Kemp Powers - Bad Dad

 

 

I'm 37 years old. I wasn't really very good at much of anything in my 20s, least of all marriage. But the decision to get a divorce wasn't an easy one. For a lot of people, the legal tangle is what stops them from getting a divorce. But in my world, that wasn't really a big decision maker. It was because we had a daughter. And going through with that meant that on some level, I was going to be losing her. If not literally, then figuratively. 

 

So, when people have a really bad breakup, it's not uncommon for one parent to be left feeling, like basically their kid is better off without them. And in my case, it wasn't very hard to convince me. To put it very simply, I really, really, really sucked at being a dad. When my daughter was a small infant, I swore that she was going to break some record for falling out of bassinets, falling out of cribs, falling out of beds. It always seemed to happen when I was the one that was watching her. 

 

I was hardly ever around. I travelled so much for work. In the rare occasions that I was there, any effort that I made to try to bond with her always seemed to backfire. When she was three months old, I bought her this gangly little puppet that I named Sanchez after my favorite reggae dancehall singer. [audience laughter] She was really into Sesame Street. So, I really thought that this puppet was going to bring her a lot of joy. Instead, it just fucking terrified her. [audience laughter] And from there, things just continued to get worse. 

 

By the time when she was six months old, I decided that it was really smart for her to know that fire was dangerous, and it was something that she should stay away from. So, one day, when I was making a cup of tea, I picked her up, holding her in one hand and the hot kettle in the other, I explained very carefully that you should never, ever, ever touch hot things because they could hurt you. At least, I did in my mind. Because in reality, by the time I got to the word touch, she'd already reached out and grabbed the bottom of the steaming kettle and burned herself. 

 

So, by the time my daughter was one years old, I was already pretty much afraid to be left alone with her. She suffered from a febrile seizure at 18 months and vomited in the middle of the night and inhaled it, almost choking to death. She was in the hospital for a week. I remembered looking at her in that incubator with the tubes up her nose and the butterfly IV in her hand and thinking to myself, “Dude, you're just going to fucking get somebody killed.” 

 

And so, I didn't fight, because I didn't really think I had any right to. I didn't fight the incredibly restrictive visitation rights that I had. I didn't fight when her mother asked for my approval to relocate to Phoenix. I didn't even fight when the visitation that we did agree upon fell by the wayside, because at the end of the day, they were too busy in their life out there for her to keep up with her schedule of visitation in Los Angeles. 

 

So, my friends, they were really supportive, but they weren't really able to offer me any counsel. It was this really bizarre twist that we had all grown up in this world where divorce was just a fact of life. But suddenly, I found myself in this adult world where every single family that I knew was nuclear. It was like we were suddenly back in the 50s, only I didn't have to drink out of a separate water fountain and I didn't have to worry about getting lynched from having had a kid with a white lady. 

 

But every single person that I knew my age was either so happily married that it bordered on sickening or so relentlessly single that it bordered on parody. My friends loved me and I loved them too. But to all of them, to the friends who were married, I was basically that single guy that they could live vicariously through. To the ones who were single, I was the divorcee, with all the responsibility that proved to them that them not having any kids and not getting married had been the right decision to make. 

 

So, I basically went on with my life and got used to the routine that we had. That was all I really had. The sporadic phone calls, the grudging pickups that happened at the halfway point between Los Angeles and Phoenix in an aptly named shithole of a town called Desert Center. It was a barren place filled with more scorpions and dust devils than people. And our drives out of the desert, my daughter and I hardly ever spoke. I was pretty glad about that, because not talking meant that I never really had to explain why we were in the situation that were in. 

 

So, one day, back in March, I get this telephone call, early in the morning, and it's from my daughter. I'm pretty surprised, because she almost never calls me. When I answer, she's distraught, she's crying. She says, “Dad, a tsunami has just destroyed Japan, and it's heading for California. You need to get out of bed right now and get to a high point immediately.”

 

Now, initially, I just had to assure her that there was no chance that a tidal wave was going to wash away Koreatown anytime soon, [audience laughter] but she was still too worried to be calmed down. So, to assuage her fears, I had to talk to her. And we talked. We talked about her piano lessons. We talked about her upcoming 13th birthday. We talked about her now six-year-old brother who lived with me, who she missed dearly. And we talked about me, who she missed just as much. It turned out that she still had her puppet Sanchez, which she hung on the wall next to her bed. 

 

When my daughter's 13th birthday came around, we made a pact, going forward we would speak every Sunday at 12:00 PM, no matter where we were. And when we spoke, she would get to ask me one question. It didn't matter what the question was, I had to give her the answer. And this was something that made me a little bit nervous, because I was finally going to be held accountable for something. When the first question came, it was, what was my favorite book? After that, it was, what was my favorite movie? A week later, what was my favorite song? As the weeks turned into months, these questions revolved about the things I'd done, the places I'd been and how I was living my life. 

 

My daughter is 13 years old and ‘10” tall, but I can still pick her up and I can still hold her in my arms. We talk every week now. When I hold her, every time that I see her. And when I do, I just make sure that I keep that hot kettle just a little bit out of reach. Thank you.