I've been thinking about my dad lately. It was only recently that I heard him cry. I know he as cried before, and I vaguely remember once about 15 years ago when my grandma died. But never since then or before then. The way my relationship with him has changed over the past year, rather since I visited home in August last year has been really... fruitful is not quite the word, neither is revealing. Once again, I'm stumped by the lack of appropriate words for the emotions I'm going through.
I've been talking to by T about this. All my life I've been trying not to become my dad at many levels. Now suddenly, I've started seeing him as a complex person rather than as simply the person I don't want to turn into. But today, I realized something beyond that.
For the first time, I realized how he never really expressed his love in an understandable... well what I'm saying is that he never communicated his love for us very well. I now see that he really cared about us very much, he just didn't know how to show it. Perhaps I'm being too generous, but I genuinely felt it today. When I look back on it, I recall him being very frustrated when we didn't understand his love. All we saw was his frustration and his anger resulting from it. Nothing more. At least I didn't see anything more.
Today, I felt sorry for him and connected with him somehow. He did what he thought was best for us, which wasn't always best. He always did things out of love, but when not appreciated for it, he got really angry, but may be he didn't know why he even got angry for. He tried to tell us he loved us, but saying it is very different from showing it in action.
Once again, I don't want to end up like my dad; only, this time it is for a different reason, an entirely different reason.
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