Some kids make their dads cards. I conducted a full editorial intervention.

My younger sister found them while she was cleaning out the upstairs. Two copies of the same book. Same quiet, certain promises about what a daughter needs from her dad. I didn’t think much about the first book when we gave it to him.

My mom bought it in 2005, right before Dad went Away to rehab. She had me and Libby write him messages inside. By then, they’d been divorced for years. She’d just remarried Randy, already building a life that didn’t include him.

It felt simple at the time. Something you do. Something that might help. I didn’t think about what it cost my mom to do that. To offer something kind to someone who hadn’t been kind back.

I didn’t think that was strange then. I still don’t, truly. Not knowing my mom. But I also understand it differently now.

It wasn’t just something kind. It was an attempt to give him something he might respond to. And I learned from it, whether I meant to or not. I talk a lot about the sensitivity I got from my dad. I don’t talk as much about the compassion my mom built around it. Without that, without her, I don’t know what my sensitivity would have become.

I have both copies of the book in front of me now. (Well, I did yesterday. I’m just editing and posting the blog now.) The second one was my gift; it was my dad’s Christmas present two years later when I was fourteen. I guess I figured the message hadn’t stuck.

Almost every page has something extra in it. Not just notes, but additions. Corrections. Places where what the book said wasn’t enough, so I stepped in and made it more exact. Page by page, I made adjustments. Added lines under the printed ones. Clarified things that felt too vague.

I treated it like something that could be fixed.

I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed. So I tried to build it instead. E.g., when the book said a daughter needs a dad to teach her what it means to always be there, I added: no matter what happens.

I didn’t ask him to be those things for me. I didn’t dare say it out loud. But I wrote it where he would see it anyway. I thought maybe if I explained it well enough, he would finally understand. And if he understood, he would become it.

I thought clarity could make him change. Like if I edited the language precisely enough, the meaning would hold.

There’s a letter in the back. I wrote about what it meant to have him as my dad. What I believed about him. Why I needed him to keep being my dad. Why I needed him to stay.

I wrote it like it was already true. I honestly don’t remember writing every line, but I easily recognize the young girl who did. She thought naming it would make it real.

Now I think more about my mom when I look at it. What she was able to give him.

I even think about myself. What I was trying to make him understand. It comes up a few times in my memoir—that overwhelming desire to make him feel my love.

Not just feel it. Answer it. Become someone who could meet it.

We handed him the same book. I tried to make it say what I needed him to be. What he did with that was his. What he was capable of was also his.

What most people don’t understand is that no amount of clarity or kindness, no magic combination of perfect words, can make someone become who you need them to be.

We learn early how to love from our parents, and one of mine taught me to confuse love with effort. Like, if I say it right this time, explain myself a little better, soften my thoughts just enough, that someone will finally become who you need them to be.

But true blue love isn’t something you can edit into someone else. You can hand them all the right tools with as much clarity as possible, but don’t expect it to change them, or you’ll be the one left holding the difference.

Daily writing prompt

What’s something most people don’t understand?

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inspo: catching an early glimpse of my memoir brain // not just an expression of love but the structuring of it // my child-self’s attempt to stabilize something unstable using the power of language // assuming responsibility for being understood // trying to author a version of my dad I could survive // trying to reconcile ideal vs reality // finding this constructed artifact of need // mostly, these two books about why a daughter needs her dad (Why a Daughter Needs a Dad by Gregory E. Lane)

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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