I found you in 1996 and I lost you in 2006. It was your fault, it was my fault, it was everyone’s fault and no one’s fault. None of it matters anymore, except that all of it matters still. Because without that, with none of it, we wouldn’t have any of this.

Today you’ll celebrate your 11th fathers day with your children. We’re not giving you ties and we didn’t make you clay mugs and we won’t cook you breakfast in bed. What we’re giving you is us. We’re taking you away from the things of man, and we’re just going to be with you. We’re leaving the messages on the phone and the dishes still piled up in the sink and the sand that is all over the goddamn laundry room floor; we’re running away from all of it to remember each other. To remember you. To celebrate you.

But I’m not just celebrating you, and maybe that’s wrong on the day Hallmark tells us should be all about you, but you think I can write better than Hallmark so for today, we’ll make our own rules. Today I’m celebrating that everything we have was torn asunder, that it was stripped down to the studs and once we could see everything under the surface, once we really knew what we were up against, we started laying new bricks, one by one, together.

It was two years ago on Father’s Day that we laid that first brick.  It was two years ago on Father’s Day that we chose to accept it all without condition, without judgement, for all that it was and everything it wasn’t, and just build it back up.  We gave each other all that we knew, which turned out to be a hell of a lot less than we thought, and together we’ve built new walls and figured out how to make this house stand.

You’re still very much this alien thing to me, and our relationship floats through the universe like a satellite in orbit, occasionally going way out there, out of our orbit, but always coming back in again. I can see that satellite every time feel a little rain and look up to realize that there are still so many holes in the roof of us yet to be patched.  I think we need to be able to see it. I think we need that rain to remind us that we have to keep working. I think we need that rain to force us to look up, to remember that sometimes it goes and sometimes it comes and we don’t have it all figured out and that we don’t have to.  That you can be an alien, and I can be an alien, and it will still be beautiful rain.

A few weeks ago, my favorite blog-crush, NukeDad, wrote a post about his father’s death on, you guessed it, Father’s Day. Which then prompted me to blather on about something or the other. And that should have ended it, but it didn’t. You see, I just keep thinking about that post, and how beautiful and dang-gum touching it was, and even though I knew NukeDad was all kinds of awesome and funny, I was almost down-right shocked at how perfectly he pulled off heart-wrenching. And so I, naturally, nominated him for Petroville and Suburban Turmoil’s June Perfect Post. He’s actually the first person I’ve nominated, and I couldn’t be more happy about that.

A few more weeks ago, Jeremy at Discovering Dad.net asked me to come up with a question to ask a bunch of guys I don’t really know. But it had to be a sincere, marriage-based question. I thought and thought and thought and in the end, there was only one thing I wanted an answer to. I am totally embarrassed to say click here, but I’m saying it. Click here. And please don’t think less of me. It was an honest question.

It appears that Kelley at MagnetoBoldToo! (it’s a font, kids) is the winner of the contest that Hubs has asked me to never mention again. So I won’t, but she won, and now I get her ADDRESS. I love contests, man,

Kindly featured on Schmutzie’s Five Star Friday.

I had this whole Father’s Day thing written. I was going to title it Mother Fuckers, in the most literal sense of course, and it had an accompanying soundtrack. It. Was. Hysterical.

And then, what should pop into my reader but NukeDad’s tear-jerking, touching, beautiful eulogy to his father. Seriously, if you don’t read Nuclear Warhead Family, just stop reading this right now and go. It’s people like him that make me thank sweet little baby Jesus every day for the internetowebosphere. Go. I’ll wait….

Back? Okay. Rather than write my standard thesis-style comment in his box, I thought I’d just go delete some crappy old post no one will ever read in my archives, keeping me on track for the big 1K, and tell you a little story about dads.

I have a father. He is alive. That is all. He’s irrelevant. I have another father, though he’d never call himself that in public and I would never dare publicly take that sort of liberty with him or our relationship, but secretly, I love him with all the love I never got to give my own father, and secretly, I think he knows that.

There’s this one other guy, though.

My husband’s parents divorced when he was 3. Shortly thereafter, my oldest sister in law, Jen, went to live with her dad and the other two stayed with their mom. Neither group had much contact with the other parent after the split, and when my husband was a sophomore in Princeton (maybe a junior) his father died. It was shockingly unexpected, and the two who didn’t have a relationship with him were left with wounds that, I dare say, will never heal. The one that lived with him, Jen, was devastated. He died on the 16th of September and his funeral was held on her birthday, the 21st. Her baby was merely 21 months old. Her father was her only constant, and he was gone.

I met my husband shortly thereafter.

I have my father in law’s baby book, his high school diploma, his old drivers licenses, his treasured WWII revolver, and a box of pictures. I know that my husband resembles him, and that my oldest son mirrors him and shares his middle name. What I don’t know it the gait of his walk or the smell of his cologne. I’ve never heard his voice, and I don’t think there are any videos of him, so I am guessing I never will. I’ve never met one person from his side of the family, either, so I don’t know any of the mannerisms they may share.

I’ve spent many years staring into his eyes on worn, aging photographs, looking for some link to my present in his past. I have always felt robbed of his presence. I wish my husband could have had the chance to hand his son over to his father, to share that moment that could have mended a broken past.

Alas, it is not to be. But still, I’ve thought of him a lot.

One night, shortly after our first child was born, I lay sleeping in bed, dreaming in bright loud colors. I felt a rustle at the foot of my bed and looked to see my father in law sitting on the far right corner of my bed, by my covered feet. He wore a red polo shirt and dark shorts, and we spoke for a while. We chatted about the baby, about his son, about our coming wedding. Not earth-shattering discourse, mind you; we were merely catching up. He asked me a few specific-ish questions, and then patted my feet tucked under the covers, and said goodbye.

I woke up.

It was such a clear, loud, real dream that it took me several minutes to come out of it. I could still feel the weight of him on my bed, and my feet were still warm from his touch. Weird.

I got out of bed, brewed some coffee, searched everywhere for my cigarettes that I’d left *right there* the night before, and then gave up and called Jen.

“Dude,” I said, “I just had the weirdest dream.” She asked me to tell her about it, and I did. I began, and she interrupted me with the occasional “Uh huh” then started asking “Did he say this?” or “Did he do that?”. Well, yeah, he totally did. Weird. “Was he wearing a red polo?” Um, what did you just say?

Then she asked, “And where are your cigarettes now?” What? They’re missing. I’m ditsy. She giggled.

“Oh, Sissy,” she said, (she calls me sissy, and I think it’s cute. Shut up) “Oh Sissy, he comes to me all the time. He does all of those things, too. Just like that. And then he steals my cigarettes. Dad hates smokers.”

*choke*

I don’t believe in the afterlife. I don’t believe in god or the devil or ghosts or any of that jazz. But what I do know is that every now and then, when I need it, when there’s a new grandchild, or when my husband and I are in a difficult place, that my father in law comes and sits on the end of my bed and chats with me wearing his red polo and his beautiful smile and I feel safe and warm and accepted and happy and loved. And protected. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened just enough that I’ve come to wait for him, this man I’ve never met, my father who never got to be that to me or to his son.

He’s making up for lost time the only way he can. And I love him for that. But really, that jerk had better stop stealing my smokes.