Him and Us Transcript

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Meg Ferrill - Him and Us

 

I wrote him a letter. I wrote my dad a letter, because at that point, our relationship had been crumbling apart. With each year, we became a little bit less us and a little bit more him and me. So, I wrote him a letter and I told him, “I'm gay. I'm not telling you this just to tell you this. I'm telling you this, because I don't know who you are anymore and you don't know who I am anymore, and what I really want is a relationship.” We hadn't always been this way. But to understand this, you got to understand. My dad's a bit of a complicated man, like most of the best people are. He grew up in an outline of a family that never fleshed out into a full story. And he's a reclusive engineer. 

 

When he remarried my stepmom, they moved off into 163 acres in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina, his little slice of heaven. But when we were young-- When I was young, I don't know about him. [chuckles] When I was young, it wasn't this distant. I was his shadow. I played the perfect doting kid. My dad was the smartest dad. He could tell you the name of any star pattern in the sky. My dad was the strongest dad, because one time, our Dodge minivan broke down at an intersection and he pushed us to safety in a parking lot. I'd factored that to be three to four tons. [audience laughter] My dad was the kindest dad, because one time he pulled over and he ran through traffic on a highway to rescue a turtle that was stranded. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I played the doting kid and he played the parent. In seventh grade, he built me a motorcycle, and he paved a figure eight in a field and he let me speed through it, top three miles. I was always a cautious kid. [audience laughter] And he taught me how to hit a bullseye from 50 feet away with a bullet or an arrow. He taught me how to properly chop and store wood. This might sound like survival training, but it was bonding because this was just something that we did. He didn't build my sister a motorcycle, he didn't shoot at targets with my stepmom and he certainly didn't teach the dog to chop wood. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I wrote him a letter and I said, “I want us back. I want this relationship back.” I mailed it to him. And a week later, my stepmom got it. She called me and she said, “This is great.” Not that I'm gay, but that I wanted a relationship. And she's like, “Your dad's not here. He'll call you the second he gets back.” A week later, he called me. In 10-second phone call, he said, “I love you, and we'll talk about this next week when you come to visit.” We never ever talked about it again. And so, once again, I acted like the kid. I took the role of the kid. I got so mad, because even though I was 23 and I was really secure that I was an adult, like even more secure than I am now, [audience laughter] because as you get older, you start to realize all the complications of being an adult [audience laughter] and it starts moving further away from you. [audience laughter] 

 

But that time, I played the kid and I played mad and angry and hurt. I vowed to myself, because I'm passive aggressive, [audience laughter] that I would never contact him again. I didn't for 11 years. We had four times of contact during those years. My sister's graduation from law school, her bridal shower. When he called to tell me his mother died and when he called to tell me he had a massive heart attack. And then, it happened. I couldn't play the kid role anymore. I'd asked my girlfriend to marry me. We started talking about all these adult things. Wedding, marriage, kids, do we want kids, should we have kids, am I going to be a good parent? All these things you think about as an adult. 

 

I started thinking about parents and I thought, is my dad going to come to the wedding? Is he going to walk me down the aisle? Is this stranger going to attend one of the most intimate things of my life? And then, I thought about roles, roles that we play. Sisters, parents, friends, mothers. Some given to us and some we seek out. I thought about my dad again. I thought maybe he was never meant to play the role of a parent. I mean, this was the 1970s. Like, that's what you did. You got married, you had kids, you bought a house, you wore bell bottoms. [audience laughter] Any one of those could be a mistake. [audience laughter] He wasn't given the freedom that I've been given to be me. 

 

And then, I thought more and I thought more about these roles and I thought about with this new lens of being an adult, how I had come out to my dad. I came out to my dad four years after I'd come out to myself. And at best, I gave him a day. And at worst, I gave him a moment to react positively to something I had taken 1,460 days to process. Was that fair? 

 

So, I invited him to my wedding. He sat next to my stepdad, who never was good at playing the stepdad role, because he was always a dad. And so, there two dads sat. I walked down the aisle on my grandfather's arm and I couldn't see anything but pride in both of their eyes. And yeah, maybe my dad was not meant to play the parent role, but maybe he's playing the best he can and maybe that's okay. And maybe because I'm okay with that, I'm a little bit closer to being an adult.