Lies I learned growing up in the suburbs

• Food comes from the grocery store. Vegetables come from cans or the freezer.
• No distance is too short to drive.
• All songs are love songs.
• Art is about being cultured, not about expression. It is done by Artists, not by the rest of us.
• Three meals a day. No more, no less.
• A meal is one meat, one starch, and one vegetable.
• Grocery shopping happens once per week, generally on the same day each week.

Assholes & Anchors

It starts here, with this email from a friend:

My best friend's father, a man who I have basically anchored my faith in humanity to and have looked up to as a second father for years grabbed his shit and abandoned his family a few weeks ago, and did so by all appearances to be with another woman. I just found out.

 In responding to him later, I found myself writing about something I've been trying to avoid thinking about for a while. So here's that.

I know this is really throwing you. It's hard when the very few people you let yourself trust are the ones who fuck up in monumental ways. When I was talking about realizing that parents are just humans, I'm sure it sounded like I was brushing this off, so I want to tell you about when I had that realization with my dad.

My brother got married in 2005, which was a few months after I came out to my family and a week before I met my first partner (who's now my best friend). My dad and I hadn't really been connecting (it would be three years before he told me what a ridiculous reaction he was having to my coming out), but he'd always been the laissez-faire, be-my-kids'-best-friend kind of dad. He'd left my mom when I was 6 and my brother was 8, so he did the buying-our-love thing and it worked pretty well.

I drove to Florida for the wedding and spent time hanging out with my dad and brother while they test drove my first car, which I'd just bought. It was a really nice time, and I felt closer to them than I had since my mom moved me and my brother to Florida 11 years earlier. The three of us went to dinner with my brother's then-fiance, and we started talking about the wedding and how things would go, and how my brother had to negotiate the fact that we're close to both of our parents but not at all to our stepparents, but neither of our parents would've wanted to be introduced as if they were a couple. Out of nowhere, my dad says that if he had to walk in with my mom, he would much rather shoot her in the face. Much as I react to your gun violence-related jokes, I told him that wasn't funny. He told me he wasn't joking. I kept trying to get him to understand that that's my mother he was talking about and that was really fucked up to say about anyone, but it was my mother and the mother of his children. He didn't care. He truly meant, 100%, that he would like to shoot my mother in the face. I'm not one for huffing away, but I left the table. Thankfully I'd driven myself, but I couldn't go back to my mom's house to deal with that kind of awfulness.

I ended up pulling into a parking lot nearby and calling T, who talked me through understanding that parents are humans. No matter how much we valorize them, they are humans, and they have the same ability to be awful, confused, scared, or childish as any other person on earth. T said he had that realization about his parents around the same time most people do -- when he was a preteen. It took me a decade longer.

Since the asshole in question in your life isn't the father you grew up with, it's even harder. You didn't have childlike awe of him -- you had young adult-like awe, which feels like it should be far more reality-based. In general, I have a hard time balancing the idea of following my bliss and the idea of honoring commitments. It sounds like this dude had the same struggle, and he eventually came down on the side that makes you wonder what the point of building relationships and honoring commitments is at all. You can't decide he's a Bad Person because that means you were duped for years. You can't decide he just made a bad decision, or even made a decision that's good for his life, because we don't like to think of ourselves as people who can hurt our loved ones so deeply, especially in the service of our own happiness.

I don't have anything smart to tell you because there's nothing smart to do. It sucks. There is nothing that you can do to make it hurt less for yourself or the people you care about, and nothing you can do to un-make his assholic decision. This is going to hurt for a while. But hurt fades, and when it does, you'll find that you're still an introspective guy who can think about how this shook your world and how you can get a hold on it again. You'll get there. I don't know you well yet, but I know that you learn from everything that happens to you.

Take care of yourself. I'll be here for you when you need me.