Every Fourth, I Forgive You
An essay about my relationship with my father and why I choose to forgive him every Fourth of July.
I used to be convinced I was born cold-blooded. I carried this belief for most of my life because of one simple fact: I don’t miss my dad on Father’s Day.
In fourth grade, a classmate of mine confirmed my suspicions. We were spending time in class discussing our role models as part of a writing activity. In my typical eager fashion, I volunteered to share first. I had written a short paragraph about Taylor Swift and how I felt her journey to becoming a country star was inspiring me to become a writer like her. I had fallen in love with Taylor the year before and felt this natural connection to her, enough to spend my computer time at home re-reading her Wikipedia page. Once I sat down, my classmates followed with their short soliloquies about their family members. Everyone had written these simple sentences about their mother, sister, father, or grandpa. I felt like I was being hustled. When did it become cool to love your parents?
The fact that I didn’t receive this memo puzzled the boy who sat behind me.
“You don’t love your mom?” he asked curiously.
“Of course I love my mom!” I fired back. I did. I do. But when I was nine years old, I loved Taylor Swift more. Kids, right? What can you do?
“Well what about your dad?” he pushed. This was a simple answer for me.
With my eyebrows burrowed and a smug smirk on my face, I said definitively, “I hate my dad. Everyone hates their dad.”
“You’re crazy. I love my dad.”
I remember thinking I was smarter than him, that he was falling behind the rest of us. I was even concerned about what would happen if he didn’t come to his senses soon. He had to learn how to hate his dad. Everyone hated their dad.
It’s been over a decade since this interaction but it always sits at the top of my mind. It crawls out and haunts me when I’m in a classroom full of my students and all at once they’re telling me about their weekend. They tell me about what they ate, the games they played, and the arcade that Dad took them too. Yes, Dad took them to get McDonald’s. Dad took them to the zoo. Dad took them to visit grandma and grandpa. Dad bought them flowers.
I usually sit at my desk jealous. Jealous, of my third graders for having a father who is present and who clearly loves them. Then I find myself being angry about it on the way home. Other people’s Dads give them flowers, my Dad gave me his anger. Most of the time it lays around dormant. But in moments of frustration, it begins to ravage my mind.
Like when someone when honks at me on the road. You stupid idiot. Be better about checking your mirrors. Why don’t you know how to drive? You should be better at this by now. Do you know how to ridiculous you are? Do you know how embarrassing it is that you don’t know how to drive better?
Or when I didn’t get the grade I wanted on a math test. You dumb bitch, you didn’t study hard enough. This is why you deserve to fail. You don’t try hard enough. You aren’t capable of the things you want. You will never be anything better than what you are now.
It’s a feeling that frightens me. Somehow I never learned how to forgive myself for being human. Instead, the resentment I have built up inside of me turns me into an irrational nightmare. As a young girl, I was so sure that everyone could notice it. They saw me for the true terror I was. They could hear the thoughts in my head and they believed them. They saw me as my father’s daughter.
So, every third Sunday in June, I don’t miss him. But I do miss him on the Fourth of July.
I haven’t celebrated the Fourth of July in years. Not properly anyway. Since we used to live less than a five minute walk away from the beach, my family grew accustomed to all the typical Fourth of July traditions. My father barbecued while the rest of us sat inside filling ourselves with strawberries and blueberries. We counted the amount of times we heard Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A” blaring from the cars riding down the street. We camped out for the fireworks and every year like clockwork, my mother and siblings would be unimpressed. One year, their disinterest reached a point where they no longer wished to attend the spectacle. They were satisfied camping out on the street we lived on, instead of the boardwalk. This was unacceptable to me. Sure, we had a perfect view of the fireworks from our grassy spot, but this was a beach holiday! We needed to be on the beach, not just by it.
Desperate to join the masses, I pleaded to my father to take me to the beach on his own. I know now that my father only took me to the beach because it was an obligation of his. I can almost hear my mom say it!
“Mario, tu hija quiere ir a la playa”
But back then, I treated this alone time I had with my father like it was a special prize. As a child, I thought love was something that had to be earned. It was not just given. In this instance, I was over the moon. I had won over my dad’s attention enough for him to take me somewhere on my own.
The Asbury Park Boardwalk is a sight to be seen on the Fourth of July. It’s overcrowded, filled to the brim with carts and shops selling souvenirs, and full of people hogging the benches hours before the fireworks are even scheduled to begin. To pass the time, my father and I people-watched and looked for our favorite flavor of ice cream. As the spectacle approached, I broke my father down and convinced him to buy me a souvenir. In the years that followed since this first instance, it became a tradition that my dad would buy me a souvenir on the Fourth of July. Whether it be a fancy glow-stick or light-up headband, I never left the boardwalk without a toy. I kept them stored in my toy bin and never allowed my family to throw them away even after I used them to death.
