“I know we never got along.”
This was news to me. Because in front of me was my Dad. The man who had been the only father I’d known for most of my life. I mean, I remembered the time before he came along. I remembered that there was a time when he was not my dad. I remembered it because I was young enough that just a few short years of him being married to my mom was enough that it took up most of my life.
I remembered the times he took me camping. Hunting trips where I slept in the back of his beat-up and rusting Toyota pickup while he took a shot at a deer or a hog. I never even woke up, despite the thunder of his rifle. He’d been impressed by that.
I remembered all those fishing trips, including the time I caught a 100-pound alligator gar that won me first place in the Freeport Fishing Fiesta—a record I held for the next 18 years. He’d been proud of me for that.
I was never much into hunting or fishing, though, so maybe that was why.
I remembered the time he took me to go play video games at a convenience store, pumping quarters into the machine while he tried to talk to me. He told me that this wasn’t about the games, it was about us talking to each other. I didn’t really know what to say to that. I didn’t understand—I just wanted to play the games.
Maybe that was why.
I remembered the time we were fishing on a small sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico, off of Surfside Beach. My step-brother was there. We were playing in the water while my Dad and his friend cast lines out on the other side of the island. I saw a kid on a pier, across the water. I waved, and must have wandered. I was snagged by the undertow, I was pulled under, I struggled, I sank. I was drowning.
And Dad pulled me out. He put me on the beach. He made me cough up the water. And later, when my mom and my Granny and my PaPa asked me about the experience, I told them I saw Jesus, and I didn’t even think about thanking Dad for saving me.
Maybe that was why?
Years of us in the roles of father and son. I don’t remember ever fighting with him. I remember plenty of moments, in fact, where we were frank and honest and good with each other. I remember asking him once, after discovering that I used to have a different last name, after learning that I had a “real dad,” that in fact there had been another man married to my mother before Dad came along, “Why didn’t he love me?”
The story was more complicated than that. I’d learn all of it later. Most of it. I’m still not sure about some of it. But my Dad explained some of it to me, and even though I didn’t understand, I understood. Or I lived like I understood. Because he was the one who was there, and he said he loved me, and that was enough.
“I know we never got along,” he said, eventually.
Mom and my brother had already left. They were at Granny and PaPa’s house, across the pasture from us, around the corner from us. I could walk it, but I had to get my bike there. That’s why I was still there, sitting with him, in that quiet and dark house that I wouldn’t set foot in again for years.
He probably said a lot more, after that. Probably explained. The divorce wasn’t my fault—he probably said that. Sometimes two people just can’t get along. Things fall apart, or don’t work out. But he loves me, he probably said.
When I left, I rode my bike along the country road I’d ridden on all my life. I rounded the corner to the home of my grandparents, to a house I’d been to more times than I could count, had even lived in, during the time before Dad.
I remember crying. I remember pumping the pedals. I remember the words kept playing. “I know we never got along.”
Well, I didn’t know that. I hadn’t known that. It had never even crossed my mind. Because he was my Dad, even if I could remember a time before him.
So... if I was clueless, if I didn’t know that we didn’t get along, that could only mean one thing.
It was my fault. I was a bad kid. A bad son. A bad person.
There have been a lot of years between that bike ride and those tears and that echo of Dad’s voice in my head, and present day. This moment, sitting in front of this keyboard that has been my tool for living and exploring and understanding and expressing, the means by which I serve my God and His people, I’m thinking still about all of that. I’m wondering still, how it was that we never got along.
A few years ago, December of 2019, I learned that Dad was in the VA hospital in Houston. Kara and I went to visit him. We hadn’t seen him much, over the years. I hadn’t spent more than a week total with him, in over 40 years. He just wasn’t part of my life. Maybe because we’d never gotten along.
He was in bad shape. He needed tubes in his nose to breathe. He had tubes in his arms to keep him hydrated and medicated. There was pain. He was suffering.
He was smiling.
“I always worried that you would change your name,” he told me. “After you found your real dad. I was always worried you’d change it.”
“Never,” I said. I smiled back. I took his hand. “I worked too hard to make my name mean something. You know, with the books. With everything.”
He hadn’t read my books.
He told me about the lung cancer. No real surprise—he’d always been a smoker. It was just part of him, as far back as I remembered. Both my parents were smokers. My brother, too. It’s a miracle I never picked it up.
“I dream about being in the woods,” he told me. “Huntin’ and fishin’ and campin’.” Green. Calm rivers. A big catfish and a buck with antlers like the limbs of an ancient tree. The sun and the wind and the rain. He was dreaming of his heaven.
“I’m glad I got to see you again, son,” he said. “I know things weren’t always right with us.”
“Things are right,” I told him. I smiled. I squeezed his hand. I hugged him. “We’ve been good for a long time. I forgave you a long time ago.” I had no idea what I might have forgiven him for. I still don’t. What did he do? Nothing I could think of. Just those words.
It was me who needed forgiveness. It was me who walked away and never came back. It was me who spent a lifetime away from him, instead of loving him and spending time with him. We weren’t blood, but we were family.
