What He Got Right
What my father got right, seen clearly. A Father’s Day letter by JT. On showing up, consistency, the long game, and the love that is mostly a verb.
I want to talk about what my father got right.
But to do that honestly, I have to start somewhere else. I have to start with what I was looking at while he was still here.
While he was here
I spent too much time seeing what he wasn’t.
The things he didn’t say. The things he didn’t know how to give. The ways I thought he fell short — the emotional vocabulary he didn’t have, the conversations that never happened, the version of him I’d constructed in my head that he kept failing to be. I carried that accounting around for years. I was precise about it. I could have given you the list.
And I took the rest for granted.
The showing up. The consistency. The quiet ways he kept loving us that didn’t look like love because they didn’t look like what I thought love was supposed to look like. I walked past all of it, every day, cataloguing the gaps, missing the substance entirely.
You don’t always recognize what someone got right while they’re still here. I know that now. I wish I’d known it sooner.
So. What he got right.
He showed up
He showed up. That’s the first thing and it may be the most important thing, and it is less obvious than it sounds.
Showing up is not just physical presence. Lots of people are physically present without being there. Showing up means being available, engaged, actually in the room in a way that the other people in the room can feel. My father did this. He was not perfect at it every day — nobody is — but his baseline was present. When you needed him, he came. When something was happening, he was there for it. You knew where to find him.
I have met enough adults who grew up without that to know it is not a small thing. I didn’t know it then. I do now.
Lots of people are physically present without being there.
The same in every room
Consistency, and the weight of the truth.
He was consistent. His values didn’t shift based on who was in the room. He didn’t have a company version and a home version. He didn’t adjust his principles for convenience. What he believed, he lived, and he lived it the same way in private as he did in public. The same person at the kitchen table as he was anywhere else. That is rarer than it should be and I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was old enough to see how many people operate otherwise.
He was not effusive with praise, but when he gave it, it was real. I never had to wonder whether his compliments were genuine because they were not frequent enough to be automatic. When he said something was good, he meant it. That meant when he said nothing, you didn’t spiral — you just understood that silence was the baseline and praise was reserved for the actual thing. There is something clarifying about that, even if it took me a long time to feel it as clarifying rather than withholding.
He told me the truth. Not always gently. Sometimes not gently at all. But the truth. He did not protect me from hard information to spare my feelings. He told me when I was wrong and when my plan had a problem and when the thing I was proud of actually needed more work. He told me the truth, I think, because he believed I could handle it. That belief — even when I couldn’t feel it at the time — was its own form of respect.
The long game
He planted what he wouldn’t see grown.
He believed in the long game. He planted things he knew he might not see fully grown. He started things he didn’t expect to finish. He invested in things that didn’t pay off quickly. He was patient with processes that required patience. He made decisions with time in mind, not urgency.
I am still trying to inherit that. Still working on it.
The love that doesn’t film well
Love, in his expression of it, was mostly a verb.
He loved his family in the way that doesn’t film well. Not dramatically. Not with grand gestures. He loved us by doing the thing that needed to be done, consistently, without making it about himself. By being the person you could count on. By making sure the lights stayed on and the refrigerator was full and the problems got handled.
I have been turning that over in my mind since I lost him. The love that looks like reliability. That looks like presence. That looks like a man who does what he says he will do and is there when you need him and tells you the truth even when it’s inconvenient.
I was so busy looking at what he wasn’t that I almost missed all of that. Almost.
What he got right
There are things I wish had been different. Every honest accounting has those. He was not perfect — no honest remembering says that. He had his silences, his resistances, the places where he couldn’t quite get across the thing he meant. We had years that were harder than they needed to be for reasons that are complicated and partly mine.
None of that cancels what he got right. What he got right is what I am trying to build in my own life.
- iThe showing up.
- iiThe consistency.
- iiiThe long game.
- ivThe love that is mostly a verb.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
I miss you.
If your father is still here, call him. Not to deliver a speech — just to tell him one thing he got right. Specific. Not everything, not a summary. One thing. He’ll remember it. And so will you.
— JT
More of JT’s writing is collected on his contributor page. For readers whose fathers are still here and getting older, Rebecca’s guide to opening the conversation with aging parents covers the practical talk about driving, housing and medical wishes that often follows the phone call, and the wider set of family columns is on the HowTo Family home page.