It was a crunchy, deep cough that could only lead one’s imagination to the thick, black molasses lying in the chambers of his lungs. After at least forty years of smoke and nicotine, this cough happened so frequently that the energy used to cover his mouth was taken by others' silent and indefinite concern. My dad was addicted to not taking care of himself, and at five years old I looked at him and saw a man who had given up. I’m sure he didn’t believe he had, but it was the pain I felt having to love a man I knew was going to die on his own accord. A man who was either so stubborn or so far in addiction that it didn’t matter how many times a night I cried to God making sure I’d wake up the next day to see him laughing and joking in the kitchen instead of in Heaven, he wasn’t going to change. 

Still, I’d lay in in the dead of for sometimes hours repeating over and over “please make sure 

On those nights, I’d lie restlessly, staring at the ceiling of my Fairy Garden Princess room, trying desperately to deal with the way my dad represented both fear and love of humanity. I’ve always been afraid to ask him about certain parts of his life, his demure trying hard to hide a dormant volcano. Between biblical rants, heartbreaks, laughter, and storytelling, the backseat of my car became a crucible of our relationship, and by seventeen the road gave me every bit of childhood he was willing to share. In the chill of St. Louis's October 1957, my Dad was born to Dale and Marline Dodson, who on the outside was a seemingly cookie-cutter version of a white suburban family. They had four other children, Dug, Denise, Dan, and Dale, and spent many nights eating TV dinners and hamburger helper, probably why now he so weirdly craves Beanie-Weenies much more than anyone should. 

When he was really little, most nights my Dad would sleepwalk, once sleepwalking all the way into the neighbor's yard, the old cranky man running out of his front door with a pistol at two in the morning to find a seven-year-old kid dazed on his porch. My grandma, who my brother and I called Mema Marlene, then decided to tie him down to the bed every night out of fear that the neighbors’ threat of “shooting him up the next time as if he were just a deer on a hunting trip” would come true. I don’t remember her that well, as she always had a glaze in her eye representative of dementia slowly claiming her brain, but in a time where women always had the lower hand, Dad's stories claim her as the most respectable, caring, and loving badass there was. 

See, a woman of five children is a woman who gets things done. A woman who worries crazily about her kids and at the same time chucks her shoes at them because she can’t be bothered by the inconvenience of “talking it out” every time they do something wrong. On one hand, it always worried me how definitively my dad scoffs at today’s sensitivity, claiming that the leather belt his parents used on him and his siblings or the countless shoes my grandma threw at them were effective ways to raise children. On the other hand, there was dark humor taught to me in looking around my grandparents' quaint house until stumbling upon a belt, proudly hanging on the wall as a mere reminder of what happened if you were naughty. It is interesting to realize now, how much of my Dad’s childhood was exponentially harsher than mine. It makes me wonder if my present is worse because the “softness” makes me more susceptible to mental illness, or if my dad's past was worse because the emotional intolerance led to insufferable loneliness in adulthood.

While my cousins were in their thirties by the time I turned eight, my Dad’s childhood was practically a sequel to The Sandlot. On hot summer days, he and his cousins would take washing machine drums and roll inside them down the road, clanking and clacking until either bored or too bruised to continue. When this was the case, they would take a break by sitting down in bushes and throwing car parts into the road, the poor passerby having mini-heart attacks as their precious cars looked to be falling apart. On slow days the children, laughing until their bellies felt sick, would forget all about the need for invisibility, resulting in angry neighbors chasing them down the street, sometimes for hours, and sometimes separating them or following them into the woods until the movie-worthy event would leave someone with stitches. 

In 1999 my mom bought a house, nice medium-sized, two stories, lots of bedrooms, the backyard lined with willow trees and evergreens. In 2001 her husband Kevin moved in with her. I mean, maybe it was late 1999 or maybe it was 2000 or something, but all I really know about him is through records I’ve found on the internet. My mom and Kevin got divorced in 2003 I think, and that’s when my dad met her at a divorce group held by their church. That’s how I start explaining it anyway, when my friends ask why there are two houses on my lot. I say, “My dad was living in his car, and my mom was bored I guess, so she said: “if I build you a house next to mine, will you pay the rent?”. I actually don’t know why she built a house next to hers, but I always liked that version.

