How I (Finally) Got My Dad To Call Me His Son
Sometimes good things can happen in the worst of times.
My mom died in 2017. She was 51 years old, and she had stage IV lung cancer that had metastasized to her liver and spine. Around 10 years prior, she was diagnosed with and treated for stage I rectal cancer. It is likely that the chemotherapy and radiation from that treatment made the lung cancer next to inevitable, although you could make the argument (and I have) that her diet and lifestyle did her no favors and probably directly led to the rectal cancer.
She was an extremely hard worker, my mother, and it was to the detriment of her overall mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Not only was she a high-stress individual, but she also had atrocious eating habits consisting largely of processed meats with very little fiber.
I’m not judging, but it’s important to bring that up when we speak of chronic disease. I know, now, that I carry a gene that predisposes me to colorectal cancers caused by additives and such in processed meat. It’s lucky that I went vegan as a teenager, in that respect.
When my mom became seriously ill, I was on top of it. During the rectal cancer period, I was 17 years old. I took half my courses at the local high school and half online through the local community college. This meant that I was allowed to move freely where a lot of other people would not have been, and it meant that I was able to shuffle my schedule around so I could be at home or the hospital as needed.
Ten years later, I was out of school but not out of the woods. As I sat by her side, only leaving for the occasional shower and laundry run, and only doing that when I could leave my brother in my place for the hour or two that took, I had a lot of time to think.
I was angry. Furious. She had been seeing her primary care doctor an average of twice a month for over two years, complaining of pain, shortness of breath, a cough that wouldn’t go away, and some other upper-thoracic symptoms. I knew this because I had been with her for all but one of those appointments, and I only missed the one because I had had to be taken to the emergency room two days prior, myself, for a ruptured ulcer caused by stress and way too much ibuprofen.
Translation: at any point, he could have ordered imaging to check if there was an underlying problem. He finally had ordered a chest X-ray less than a week before I finally convinced her to let me take her to the ER.
No dice for two years, when it would have been incredibly easy and when there would have been zero loss to him whatsoever to order imaging much earlier, and when he couldn’t deny knowledge of the symptoms.
Like I said, I was furious. I had what I later would jokingly term “Florida rage,” which can be loosely defined as follows: I wanted to square off with him in a Waffle House parking lot with a broken meth pipe and a rusty, used needle as my weapons of choice. I wanted to crater his face in with my fist so hard that the force of the impact made him bite his own heart. I mean, I was pissed off.
This was my mom. (Mom always said, “mother is half a word.”) He had fucked with my family and my home, and he never once had the decency to even act like he was sorry.
I know I can have a bit of small dog syndrome — the tendency to pick a fight with someone larger and stronger as if I were unaware of my size and relative lack of strength — but these were my people. This was my mom. None of them were or are perfect, but you don’t get to fuck with them.
He had fucked around, and I really, really wanted to let him find out.
But as things stood, there wasn’t anything I could really do but be there for her. We were sent from the local hospital to the larger university hospital about 45 minutes away, where their biopsy confirmed metastatic cancer of the lungs. There wasn’t anything that could be done by this point in the game other than to make her comfortable.
We took her home, went to see her primary care guy to tell him what we found out, and within 24 hours, she and I boarded an ambulance back to the local hospital. Right out of the gate, I had to repeatedly demand that they put a catheter in. Likely due to inflammation, she wasn’t able to urinate on her own.
The nurse who finally listened to me expressed surprise when the bag immediately filled up with urine. They replaced that bag with another, which filled up by about a third just as quickly. It was then that I realized I couldn’t count on them to do their jobs without pushing them to one degree or another. I wasn’t planning to leave her alone in their, regardless, but that sealed things.
She could not care for herself, and because of the masses on her liver, she had dementia-like symptoms that meant she hardly understood where she was and why. There was no way she could advocate for herself. The well-meaning nurses were overworked and understaffed, and the Dilaudid that they had her on was neither sufficient to control her pain, nor was it administered frequently enough to prevent breakthrough pain. She would need an advocate with their head screwed on properly and not one that would be afraid to speak out if things went south.
During our stint in this hospital, my dad and brother came by about once a day. I was also reaching out to her siblings, who I’ll call DI and JW.
DI drove up about 24 hours after I called him. JW elected to take a trip to New York to visit her daughter and grandchild. The grandchild, an autistic boy with some learning difficulties on top of that, had won an award at school. She (rightly) recognized that this was a big deal for him, but it cost her the ability to see her baby sister alive for the last time. There would be other awards in the kid’s future, but she would not get another chance to say goodbye.
I was angry about this, too, but a part of me was selfishly relieved. My mom’s siblings had not been a regular part of her life for a long time. I was the one doing all the work, and I had been for a long time. In a way, I didn’t think they deserved to be there. I didn’t want to share my mom’s last days with them, because they hadn’t earned the right to it, as far as I was concerned.
All of this went on from late May to June 21, the summer solstice and the longest day in the year. My birthday was on June 11, and my dad and brother came in that day with a couple of birthday cards and a packet of t-shirts. I was turning 28, and I genuinely did not care about that.
My brother’s card featured a unicorn vomiting a rainbow, demonstrating his keen understanding of my general vibe. My dad’s, on the other hand, was blue and more sentimental in nature. And in large, curling lettering on the front, it featured the word “son.”
This was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do, being at her bedside and ending up being the one to suggest hospice. (I remained at her bedside there as well, but they were able to give more intensive care in terms of her pain, and I had a hell of a lot more trust in them than I had in the hospital we’d just left.) Dad had thanked me for it, saying how hard it was for him to handle these things. I understood, although it’s hard for anyone, I’d argue.
Nevertheless, I was the one best qualified to be on deck for this job. I’d been to many more of her appointments than he had, and I had a depth of knowledge of the situation to which he could not hold a candle. He recognized that. As a child, you might view your parents as being the experts, but if anyone was the expert here, it was me.
To be validated like that felt good. But having him call me his son? That hit me in ways I couldn’t anticipate. My aunt, mom’s sister, JW, is a born-again holier-than-thou type of Christian. I would later learn that she was and is an ardent Trump supporter. But even she referred to me as my mother’s son.
My dad, on the other hand, had been refusing for years to use my preferred pronouns, even though he had no problem switching from “she,” to “he,” when we rescued a kitten that we initially thought was female and were told otherwise. He used my preferred name, but that was it.
It had taken my mom dying and me nearly killing myself caring for her during the process, but through it all, my dad had grown to respect me as a complete human being, and dare I say, as a man and a competent leader. If anybody but the cancer itself could be said to be driving the bus at this stage, it was me. He saw my rage and my righteous indignation, my willingness to go full Florida on anyone who treated my mom with anything less than 100% respect, and I suppose a part of him said, “Okay, this is my son.”
It didn’t make everything okay. Nothing would be okay for a long time to come. But it made things slightly more tolerable than a “daughter,” card would have done. I felt seen and respected by him in ways I hadn’t known I needed or wanted but that I very much did need and want.
It felt like when I graduated from high school, and they started to see and treat me more like an adult. I wasn’t yet 18, and I was basically still an idiot kid in the way that kids are often idiots, but in their minds, I had leveled up. I was out of high school and set to leave for university about a month later. They were proud of me, and I felt that.
Kids benefit from feeling validation from their families. I could have lived my whole life without that birthday card, and because of how angry it had made him in the past when I had asked for a pronoun switch, I was sure I was never going to receive it. I was resigned to that uncomfortable fact but did not tend to dwell on it.
He surprised me in a big way, and I remain grateful for it.
