Bonus Father's Day Edition: In Defense of Regifting a Family Pet
A Family Secret, and a Chance to Start Again
Greetings RPR Readers,
In the spirit of everybody’s favorite commercially mandated holiday, I’m offering up a little Father’s Day essay that I’ve had tucked away for years. It’s from the heart — but there are also a few funny moments.
I hope you enjoy the detour from the regular content of this newsletter, and we’ll return to the disaster stories at the end of the month with a tale of a man who survived multiple floods in Vermont thanks to the help of a very interesting cast of characters.
Of all Father’s Days I spent with my dad, I only got the gift part right once. For years, the rushed, thoughtless cycle of tacky mugs, hideous Nineties’ sweaters and god-awful ties I presented my father with each June highlighted just how little I knew about the man I was celebrating.
Then, when I hit 21 a few years after the turn of the century, something shifted in me. Right before my sister and I headed over to dad’s place for Father’s Day, I looked down at the Stargate DVD with the scratched-off remnants of the red bargain bin sticker still visible and the funky tie we picked out together, and I knew we had to do better.
Temporary solution
"We can't show up with just this," I said to my sister. Nearby, our cat Hillary licked at her raised paw furiously, creating a rapid head-nodding motion that appeared to signal her passionate agreement.
When my parents first separated, it was 1999 and I was in high school. Our dad moved into an apartment a few miles from our family home; the move was supposed to be temporary.
"We're just working through something, and we need a little space," our mom told my sister and me. She then placed a bottle of champagne in the fridge and waited patiently for that "something" to resolve itself so her husband could move back in and she could open the reunion bubbly. About a year into the separation, my sister discovered a shoebox full of emails and letters from a man with whom our dad was having an affair, and all hopes of a reunion were dashed. As soon as my mom read the letters, she grabbed the champagne and downed the entire bottle as if it were Gatorade and she had just finished a marathon.
We confronted our dad about the shoebox, but to our surprise, he denied everything — the affair, his sexuality, everything. Rather than push the issue any further, my sister and I chose a road traveled by countless teens navigating the rocky emotional terrain of their parents’ journey through divorce: We picked a side. From the moment we left our dad’s apartment after the confrontation, we were team mom all the way. It wasn’t a conscious decision but looking back it was easy to see the shoebox incident as a pivotal moment in our relationship. It was as though we’d hit a fork in the road. Go left — a road no doubt filled with pain, anger and lots of uncomfortable conversations — and my sister and I would eventually return to the relationship we had with our dad pre-separation or maybe an even stronger one. We opted to go right.
Initially, we tried to maintain some degree of balance and fairness between the time we spent between parents. I’d occasionally pop over to my dad’s apartment for random midweek visits. “My home is your home,” he told me every time I left his place during those early stopovers. Except dad’s place never felt like home. It felt like an obligation. The infrequent visits, which only lasted an hour or less, were the bare minimum needed to keep our floundering relationship from drifting into estrangement territory.
Mandatory visits
Little by little, the visits dwindled until eventually my sister and I rarely saw our dad outside of the major holidays — and Father’s Day. That Sunday in June always seemed to sneak up on my sister and me and leave us scrambling to pick out some gift for our dad that showed how, despite everything that had come between us, we still loved him. We never quite succeeded, at least partly because we no longer knew the man we were shopping for. What was he listening to these days? What was he reading? Did he even know what a Foreman Grill was? Like the DVD and funky tie, our gifts were painfully random and uninspired, as though they were meant for a complete stranger. But that’s exactly what our father was to us then. During our stops, the conversation focused almost exclusively on my sister and me — What’s new? How was school? Were Hillary and Maddie (our Rottweiler) being taken care of? Whenever we asked him a simple question about his life, dad would mumble something about being “busy with work,” before retreating to the kitchen and making a show of clearing or preparing dishes.
Hindsight hurts
“If only your father would’ve leveled with me, with all of us, things could’ve gone so much differently,” our mom said, years after the divorce papers were signed and the anger over her husband’s betrayal had slowly begun to fade.
