I'm Sorry You Feel That Way Read Free

my father, shirtless and big-bellied, my father who didn’t necessarily acknowledge my date, didn’t always put the newspaper down, sometimes didn’t turn down the volume on the television or even turn his head in the boy’s direction. Once, after seeing the bologna-skin tires on one boy’s car, my father refused to allow me to go anywhere until that kid got a new set. Another boy asked me if my father was mean. Sometimes, I said. Still another asked if my father hated him. I said I didn’t know. It seemed possible, especially since I wasn’t always sure how my father felt about me.
    My father worked long, hard hours. My brothers and I grew up to be people who don’t quite know what to do with ourselves when we’re not working. When my father came home from work, he wanted his children to greet him at the door. He wanted a sheet spread across the couch so the couch stayed clean while he took a nap before supper. He wanted a supper that included meat, starch, vegetable, and a stack of sliced white bread on a saucer, a stick of soft oleo in the butter dish. He wanted to watch television in peace.
    My father watched Paul Kangas host Nightly Business Report on PBS. He watched movies about vigilantes and renegade cops, and he especially liked Chuck Norris movies or movies starring Charles Bronson or anything with Clint Eastwood as a cop or a cowboy. On Sunday afternoons, my father watched football games and he liked Kung Fu , the series where a monk named Kwai Chang Caine wandered through the American West, occasionally experiencing flashbacks in which he remembers some valuable lesson taught to him by blind Master Po. My father brought home a VHS tape called Faces of Death that showed a scene of people eating a monkey’s brains fresh out of its skull. My brothers and I weren’t allowed to watch it, but the old man told us about the people who, forks in hand, dug right in.
    I also have the impression my father liked the film Purple Rain , starring Prince, which he must have caught one of the zillion times it ran on HBO.
    Am I remembering right? Can that possibly be true?
    As far as I know, my father doesn’t read books for pleasure, but he’s always read the newspaper. He likes to look at real estate listings from other parts of the country and compare prices to where he lives. When I travel I always pick one up for him, though I almost never get it mailed, and when I eventually toss it in the recycling bin, I feel guilty. I feel like I should try harder. I should do more.
    When I was growing up, my father seemed unapproachable and unpredictable. Sometimes he got really, really furious about something—dust on top of the grandfather clock, for example, or that the pork chops my mother made for supper had been frozen, or the C that I got in algebra—and he’d yell. Or he would throw something. He might ridicule someone until that person cried. He might hit something. He might hit someone.
    It’s easy to remember the mean things my father did. The violent things, the hard, angry things. Growing up the daughter of such a man, it’s easy to fixate on those things, to hold a grudge. Letting go of the grudge is much more difficult. One of my brothers tells me Dad’s not like that anymore, the old man has really mellowed out. My other brother says he just wants everybody to be happy and get along.
    Such assholes!
     
     
     
     
     
    So when I think about my father, I try to keep in mind the other things I know about him, the things I know for sure.
    There’s this:
    My father could be a clown. He liked tongue twisters, and hearing him mangle them always made me laugh. He could say A big black bug bled black blood. He was good at She sells sea shells down by the seashore. But Seashell city tripped him up. Seashell city. Seashell city. Seashell city.
    She smells shitty!
    There’s this:
    My father and I were watching a video called, I think, Cops: Too Hot for TV. There was a sting operation involving undercover police