Anyway, that's the house where my dad keeps the stitches he got as a kid. I used to think this was weird, like why would someone keep a bloody stitch from when they were eight? But, where I have cameras and pictures, my dad has stitches, and for every stitch, there is a story. After seeing the flying Wallendas at age thirteen my dad decided he wanted to tightrope. He honestly got quite good at it, and for a while truly thought he’d run away with the circus until trying to impress a girl made him fall off and break his arm. And speaking of girls, standing in the middle of their suburban St. Lucius street that same year was a girlfriend of his, who proudly broke his nose after asking her to because she’d “punch like a girl.”

I guess all the breaks, bruises, and cuts caught up with him at just the right time, because as they all started to heal he packed up his things and moved down to Cary, North Carolina. When my dad talks about his past, he just chuckles with a kind of whole-hearted lovingness of a memory, so all I know about his move is his lighthearted belittling of a tiny him who dragged outrageous proportions of snow gear to NC as if he were actually moving to Maine. Between the lines, though, North Carolina is where his stitches stories just...stop. I never really looked too far into it, but it makes me sort of sad. Though I’m sure every doctor's visit was painful, there is something so heartbreaking about losing a symbol, the cultivation of childhood. Sure, every now and then a conversation would bring up stories about stupid teenage stuff, but it lost its innocence. 

My dad went to high school in the 70s, so maybe another reason I don’t have as many stories is that rolling down the grass in a washing machine drum turned into rolling grass into a- well you get the point. Still, I can’t help but wonder what happened in those teenage and early adulthood years. Truly, I know close to nothing about my dad between ages sixteen to forty-six. It comes through in Bible verses taught to me and my brother, or when he points to places he’s lived while we drive down the road. From the time I could speak I knew of Job, a man my dad says lost everything, his family, his money, his pride. Job was smart, though, and knew the devil was only testing his loyalty to God. I never understood my dad when he told the part of the story that said God gave Job everything back, and better. How could one lose their family and then get another one and claim that they are “Better?” Still, something in me hopes my dad thinks he’s like Job, that my brother, mom and I are his “better.”

I’m not sure why it bothers me so much, that I know close to nothing about his other family. He had kids about 30 years ago, though he rarely mentions them. I don’t know when he last talked to them, or if he still does. I don’t know why they stopped talking or if I want to know. I learned their names through the white pages and figured out he spent most of his life in two jobs just to feed them. I sit wondering if the way my dad talks to me is the way he talked to Tory, or Pam, or Micheal. Did he have a different nickname for them every time they spoke? Was he hard on Micheal like he is on my brother? Did his wife jokingly nag at him for making up words like “bremember” or “aminal” because he thought it was funny to teach his toddlers the wrong way to say things? And honestly, do they even exist? That part is the most inconceivable to me.

A few months ago I couldn’t sleep, so I went into a two a.m. rabbit hole that stranded me on a Twitter page for an elementary school in Seattle. Staring back at me was Tory Dodson, a 36-year-old music teacher, and my dad's daughter. No contact info. No email address. Just a smiling girl playing the piano with the caption, “Teacher of the Year”. And I wanted to ask her a question, just to see if I would be the one to answer back. Just to see how much of her was me and how much of my dad was her. And if she loved my dad, and if my dad deserved to be loved as much as I love him now. I tried to write a song the next day about it, I thought about sending it to her through an email, or a text. But how do I do that? How do I say, “you don’t know me but, I know you”? How do I say, “I am your dad's daughter”? And I wondered if she is dangerous, or if it is for some reason illegal for me to speak to her, or if I’d hurt my dad by doing so. 

At the same time, I saw a girl through the screen who looked like a scared puppy. Like someone who did not deserve to have no contact with her father for twenty years. And if he could do it to her, could he do it to me? My dad can’t hear very well, so sometimes when his phone rings I’ll tell him it’s spam, and he gets a shocked, almost heartbroken look on his face and will ask, “Pam? Did you say, Pam?” And I know who he’s talking about, but I never ask. To be fair, he has some stories about his other family. I know that Tory played music with him at the church and that she was a violinist, probably because my grandma was. I know that once my dad tried to make her a violin stand out of this really exotic wood that he ended up being allergic to, and spent the next month popping boils of orange skin that covered his top to bottom.

