I’ve never heard my dad complain, I said to a friend recently.
No, that’s not quite true.
When I was young, he complained when Tom and I watched Gilligan’s Island.
“Drivel,” he’d say. “The boob tube.” Fair (prescient, actually). And there were his complaints about politics, the price of gas, traffic—the ordinary irritations of living in the world.
But what was true—what insisted on being said—was this: I’ve never heard my dad complain about anything on his own behalf.
Never—not once, not even in passing—about his own inconvenience. Not about the unfairness of others. Not about the challenges of starting and running a business, or the discomfort of the (very) rare injury or illness. No pain – physical, financial, emotional – formed into an expression of why me, or can you believe or even, this is hard. If he spoke about such things they were merely a statement of fact.
Oh—but there was once.
I remember my mom— I was a teenager at the time—telling me that Dad was sad. He’d been working a lot and wasn’t around much. He told her he felt like a stranger in his own house.
I felt punched in the gut.
Dad, sad?
I think about those early mornings before the light came up, when he would perch on the side of my bed, wanting to talk, and I would groan and roll over, wrapped tight in my teenage short-sightedness.
He wanted to change it. And he did. He can do almost anything.
And maybe that’s why I never heard him complain. He never stood still long enough.
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