Patrilineation

Because he was not his father, they called
him a good father. His was a good father:
he never abandoned his kids, snuck his son
peanut M&M’s and played one-on-one
for hours on a rickety hoop that seemed
like it would snap on every dunk. His father
was often gone. Took trips to fight climate
change and poverty. He sacrificed for his
family. He sacrificed his family. He saved
others. He never missed a mortgage payment,
kept everyone comfortable, fed, laughing,
loved. Always. Well, not always. He always
had a good explanation. The son didn’t become
his father, thank God, so he tried to become
the opposite of his father. Grasped at sea water,
spent most of his 20s drowning, searching, then:
became his father. The one who’d demand
his wife never answer the door in jeans, who
needed her shoes and purse to always match,
the one who told her to stop grieving the sudden
loss of her little brother, put on a smile? Or
the one hunched over the kitchen counter
two decades later, for two hours every night,
scrubbing the tile clean? The one who never
uttered a bad word about his ex-wife?
The father who wrestled tío for the bill
he couldn’t afford or the one who collapsed
into sobs opening that photo album?

        It’s hilarious. You thought this was
        a poem about the boy’s father. Any
        version of his father. Whichever him
        I chose to reveal. That’s how I prefer
        my lies: well-curated, sterile, something
        that glimmers and inclines the jaw
        toward the floor. Leaves me spared.

                My wife once told me: Of course,
                you’re the hero in every story.
                You’re the writer. What does that
                make me?

                        Maybe I’m my father with a bigger
                        vocabulary, better alibi, when there’s
                        nothing else to see but failures.
                        Or were they?

                                I have never been a worse father
                                than when I spent every minute
                                of fourteen months with my wife
                                and two kids.

                                Each day we flirted with endings,
                                each headline more foreboding than
                                the last, and that’s when the revelation
                                arrived: I’m actually an asshole—reactive,
                                exhausted, kinda just want lemon pepper
                                wings, a tall hard cider, and a ball game
                                that won’t end.

                                        But here’s the thing: maybe that’s it.
                                        In the most unforgiving stretches, I’d walk
                                        with my son through the woods. And by
                                        walk, I mean, he was too small to walk far,
                                        so I’d cradle him. My face reflected
                                        in his bright vast wonder. At some point—
                                        every time—the sky, those epic branches,
                                        the staggering dazzle of the world would
                                        just become too much. And there, it would
                                        blossom: When I felt I had never worked
                                        so hard at anything and still gotten everything
                                        wrong, a brief flickering of grace, the collapsing
                                        sigh, finally, and mercy of his warm steady breath
                                        above my pulse.