My dad.

I didn’t exactly win the mom lottery, but I sure as shit hit the dad jackpot.

I remember being very young, and sitting extremely nervously on the beach, a few yards from the tide, toes digging into the pebbly Jersey shore sand, my heart racing as I watched him cut through the grey waves. Every time he went under, I would hold my breath, waiting for what felt like an eternity for him to pop up again. Mouth open like he was taking in a month’s worth of air before plummeting into the waves again.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. The water was too rough for me, too rough for most people, and he said I wasn’t allowed in (I was terrified to go in, so that was fine by me) but my dad hadn’t met a wave he didn’t think he could triumph. And it scared the shit out of me.

When he would finally tire of his “laps”, he would come in, and then I could run to him with a towel, and breathe again. He was safe.

There was no one in the world more important to me. No one I needed more, or worried about losing more, or loved more, than my dad.

When I was around 4 years old, my mom moved out of our house. Looking back at that time, there really are far more questions than answers, and I don’t know much more now about what set that into motion than I did then. I don’t really remember how I felt about all of it beyond just knowing that I was confused. I don’t even remember being sad about it. For a great many reasons I’ll someday go into with greater detail, her departure didn’t seem to be a bad thing overall. It seemed, and I don’t know if this is my actual memory or the combination of what is true and what I was told by my dad’s second wife and others and conditioned to accept as truth, but it seemed that after she left, things felt more peaceful.