I never doubted my mom’s sincerity, but I wasn’t so sure she was right. The longer our dad stayed silent about the confrontation at his apartment, the more I understood his desperate need to keep his secret at all costs. I remembered the jokes and comments friends’ fathers would make about the kids on my sports teams who ran a little funny or spoke with a bit of a lisp, or the way my friends and I would casually use the phrases “that’s so gay” or “you’re so gay” to describe any action that contained even a hint of earnestness or vulnerability.
As an 18-year-old straight male with some warped ideas about masculinity and several friends who could safely be categorized as homophobic, I was secretly glad my dad decided to keep his secret.
I’ve spent nearly two decades trying to make up for my initial reaction, but that doesn’t change that fact that I was ashamed to discover my dad was gay. Years later, when I held dad’s hand as he lay dying of an HIV-related form of cancer, I wasn’t completely shocked to learn how worried he’d been to tell me his three-letter diagnosis, a disease that for years had been known as the “gay plague.”
“What about Hillary?” my sister asked in response to my comment about the subpar Father’s Day presents.
“Our cat?” I answered, not following.
“We should give him Hillary,” my sister said. At first, all I could do was laugh at the absurdity of giving the cat our dad had initially given to us back to him as a Father’s Day present. But my sister was serious, and the more I thought about it, the better her regifting plan sounded for both dad and Hillary.
A better home
The cat had gotten a raw deal in the divorce, too. My dad may have lost his children, his house and the friends he shared with his ex-wife, but at least he could care for himself. Hillary lost her primary caregiver when dad left. The fact that she resided with us in the first place was a testament to his negotiation skills and his love of animals. One of the few stories dad told of his bitter, fatherless childhood in a dying Pennsylvania coal town involved a stray brown Labrador he’d convinced his mom to take in.
“Every single day when I stepped off that school bus, Brownie would be waiting right there at my stop,” he said. Growing up, my dad brought home a small shelter’s worth of dogs and cats to keep him company. Unlike the humans in his life, he could trust these creatures to love him unconditionally.
Our mom, on the other hand, never much cared for pets. After my sister went to college, the cat got about as much attention as the Buns of Steel workout video she’d purchased during her brief fitness craze circa April 1993. It’s not that our mom hated Hillary, but like the regular homeless folks she passed on her way to her Philadelphia office each morning, she just failed to notice her a lot of the time.
“What did you get for your father?” mom asked as we were leaving. I could see Hillary squirming in my sister’s purse. I mumbled something about a funky tie and pushed my sister out the door.
Cat’s Out of the Bag … Literally
Dad heard Hillary, who began meowing pathetically the minute we entered his apartment, before he saw her.
“What the hell is in …”
But before he could finish, his scrappy former cat squeezed through an opening in my sister’s giant purse, leapt out and began exploring her new environment. She quickly made herself comfortable and started up with the furious paw-licking, head-nodding routine, as if to say, “Yeah, this place will do quite nicely.”
“Happy Father’s Day!” we said in unison.
“Your mother would kill me if she knew I had the cat,” dad said.
“She’ll never find out. I promise we’ll never say a word about this,” I said. The last thing our family needed was another secret, but something about this one felt pure, like we were giving dad back a part of his life that was taken away and offering him hope that other key pieces could be restored as well.
“Mom probably won’t even notice she’s gone,” Jess said.
He laughed at this. It was the first genuine laugh I’d heard from him in a long time. After lunch, we cleared the dishes and relocated to the living room. For the first time since the divorce, we weren’t obsessively checking our watches or working out vague excuses to rush out the door.
“Do you remember when we brought Hillary home from the SPCA?” Dad asked us during that Father’s Day visit.
“Kennel Cough, right?” I said.
“Yep. It was touch and go for a while there,” dad said with Hillary sitting contentedly on his lap, just as she had back at our family home in a previous life. “I really didn’t think she was gonna make it through that.”
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Thanks!
Jared
Another good article Jared...keep on writing I love to read your articles 🤗😘🩵