My brother and I have called my dad by his first name nearily our entire life. I never knew why, we just did. Then one day about two years ago, my mom called me and my brother down to the living room “to talk”. The air was thick and the sun had just set, which made everything seem inappropriately dim. Anyway, something one should know about my mom is that she waits for nothing. Not a man, not her crippled, type B child in the grocery store, not for the “picture perfect” moment to have children, and definitely not for the right time to tell them they adopted their dad. That’s how she told us it happened. That as soon as she got divorced, my mom decided to get kids. My mother is classy, of course, so she went to a lab for that, but it disclosed that the only thing bonding me, my brother, and my dad was a simple fact that he decided to raise us and we decided to let him. I suppose in our hearts we always knew that. Maybe that’s why we called him by his first name, but who knows. 

It just puzzles me, that my dad and I share absolutely no genetics, and yet me and Tory are almost identical in interest. I make music, she teaches it. I’m disabled, so is she. And I think, if she knew me, would she also wonder why that is? Would she subconsciously try and find ways I was less of his daughter than her because we were so similar? She must have some resentment towards me, or at least I hope she does, because it would mean at least he wasn’t a bad father, and at least he didn’t hurt her or Micheal or Pam. Yet, there is a part of my dad that is so different than any other. A part that I obsess over figuring out. Was it the nights spent sleeping in the cold car, without his family, without money or pride? Was it the harshness of a childhood that forgot to teach little boys how to express emotions so they grew up instead, bearing aches and pains until they came out in angry volcanic bursts? Maybe that part of him was something only me and my brother experienced, as it only really picked up when he felt lost, newly retired from a job he worked at for forty-five years. I guess my fear is that it’s probably a combination of all of them and that me, my brother, Micheal, Tory, and Pam have just been left with the physiological ruins of someone who deals with heartbrokenness through uncontrollable rage. 

It was a sickening routine, the nights before and mornings leading up to every day of middle school. My swirling brain would fill the night sky with vivid scenarios of waking up the next day to find my dad no longer breathing. The anxiety that filled every heavy breath, concerning cough, and obvious sign of sugar addiction (which I definitely picked apart way too much), left me temporarily in elementary school, but since his retirement allowed him to take me and my brother to school every day, I think the wall of resentment I had grown towards him and his newly found anger motivated guilt-filled anxiety about him dying before I could forgive and whole-heartedly love him again.

I go through what happened those three years over and over in my head. I have friends whose fathers have left them completely,  who were never there for them or have physically abused them and or constantly told them how worthless they are. My dad wasn’t like that. He was just sad and didn’t know what else to do except be really, really angry about it, to everyone. And it was so stark, that it was like meeting someone I’ve never in my life seen before. One morning, my mom and I sat across from the person I thought was my dad, asking him about the day to come. And he looked back with lifeless eyes, and I began to cry. I’m not sure what was so different about him, it just was.

When I was younger, my dad and I would drive around making up songs. He would start a verse and I would end it, our jingles sometimes lasting ten or twenty minutes long. We also had this game where he’d sing doodle bop in different lengths and patterns, and no matter how hard it got I could always repeat back exactly what he said. Those were times I was afraid he’d die because I loved him so much. Because he was my best friend in the entire world and I couldn’t let his inability to take care of himself ruin that. It is hard to explain how colorful a single person can make life seem, and how much that color can radiate off of them and onto you. That’s what a dad should be, someone who radiates color into one's life. But, driving down the road, singing and laughing the colors of the rainbow, that just turned into a world of silent whites and solemn greys.

 It was always a surprise, what he’d get angry about every morning. Sometimes it was the way my brother and I said something. Maybe we just didn’t use the right combination of words or maybe our answers to his questions weren’t fast enough. I learned to walk on eggshells and began making lists of what I couldn’t talk about. I’d mimic his thoughts and subconsciously act like a younger version of myself to make him think I was undeserving of his temper tantrums. It just didn’t make sense, how suddenly the color in my life was making me leave for the morning in tears from anger so loud or worse so silent that it felt like the car was shaking. And it was like the entire world and concept of my dad was falling and I could do nothing about it because I was a child, and children aren’t meant to talk back. In the static, I made up a thousand different scenarios where I’d finally scream to my dad or brother, who bless his heart didn’t know when to stop talking. Though, the morning trees always softened the blow of knowing that kind of power was unfathomable at the time, the power that might let me finally just yell “SHUT UP.”

