By thirteen, I had the special privilege of staying up late on the weekends, watching grown-up shows like Leno and Letterman with Dad. Most of the jokes I don’t get, but the ones I do make me feel like I could stay here forever. Dad is a special kind of strong; he is the smartest person I know. Like a Clark Kent who just doesn’t see the sense in changing costumes. He effortlessly manipulates words and their meanings, twisting them into puns like balloon animals at parties. He is kind and consistent.
My love for my father is second only to my love for this house; a warm, two-story California craftsman on a quiet street. It is white with blue trim; the paint peels when I pick at it with my fingernails. Here, I never hear my parents fight. They throw us big, loud birthday barbeques that spill out onto the porch and side yard. They work themselves to the bone to give us the kind of childhood they couldn’t have.
I am laying on my belly on the old brown sofa when I hear an unfamiliar sound: short, whimpering breaths coming from somewhere behind me. I turn around and see Dad in his pajamas, hunched over the dining room table, propped up by his elbows, one hand covering his brow as he winces. I’ve never seen Dad cry before and I know I’m seeing something I shouldn’t be allowed to see. He is trying so hard to hide himself from me.
He has a pinched nerve in his spine, and the pinching sends lightning rods of pain down the length of his back. He needs surgery but that can’t happen yet, and in the meantime he relies on painkillers to get through the day.
I approach him and place my hand on a flanneled shoulder.
“It just hurts so much,” he whispers.
The meds aren’t working, and it’s just him, alone with his pain. I can see that the forcefield around the house has been penetrated and my heart breaks. What had once been a magical wonderland where no one ever suffered was now a place infected with the worst kind of suffering: the kind we can’t do anything about.
I sit with him and his unrelenting pain. In bewilderment, I watch him use his remaining strength to stifle his crying, hiding behind the shield of his shaking hands. He is more terrified of being seen by his own daughter at his most vulnerable than he is of the pain itself. I offer him the only salves I have on me: empathy, care.
“Dad, I’m so sorry…is there anything I can do for you?”
“No.”
“I’m gonna sit with you until it passes, okay?”
“Okay.”
Mistaking our home for the place where nothing bad could ever happen to us left me unable to appreciate its true magic: this was the place where the bad things could get in, too. The place where we could bring the scariest, most frightening parts of ourselves and our lives knowing that someone would be there to see us in our suffering, and tend to the wound as best they could.
The sounds of staticky late night television bumble over the steady rhythm of rain on the thin, single-pane windows behind us, and I sit with my father at the dining room table. I run the flat palm of my thirteen-year-old hand between the stiff blades of his shoulders as he cries softly into the night. Dad, in his wholeness, in his exquisite humanness, is more Super Man than Clark Kent to me in this moment. In the morning, he’ll return to breaking his back to carry the armor that keeps him safe from being seen. But for tonight it’s just us and his pain and the unspoken promises between us.