I’m sure they still exist in a plastic bin in a storage closet somewhere. Full of dead batteries, these toys still hold pieces of my father’s love inside of them. Yes, the love my father had for me is forever immortalized in red glitter and peel-away white star stickers. It feels ridiculous but I hold onto these remnants of my past life so intensely. Wouldn’t you?
I loved my father. Truly. I remember recognizing as a child that I loved my father more than my mother. I was so ashamed of this fact because I thought you were meant to love your parents equally. But I couldn’t deny it. My father understood more of my English, he planted flowers for me, and if I was lucky he would let me hold his beer.
Yes, my father would let me hold his beer.
Every time my father was working on something outside, I was entrusted to hand him an unopened beer from the fridge. I never thought about drinking it or opening it. To me, it was an act that would make him happy so I did it without protest. This is how I did everything with my father. I did everything to make him happy. If he told me to take the chicken out of the fridge, I did it. If I had to clean up the living room before dinner, I did it. If I had to help him figure out how to text back his sister on his new phone, I did it. I had to be the source of his happiness.
But my dad took advantage of my devotion to him.
Before I entered the fourth grade, my mother discovered my father was cheating on her. I remember the night it happened vividly because the reveal coincided with the most anticipated event of the summer, the premiere of Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie (no, I haven’t seen it since). The fighting happened in between commercial breaks and while my siblings retreated to their corners in our small home, I stayed glued to the television screen.
I hate it here so I will go to
Lunar valleys in my mind
When they found a better planet
Only the gentle survived
I dreamed about it in the dark
The night I felt like I might die-”I Hate It Here” by Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology
The heartbreak I felt at my father’s deceptions ran deep. But unbeknownst to my family, I had played a part in his lies.
The first time my father told me about his “sister”, Lucia, I thought about how lonely she must be. While I was surrounded by the love of my siblings daily, Lucia was separated from my father and could only contact him through text. I didn’t want her to feel that way. So I helped my father text her when he asked. If he didn’t know how to say something in English, I translated it for him. I sent her love letters from my heart, hoping one day I could say these words to her in person so she wouldn’t feel so alone.
Up until that fateful night, my mind was a quiet place. I stored a secret in there from time and time. But that night it was ravaged by loud thoughts that haven’t left since.
You stupid idiot. You destroyed everything.
Following my father’s betrayal, he was essentially exiled from the family. He still had to maintain his physical presence in our life and fill us in on the components of adulthood that my mother couldn’t educate us on (driving), but the dynamic couldn’t be fixed. I didn’t know how to make sense of it all, so I buried myself into anything I could. I joined band. I bought myself a journal. I went for walks in the park. I watched TV. So much TV. I can recite lines from Full House like I wrote the script myself. I escaped into this other world where I could find proof of all the good things in the world. Uncle Jesse would never cheat on Aunt Rebecca. Danny Tanner would always love his daughters and always put them first. Everything that happened on the TV gave me the belief that I could rewrite my sad story.
“All I know about being good I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that's what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn't enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can't just screw everything up, and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so... hard. When you're a kid, you convince yourself that maybe the grand gesture could be enough. That even though your parents aren't what you need them to be, over and over and *over* again, at any moment they might surprise you with something... wonderful.
. . .Even now, I find myself waiting.”
-Bojack Horseman, Free Churro, episode six of season five.
I don’t think my father remembers our trips to the boardwalk on the Fourth of July. I think he struggles to recognize me because I look at him with an indifference. I am not the eight-year-old in the glitter red headband anymore. Instead, I am a grown woman who longs to return to the beach, a place I haven’t truly been to since he stopped teaching me to love it.
Believe me, I resent the fact that my father made me damaged goods. It frustrates me that I will never know a version of myself who feels confident in love. Instead it’s hard for me to accept a man’s kindness as genuine. I judge men harshly and resent them even more. I look for their flaws and look out for actions that prove my doubts to be correct. But that is no way to love. I’ve learned that. I can’t love someone and be constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. I refuse to let my father’s cycle of destruction ruin me for the rest of my life. I want to believe that someone can love me because I’m thoughtful and authentic. True love isn’t deceitful. True love doesn’t expire.
Above all logic, I still love my father to this day. But he is the last person I will ever allow to treat me that way, because despite all the thoughts he’s plagued me with, I still love myself.
Today, I forgive the young girl who had kept her pain locked inside so she didn’t add to the confusion. She is not an idiot. She did not destroy anything. She loved her father and there was no fault in that.
Every Fourth, I forgive her.
Hello my dear friends! Thank you for reading this post and for bearing with me during my month-long absence. I hope this essay is enough for you to forgive me for being gone for so long.
I’m hoping to write more now that summer is in full swing.
Additionally, while this essay covered a heavier topic, those moving forward will hopefully be more lighthearted and fun. Thank you again!
Love,
Arly <3