I spent my life feeling like I had no father. But there one sat. We didn’t get along, I hear. But he thought of me as his son anyway.
And I thought of him as my dad.
There’s a certain regret. I feel it. I missed out on a lot. I learned more from his funeral than I did from living with him, for that brief time. I went through life without him, and only came back at the moment his life was ending.
He was gone just a couple of weeks after that moment in the hospital. He was done. Maybe he had just held on long enough for me to tell him that it was all ok.
That we had gotten along after all.
A NOTE AT THE END
You know, I love being a writer. It’s literally all I ever really wanted to do with my life. I don’t know that I fully understood what it would mean, to take on that mantle. But it’s turned out to mean everything to me.
My Dad never really read much of what I wrote. He wasn’t much of a reader. And I never got any words of encouragement or any praise from him for this work, which is fine. I would have appreciated it, but I didn’t really expect it. I may have needed it or even yearned for it, but I can’t say for sure whether that’s true. My life took the shape it took, without him being in it much.
But I think I owe him some gratitude and appreciation and respect, for the part he played in shaping who I am, who I became. I think I owe him some understanding, some benefit of the doubt.
When he said, “I know we never really got along,” I think he was using the only vocabulary he had to express something he was feeling but didn’t fully understand. I think he wanted to bond with me, the way he had with my little brother. I think he wanted us to be father and son, in the way he understood the roles. He wanted me to be more like him, because he couldn’t quite understand the way I was. He wasn’t much of a reader, wasn’t all that creative. His life was pretty focused on hunting and fishing, being outdoors, living a pretty rugged life. My life was focused on writing and telling stories, making things up, pretending. I liked being in the woods, too. But I didn’t like the same activities.
He thought we didn’t get along because he couldn’t find a way to understand who I was, and why I thought and behaved the way I did. I was an alien to him.
I think I understand that now.
He wasn’t trying to hurt me, even if he did. He was trying to apologize to me for what he thought of as his failure to be my dad.
I forgive him for that, even though there’s nothing to forgive.
Now it’s down to learning to forgive myself.
A CALL TO ACTION
Writing is how I make my living. At this moment in my life, it’s the only way I make my living. And that means I have to thank you—because you, the reader, are a beloved part of this with me. If you are buying my books or paying for a Substack subscription, I am very grateful. If not, I hope you’ll consider it. You can join my paid Substack, or buy one or several of my books (kevintumlinson.com/books), or just go tell your friends and family about all of this.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Thank you for sharing this, Kevin.
It parallels the relationship I had with my father.
He was a tough, hardworking blue-collar man. I started out blue-collar but left it behind as fast as I could. I respect the heck out of the blue-collar working community. They’re indispensable. They keep this country going. However, it wasn't for me. I wanted to do other things.
Although my Dad was an avid reader, he never saw the point in pursuing any sort of creative endeavor for a living.
We were not close for most of my life., as we had little in common other than he was my Dad, and I his son. It was only after I became a father myself that we grew a little closer.
Never comfortable with displaying emotion, Dad never hugged me or told me he loved me after the age of 10, but in his own way, he always showed he cared.
I learned from Dad. With my own kids, now in their 30s, I keep in touch with them, hug them and tell them I love them – always.
In 2015, I got the call that my Dad lay in a hospice bed, on pain meds for cancer. Things were happening fast. I dropped everything. My son and I hopped in my car that same day and drove from New Hampshire to Florida non-stop.
We met my Mom and my sister at the hospice. They took me to Dad’s room. He couldn’t move, couldn’t open his eyes. I took hold of his once calloused and powerful, now soft and limp, hand and held it firmly. I leaned in and told Dad I was there. He squeezed my hand to let me know he heard me.
Before I took my mother home so she could rest for a bit, I again took my father’s hand, leaned in and told him, “I love you Dad, and I am damn proud to be your son.”
It surprised me how hard he squeezed my hand, and then I noticed tears streaming from his closed eyes. I kissed his forehead and said goodbye.
At 2AM my sister called to tell us Dad was gone. It was my birthday, four days before Christmas. Dad told me he loved me in his own way.
As a boy who lost his “real dad” when I was 8 & he was 32(sudden heart attack), and then had a step dad for a few years who was an angry raging alcoholic who beat my sister and was abusive to my mom & I, this really resonated with me. My “real dad” was perfect in my memory. Fishing trips at 3 am, camping and being terrified as the bear sniffed around our camper. Watching him die and running to get a glass of water to splash in his face so he would wake up. Graduating a week after my 16th birthday and a week later telling my stepdad I didn’t appreciate him showing up drunk. Never saw him again. My mom said “we are moving to Canada to live with Grama and Grampa”. And me replying “maybe you are, but I’m not”. And suddenly facing life on life’s terms at 17. It was a sharp learning curve but I am a better man for it. My sons have grown up knowing and loving one dad, & one mom all their lives and living in the same town for all their education. My youngest son is now a great dad to three daughters(“dad, what do I do now, I’m living with four woman and I don’t know anything about women”. Relax son, no one else does either”).
Thanks so much for sharing part of your life that is reflected in your writing by the strong love relationships your protagonists have.