Music, politics, school, emotions, anxiety, depression, food, cigarettes, homework, friends, life, theater, were all subconsciously banned from the conversations I could have with him, and as the months passed that list became longer and longer. One day in eighth grade I began asking my teacher for a pencil when startled, an uprising of emotion broke to the surface and one by one tears rolled down my cheeks. Embarrassed and confused, the next two years were spent unknowingly terrified of talking to adults, and especially to my dad. I think the saddest part is that I knew he hated who he had become. I’d hear him pray about it while smoking a cigarette, or when he thought no one could hear him. I used to blame it on the radio he listened to, because Sean Hannity telling the world that anything that isn’t far-right approved was going to kill it, probably isn’t a good influence on anyone. 

Regardless of how it happened, I always thought It must be a lonely world thinking the only person you can cry to instead of just yell at is God, because the almighty can do everything except talk back. I wonder what my life would be like if he cried instead of yelled. Maybe it would make me afraid of the world, but maybe at least it wouldn’t have made me afraid of him. I’ve dissected and investigated every known part of my dad's life, just to find what caused all the lava. The need to know his kids and make sure they are alright. The need to know they knew him before he became a volcano. But you get mad, you resent, you exaggerate, you cry and scream and ask why you can’t just stop being anxious about things that clearly shouldn’t make you anxious. And then you start to heal, and so does the person that hurt you. 

And as time goes on, the nights spent holding onto a pillow instead of my parents, the inability to trust people when I need to, it fades. Not in a way that it just disappears, because I think subconsciously the need to protect myself or mold myself into things I’m not or whatever other messed up stuff I do, it won’t ever go away. But, instead in the way my dad tells his stories. Laughing about times he almost died, smiling when he sees stitches. In the way I hope Tory and Micheal and Pam feel about the person who raised them, who they haven’t talked to in twmenty years. That after a few years of healing, there isn’t resentment or happiness or a thankfulness etheir, there's just acceptance. And not just of the good or the bad, of all of it. 

Because what else can you do? What else can I do when even in writing down so much of what I know about my dad, my opinion on him is not any more clear? It’s just a conglomeration of memories and theories and ways we interact and ways he's helped and hurt me. And I’ve hardly touched on the good stuff. How we literally, and I am not joking, pretend fart to say I love you. How when I come out of surgery, all tangled in wires and stitches and hurting in my back or head or heart or wherever I’ve been cut open, he talks to my foot to make sure it knows that the rest of my body will soon be ok again. Every chocolate bandaid and weird bluegrass song he’s given to me, and how when I was really little we’d combine and make up and turn around words. How when we go to the store he always asks me if I brought any money and I always tell him that I put it in his wallet, or that my money is green so he should have some, just to make the cashier laugh. 

How when standing in line places he taps the back of my shoulder and says “that lady over there did it”. And when we play punch buggy I’m allowed to punch him but he’s never allowed to punch me. How I know when I’m wearing a flowery dress, he will always ask me about the field of flowers I feel in. He has taught me how to be selfless, even when people are not in return. And how to be kind to strangers, where he buys candy for my doctors and cashiers and stays up until three in the morning making ice cream for peoples birthdays. And in time he began catching himself in volcanic action, and made double sure to apologize, which has given me the strength to apologize when I feel I’ve done something wrong. He loves people whole heartedly, even when he doesn’t agree with them, and now I try to as well. In a two-dimensional world, how do I take that into consideration when determining what my dad is? When trying to figure out how he could be the source of all my hate and love of humanity? Is it fair to view him solely off of his mistakes, or is it even possible to see him for everything he is at all?

My dad likes to put the car windows down when we drive places. Probably out of habit so that the smoke from his cigarette doesn’t go into the car, but I always like how the wind feels, even if it messes up my hair. Once I was driving down to the beach with him, the wind blowing through my hair, and I began seeing, what seemed like fields filled with thousands of wheat patches. Patches that bend and fly and grow because the sun beats, and the rain falls, and the wind blows. The wind and sun and rain don’t mean to hurt or help the wheat grow, they just do. And the wheat isn’t mad at them, it doesn’t have any resentment or any kind of view about its relationship with the sun, wind, and rain, it just is. And it finally hit me, that my dad is the way he is because the wind blows. And so am I, and so are you. And that people help each other and hurt each other just by existing, just by growing up and reacting and protecting and learning. There is no real reason for that, nothing that is comprehensible anyway. And it still hurts, and I still cry and scream and love and laugh and learn. But I look out the window, and I feel the wind, and at least I know that’s why.