The Summer I Stopped Being Angry at My Father
There's a photograph somewhere in my mother's house of my father and me standing at the edge of a lake in upstate South Carolina. I'm maybe nine years old. He has his hand on my shoulder, and we're both squinting into the sun. Neither of us is smiling, exactly, but we don't look unhappy. We look like two people trying to figure out how to be in the same frame.
That photograph is basically a summary of our relationship for about twenty years.
My father was a quiet man in the way that some men are quiet — not because they have nothing to say, but because saying things felt dangerous to them somehow. He grew up hard. He didn't talk about it. He showed love by showing up, by fixing things around the house, by working without complaint. I didn't understand that language when I was young. I wanted words. I wanted him to ask me how I felt, to sit with me, to say I'm proud of you out loud where I could hear it.
He never quite did. And I carried that into my thirties like a stone in my coat pocket.
What changed things, oddly enough, was becoming a father myself.
The first time I looked at my own kid and felt that overwhelming, wordless love — so big it almost scared me — I thought about my father. I thought: what if he felt exactly this, and just had no idea how to hand it to me? It wasn't an excuse. It was just a door opening. I walked through it slowly.
I called him more. I started asking him questions about his childhood, and he answered them in pieces, cautiously, like a man who'd kept something locked up for so long he'd forgotten there was a key. He told me things I'd never known. Small things, mostly. A job he'd wanted as a young man and didn't get. A friendship that had ended badly. A regret or two he named without fanfare, almost in passing.
I never said I forgive you — that would have embarrassed us both, and honestly, I'm not sure he would have known what I meant. But something shifted. Something quieted down.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh, the person I was at twenty-five, needed someone to blame for the places I felt empty. The person I became closer to fifty understood that my father had been doing the same math I was doing — trying to love people well with whatever tools he'd been handed, and not always getting it right.
He passed away three years ago now. We didn't have a dramatic reconciliation. There was no big scene, no tearful conversation at the hospital. What we had were Sunday phone calls that got a little warmer over the years. A few fishing trips. Him telling me once, quietly, that he liked the man I'd turned into.
That was enough. More than enough.
If you're still carrying something like this — a parent, a sibling, an old friend you lost track of — I'm not here to tell you forgiveness is easy or that it wraps up clean. It doesn't. But I'll say this: it gets lighter. Gradually, quietly, it gets lighter.
And sometimes that's the whole story.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh writes personal reflections on life, memory, and the slow work of growing up. More at scottandrewalpaugh.com, andrewalpaugh.com, and scottalpaugh.com.
Written by Scott Andrew Alpaugh — technology professional and entrepreneur based in Greenville, South Carolina. Also at andrewalpaugh.com and scottalpaugh.com.
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