The Pull

Grieving the hope, not the person

I’m in my childhood home running away from my father. I don’t know why he’s after me but I can feel that he’s angry, and I can feel that he doesn’t care about my pleas for him to stop. Then the dream shifts and I’m on an outdoor grill, being cooked alive. The flames are around me. My father is looking down at me apathetically. I can’t run — I’m tied up in some invisible rope. I scream. I cry.

I wake up terrified. I’m twelve, looking around my bedroom, half-expecting to be snapped back into the fire. Why did I have that dream.

I noticed, around that age, that my father had a relationship with other adults that he didn’t have with me. He seemed friendly with them. Fun, even. I never saw that at home. I wanted to be someone he treated like one of his friends. At the very least, someone he enjoyed being around. But I always felt like a nuisance — like despite telling himself he was a father, he didn’t actually like anything that came with it.

So I tried to be smart enough to impress him. When that didn’t work, I tried to change him.

My father and his girlfriend came over for dinner. I'd recently found new work and things were moving, and I wanted to share that with him. I talked about the job, the process, what I was building. Somewhere in the middle of it I noticed I was hoping — mentally begging, actually — for some kind of reaction. Any reaction. The begging didn't stop when the dinner ended. It became a background hum of needing his approval that I carried around without noticing.

He never told me he was proud of me. Never said he loved me. Never hugged me. When I asked him about it — and I asked many times — he said: “Your mom and her family were too nice to you and pretended you were funny. You won’t get that from me.”

I still felt the need to prove myself to him. I needed the fight to be pointing somewhere, so I reached for the story where the son’s persistence eventually cracks the father open. I didn’t name it that way at the time. I just believed, in some quiet unexamined place, that if I kept showing up, something would give.

Nothing gave. I kept showing up anyway.

Then Trump threatened Iran with nuclear genocide, and even some of his own pundits started turning. This, I thought, has to be where my father draws the line. I screenshotted the Truth Social posts and sent them to him. I asked him what he thought.

He told me Trump was playing some kind of sophisticated war strategy.

I asked him about praising Allah on Easter. About the Epstein files. About the genocide threat itself. All he said was: “He wasn’t actually going to do it. Everyone who’s against him now has gone crazy.”

I read it and my heart went heavy and my mind went quiet.

It didn’t make me angry. It felt like smoke clearing. I was looking at the inside of what had always been a hollow goal. I wasn’t grieving — I’d done that in pieces, many times, over years. I didn’t have the urge to fight him.

I didn’t respond. I left the message alone. Responding felt hollow now, in a way it hadn’t before — like reaching for a muscle that had quietly stopped being there.

And in that quiet, I noticed a phrase: It’s okay to let go.

This wasn’t a decision I made. It was one I had finally arrived at. The pressure to prove myself to him had dwindled to something small and easy to ignore. What was left was a slight tinge of empathy for the vulnerable — the kind you feel when you accidentally step on a ladybug. It’s not nothing. It’s not something that’s going to ruin your day, either.

I didn’t feel compelled to do anything immediate. I wasn’t itching to tell him I was done, or to announce it, or to draw a line he could see. That would have been more of the same.

That was pretty much it.

I’m not entirely sure where things go from here. I don’t feel like I completed anything. Maybe it’s more like trusting the direction I’m taking.