Wish you were here!
Who cares? This was the theme of my last real conversation with my father. And sometimes it was followed by, “Who f*cking cares?”
In the aftermath of the presidential election, when I wrote to my father of my disappointment in his support for Trump, I guess, I thought maybe he would?
The night after the election, I sat in my car at the airport terminal parking garage for a long time. It was my first moment of peace, and the first time I had been alone all day. The night sky, the vastness of the city, provided a lonely backdrop to contemplate the results.
There are about 5 million people in the metropolitan area of my home. The population of my father’s town is closer to 3,ooo. We couldn’t have been farther apart in that moment. I looked out into the night, at the twinkling of electric light fighting against the stars in the sky, and cried. I hadn’t expected to feel so overwhelmingly sad, and I hadn’t been prepared to feel that my father was responsible for some of that sadness.
I still don’t know if that’s fair — how long are father’s responsible for their daughters? Is there an expiration date?
I’d never given him any real trouble in my life, but I was about to. I was about to take a stand. And in that moment, alone in my car gathering my thoughts, I truly thought he would care.
Who cares?
That question rings in my ears now. He didn’t care enough to talk to me after receiving my letter. In fact, when my stepmother screened my call to him, she said, “What did you expect, writing a letter like that?”
Again, I expected him to care.
So I wrote about my feelings online, putting my heart out there, connecting with other disappointed daughters — with people who care. When someone told him about it, all of a sudden I got my phone call. That act, of openly discussing my reality, made him care enough to call me evil.
I started to see exactly what my father cares about.
Time passed. Short exchanges came around the holidays. The inauguration came and went. Then one night, I found myself in the window seat of a late arriving flight, and on our decent, I noticed a drone (or some other aircraft) curiously close to my plane. I watched silently, thinking to myself — there are going to be more mid-air collisions with so much shit in the air. Was it supposed to be so close? Then it was gone, almost looking as though it stood still as we whizzed by, the light from its flight path stamping itself into the night sky.
When we landed, the first news story in my phone was of the mid-air collision in D.C.
I woke up the next morning, and watched our president, Donald Trump, blame that collision on DEI.
DEI would morph into the the new form of punishment for people who didn't fall in line. Commie was out! DEI was in. My father hadn’t adapted yet, when I didn’t agree with him, he still called me woke or a commie or a woke democrat commie.
The definition of those words mattered less than the intent when using them. You don’t actually have to be any of those things. You just have to piss off a conservative. They all have the same programmed insults.
My dad wasn’t the only one getting “letters” appealing to his humanity. The president was too. In front of the world, Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde asked Trump for mercy during an inaugural prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral.
“Millions have put their trust in you, and as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”
Trump’s response was completely dismissive. He said her plea for mercy was “nasty in tone” and “not compelling or smart.” He said she was “not very good at her job” (hinting at the beginning of the DEI insult trend) and said he was owed a public apology. He called her a “radical left hard line Trump hater.”
Budde has a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, magna cum laude from the University of Rochester. She received her Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry from Virginia Theological Seminary.
Trump thanked many of the clergy who participated in the National Prayer Service, except for Budde, whom he did not acknowledge. The silent treatment, the dismissiveness, seemed to be another thing he and my father shared.
Later, Trump demanded an apology. Senator Mike Collins scurried to add to the cacophony of sycophantic voices, “the person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”
Did you get all that? Agree and comply, or you are DEI. They will diversify you right on outta here. You will have equity in nothing. They won’t be including you in shit.
I was careful to not call my father a Nazi when I wrote my letter to him, because I knew he wasn’t one. It’s why I was so confused to begin with — look around, dad, you and the white nationalists are on the same side!
He apparently read into it that I thought he was a Nazi anyway. One of my brothers later called and asked me if I thought he was a Nazi as well. He said he’d never seen our father more upset in his life. I had never heard him say “our father.” He’d always called him by his name, since he technically, had a biological father already. My dad was a father to him, don’t get me wrong, but this was the first time in my life he called his step-father dad, and he did it repeatedly. I had really struck a nerve.
