The down side of emails is that they allow people access to each other at any time. Because weeks will go by when something so super easy as dropping a line in an email never happens. By either party.

If he was my boyfriend, I’d have broken up with him by now. If he were a girlfriend, I would have realized that maybe we don’t have as much in common anymore. If he was anything but what he is, I would have loved him enough to let him go and been happy for the both of us. But he’s my dad.

He’s an emotionally distant guy to begin with. Well except on special occasions. Then he flip-flops to the other extreme and you really better hope you brought a rain jacket. It’s been the very rare moment when I’ve felt intimately close to him.

And Father’s Day is coming up. My little brother had to be the one to remind me or I think it might have gone by without me remembering that I have a father at all.

I don’t think it’s all his fault. Mom did a lot of damage in that department. Your father is this, your father is that, when she should have kept it all to herself.

But what I’m chewing over today is how much of the distance is on my shoulders. I don’t drop a line either. And lately when I have, it’s been my stepmother to reply. Yes, Dad works long hours. Yes, he’s busy with church and stepkids and many other things. But if I haven’t built a relationship with the man of the household over 30 years, how am I to be expected to have one with his new wife of 2 years?

Father. I just don’t know what that is. Not that I didn’t have one, but because I’m so confused. And in a lot of respects it means I don’t completely know what the word husband or father to my children means either.

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