. We both have prob­lems car­ing, be­cause we end up car­ing too much.

As far as I can re­mem­ber back, he nev­er said ‘I love you’ to any of his chil­dren. It was al­ways about be­ing good peo­ple and work­ing as hard as you can, to be the best ver­sion of your­self.

As his chil­dren grew, the old­er man be­fore me had fi­nal­ly start­ed to tell his chil­dren he loved them, in­stead of hid­ing it be­hind a phrase. To be hon­est, I missed the phrase.

He fin­ished an anec­dote from his teach­ing days about do­ing more than what the school board thought he was even ca­pa­ble of do­ing, when a con­ver­sa­tion si­lence fell be­tween us.

I looked at him, still in the process of rem­i­nisc­ing and said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for nev­er pres­sur­ing me to be a girl or to do girly things. For al­low­ing me to help out in tasks that most would con­sid­er only boys should do. To en­cour­age me to write, do art, get ex­cit­ed about tech­nol­o­gy. Thank you for treat­ing me like a per­son and not a gen­der.’

And I learned in that mo­ment where I got my brow furl from. A crit­i­cal, con­fused look of some­one in­ca­pable to even grasp the con­cept they were just pre­sent­ed.

My fa­ther didn’t say ‘You’re wel­come.’ He didn’t say ‘of course.’

He stared into his cof­fee for mo­ment and re­flect­ed ‘You work hard and you do good. And all that oth­er stuff doesn’t mat­ter.’
 

—jes

Flom­mist Jes ex­ists for mo­ments of fiery in­spi­ra­tion. See her in­spi­ra­tional byprod­ucts at jdeprez.com. Copy­right © 2016 JES DE­PREZ. Il­lus­tra­tion by flom­mist Dan­ny Joe Gib­son. Copy­right © 2016 DJG.

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