I never thought any of you were Nazis, I replied. I just pointed out who rallied around the same guy. He continued to argue that I called him one. Just like my dad had repeatedly told me that I must hate him, even after I repeated said that I didn’t.
I got to thinking about hat. I had been critical of other things, like the fact that Trump was an abuser of women. My biggest criticism focused on knowing for the rest of my life, that my father would vote for an abuser of women, before he’d vote for a woman. No one called me to talk about that. No one was upset over being lumped in with an abusive man. That was either still acceptable or it wasn’t something they themselves believed. Meaning there was some truth, in their own hearts, to being aligned with hateful racists.
Proof that supported my observation kept coming after the election. The co-chairman of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), Tino Chrupalla, said his trip to Washington for Donald Trump’s inauguration was an opportunity to establish political and economic contacts with the new US leadership. The AfD use Nazi slogans and make anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-democratic statements. They have threatened to deport German citizens of non-ethnic-German heritage and discussed deportation on “non-assimilated” Germans.
About a month later, JD Vance met with the leader of the AfD as well, amid election interference criticism.
Another example of their alignment? White supremacists showed up to hear Trump speak at the March for Life rally shortly after the inauguration. They brandished Christian symbols and military-style flags. These were the guys who gathered in Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally in 2017, when Trump said there were “some very fine people on both sides.” That rally had turned violent. A woman lost her life, when a white supremacist deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protestors.
Even as I write this, the Pentagon press secretary has been accused of parroting neo-Nazis and Russian propaganda on social media before joining the Trump administration.
I think it made my father angry when I told him to look around, not because he didn’t see what I saw, but because he did.
We might have different views, me from a valley of 5 million people, and him from a town of 3,000. But we are seeing some of the same things, whether we admit it or not.
Between the two of us, I’m the only one who lost a right due to the other’s vote, as a woman still of childbearing age. One I had to fight for, successfully, along with my fellow women, to protect at the state level. It’s one I no longer personally worry about, not because Trump is no longer a threat to abortion access/healthcare access for pregnant women, but because I had a hysterectomy three weeks ago at the age of 42.
I didn’t tell my father, although, someone else did. I never heard from him. My stepmother messaged to say “we love you,” doing the emotional labor for the both of them. She also said she assumed I would tell them if something were really wrong, the subtext being that I hadn’t updated them and they felt weird about it. Women don’t get hysterectomies at 42 because everything is going well, but no, I didn’t have plans to tell them. The pathology report read: benign. I was okay. I had been pretty sure I would be, but you never know. You still have to wait to find out. I still had an entire organ removed. I wondered, after getting her text, if I had to be dying for my father to do his own emotional labor. If it turned out I had cancer, would that have motivated a phone call?
Or is my father’s embarrassment a better motivator? Is it only anger that gets a response?
As I said, I have given my father very little trouble in his life. My worst offense was telling him I was disappointed at the age of 41. My worst offense was showing him how he might not have always been the father he thought he was. And now, my worst offense includes writing about his reaction to it.
“Why do you even write a stupid blog for people to read?”
“Because I like it, dad. I enjoy writing.”
“Oh, who cares? Who f*cking cares?”
I feel like our relationship is at a distance now. We send a few texts here and there, like postcard updates from far away places.
Greetings from beautiful Hysterectomyland! Fell into a deep sleep and someone stole my uterus. Not to worry, it was nothing too serious. Write to you soon!
We get updates in our family group chat — greetings from living in denial! Everything sure is swell here. We smoked some chicken today. Thinking of you! We are so blessed.
I wonder where we will all go over the next four years? I wonder how far apart we will be? I wonder how long they will pretend nothing is majorly wrong? Maybe forever?
Greetings from all of our individual realities hanging out in a chat meant to keep us connected as our lives physically diverge.
Every update stings now. Is this connection? Pretending everything is ok when it’s not? Politics aside, we are broken.
Anyway, the weather has been pretty good. Went for a walk yesterday. Greetings from democracy — wish you were here!
