Surrendering To the Air

"In my mind, this is always you."

A couple of months ago, my dad sent me a photo of a photo of myself. A framed 8x10" snapshot he took on a film camera in 1997. I'm sitting on a big rock on the Oregon coast, wearing a too-big sweater I'd swiped from his closet years before and never returned, jeans, sneakers. 17 years old seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time. My hands are tucked into the sleeves and I'm smiling sweetly, gray skies and gray waves in the background. I can tell the framed photo is sitting in a place of prominence in my dad's house. He said, "This is my favorite picture of you. In my mind, this is always you." I can see a reflection of his face in the frame; he’s smiling at me.

Usually it really bothers me when people say I'll always be some young age in their imagination because it feels kind of evasive, like they're not willing to grapple with this older, better, stronger, more radical and complicated version of me. This so-far best and happiest version of me. Because, well, this me is harder to love than that me. Or, well, at least harder to like. So much less demure, less pliable. 

It's not a very generous way to think about people thinking about me — and more than that, it's silly. One of the weirdest things about humans is how much time we spend trying to control how other people perceive us, just eternal self-propaganda, every second of every day, when the main factor that goes into other peoples' impressions of us is all their own stuff. Their own needs and wants and hopes and dreams and insecurities and senses of humor and hobbies and self-reflections and successes and failures. How people comprehend us says way more about how they comprehend themselves than about anything we ever say or do. And anyway, other people aren't really thinking about us all that much anyway. They're working on their own self-propaganda because they're thinking about what we're thinking about them. 

It's so very rare to ever really be seen.

But what's weird is when my dad sent me that photo and said that's who I am to him — to my eye, as wobbly and naive as a baby giraffe — I felt like he was looking right into my heart. 

My senior year of high school, my dad invited me and my sister along with him on a work trip to Oregon. I jumped at the opportunity, not only because I loved to travel and because my dad was one of my favorite people, but also because he was going to be in meetings the entire week, which meant I would be free to explore all by myself. I'd already signed a basketball scholarship to a small college that none of my friends planned to attend, so it felt smart to start figuring out how to move in a new world in a new way. 

We flew into Portland and drove all the way down the state to Ashland, and there he set me free. I rented a bike from the hotel and rode all around town, stopping here and there for trinkets and snacks. I booked a whitewater rafting trip and joined two families and a guide on an all-day adventure down class five rapids that pushed us into California. I went horseback riding. I read Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon in the shadow of Mount Hood. My dad never swore but he told a colleague to go fuck himself when he made fun of me for ordering sweet tea, and for the way I pronounced it: swayt taay. He insisted we go see Twelfth Night at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We hiked down to Crater Lake and huffed and puffed our way back up. We drove all the way up the Pacific Coast Highway, stopped at Arch Rock, tried and failed to reach our arms around the Redwoods. 

We listened to Tracy Chapman, Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, and for one glorious week I didn't think about the way my mom would punish me for having fun when I got back home. I didn't think about being in love with my straight best friend who was in love with her terrible boyfriend. I didn't think about how everyone I loved best loved someone else best. I didn't think about the rumors swirling that I was gay, the way I planned to outrun the whispers at college, the fact that I'd need to find a boyfriend to do it. I hardly blinked because of the wonder of it all, and at night I lay in bed and thought about Viola begging "Conceal me what I am, and be my aid, for such disguise as haply shall become the form of my intent" and Milkman leaping at the end of Song of Solomon, about the last lesson he learned: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

I love kids, but I've never wanted any of my own. When I try to imagine what it'd be like to parent a little human being, it's like trying to imagine what it'd be like to dance on the moon, or captain a pirate ship. I can say the things I wouldn't do and I believe those things with my whole heart. I would never lay a hand on a child in any way that wasn't gentle or kind or loving. My children would never fear me. I would never make my children parent me, or force them to shoulder any of my own emotional burdens. I wouldn't make my problems and traumas their problems and traumas. I wouldn't be emotionally unpredictable, I wouldn't withhold love or affection, I wouldn't be hostile or argumentative, I wouldn't put my needs first. But in terms of raising a kid to be a healthy, happy, well-adjusted, well-resourced, resilient, compassionate, successful human being? In terms of a parenting strategy? I literally have no idea. 

When I think back on that west coast trip with my dad, I feel like I can see his own parenting strategy as clear as a window. There were so many things he couldn't do or say for so many reasons back then. He knew I was gay. He had to know. No one experienced the anguish of my closeted teenage years like he did, the tears and the confusion and the desperate, hopeless longing for a connection that perpetually eluded me. But he couldn't tell me that. Not in 1997, without any resources or representation for me to engage with. He knew I was going to suffocate if I stayed in the South forever. He knew the Baptist church was going to suck the hope out of me. He knew my mom was holding all of us back and beating all of us down. He knew I was more than some jock who was bad at school, that there was a rare and exceptional spark of creativity inside me that could burn beyond either of our wildest imaginations. He suspected, too, I think, that he’d be leaving to live his own life soon.

All of that was too heavy for me to know then, too terrifying. 

So instead he gave me a glimpse at a bigger world. 

It wasn't the first time. We toured the country's presidential history in Washington D.C. one summer. We spent a long weekend in New York City at Christmas. We did the Alamo and the River Walk in San Antonio. He took me to the Women's Final Four in Minneapolis. He shepherded us all to Disney World. I think maybe that drive up the Pacific Coast Highway is the first time he saw me seeing it too, a life beyond my childhood, a dream beyond my current line of vision, the knowledge that the world was enormous actually, and a flicker of belief that I could thrive out there in it. 

I think that's what my dad sees when he looks at that photograph. The start of me. Scraps of strength and drive and goodness. The tumultuous sky and the uneven waves and the jagged rocks and me in his sweater. The beginning of who I would become.