coming home: a reflection

if i learned anything from my visit home last week, it was this--in the time that i'd been away, i had managed to convince myself that my current relationship with dad is much more functional than it was three years ago, and i fooled myself.

can you believe that in the four days i was home, we didn't have a single conversation of substance? everything--everything--looped back to god, to god, to god.

i craved an easy, equal exchange about less divine matters--perhaps, what he ate recently that make him blissful, or what job he just finished with greg at work that was especially rewarding, or what memory from his childhood still flickers in the present, one he cannot forget. perhaps i would have told him about trying (and failing) to make borscht the way mom does it, and how i secretly fear that i'll never master cooking. i might have told him that i'm terrified of the future, of all the opportunities i'll have to make the wrong choice. i might have remembered, out loud, the summer that he taught me to play soccer, and how we'd split the older kids (back when i was the youngest of the group) into teams and then play in the alley behind our old rental until it was too dark to see the rocks that stood for goal posts.

my imagination sets me up for incessant disappointment. we talked instead--in broken, awkward sentences that ended too soon or trailed off long after we'd both lost interest--about how i was getting too old to be single (i didn't tell him about vince because i think we're on the verge of breaking up), and that i need to stop messing around and enter reality. he preached about spirituality and how we have a responsibility to pray for the world, and that god has a plan to make us (meaning dad, mom, and their offspring) rulers and clergypeople (there will be no genders in heaven, so the fact that our family is 71% female now will not interfere with our claim to greatness later) and that we have to prove to god that we'll be capable of doing our jobs well. i mean, it was all so ridiculous, but i kept trying to humanize him, to see the world through his eyes and realize that he too has hopes and dreams and fears. and i couldn't.

i'm still afraid of him, intimidated by his eyes and the permanent grimace of his lips and jaw and wrinkles. his voice still scares me, that way he asks his questions--skillfully drilling past my pretense and boring deep into my center, to my trembling truths. he knows that i'm a fraud, that i say "thank god" only as a figure of speech, and that the prayers he forces out of me as about as genuine as the plastic roses mom buys from the dollar tree.

but lord, i want so terribly to love him, to get past my senseless past convictions of his never-ending faults. is it possible, do you think, that we will ever approach each other without hostility?