Essay Workshop 2

“I am very proud of you, Michelle.” Those words echo through my mind even though they were said to me by my father six years ago. It was an amazing day for me. My father was holding my daughter for the first time just a day after she was born. It took 17 years of my life for him to finally say those words to me. Just like Sarah Vowell in “Shooting Dad”, my father and I did not have a very close relationship until I got older and matured.

My father and I were very different people when I was growing up. He was a computer programmer. He would spend hours a day developing new programs for his computer and playing games that I thought were stupid and confused me. He would spend hours cooped up in his tiny little office in our house. I remember thinking that he was insane for staying in that room from the time that he got home from work until dinnertime. After dinner he would go right back in that room and continue working on his complicated projects.

I was a little girl with lots of energy. I could not understand how anybody could sit in a little tiny room with barely any light and no noise except for the tapping of the keys as he hit them and the clicking of the mouse. I wanted to spend all of my time running around in the park that was down the street from my house. Soccer and gymnastics also helped me run off energy so that I could focus on my homework later in the day.

Soccer was a major part of our family. My sister played on a travel soccer team, and after she got into high school, she played on her school team. Almost every weekend from August until October she would have a soccer tournament that we would have to drive to. We would spend the whole weekend there. When I was younger I did not mind being dragged to these tournaments, but eventually I started to loathe them. They took away my time to play with my friends and do whatever I wanted to do. I also did not get a lot of attention during these tournaments because my parents were so focused on the games that my sister was playing in. I remember being able to just run around the parks that the tournaments were held in with no parent supervision.

I also partook in soccer. To my dad though, it was not good enough for him. I did not play on a travel team or my high school team. I attended the travel team tryouts, but my heart was not in it so I never made the team. I did not like travel teams because I did not play soccer for the competition, but for the fun of being able to run around and kick the soccer ball. This lack of interest in competitive soccer seemed to anger my father.

During my soccer games for the local recreational league my dad would yell at me throughout the entire game that I was not trying hard enough or was doing the play wrong. Eventually I stopped enjoying my father being at my games. I dreaded the games that my father would be there. There were even times that I had to skip my own games to attend my sister's tournaments. This made me very irritated.

When I was in ninth grade my father started getting displeased with the fact that I was not yet on a competitive team. He ended up giving me an ultimatum. If I did not make either a travel team or my high school's team I would no longer be able to play soccer. This infuriated me immensely. Why couldn't my father understand that I played for the fun of the game and not for the competition? Per my father's request I attended the tryouts for both the local travel team and my high school team. I believe that because my heart was not fully into the tryouts I did not make the teams. My dad held true to the word of his ultimatum. My parents stopped paying for me to play on the local recreational team, so I stopped playing soccer.

After being forced to stop playing a sport that brought me so much enjoyment when I was on the soccer field, my relationship with my father suffered a great deal. I was extremely angry with him for taking away my ability to participate in a sport that was one of my greatest passions. I started to rebel against him. I stopped listening to what he told me. Instead, I did the complete opposite of what he told me to do. Back talking to him became a daily activity for me. I guess in my mind I decided that since he made me miserable by taking soccer away from me, I would make him miserable.

These behaviors of mine lasted probably about 3 years until I became pregnant with my first daughter and went to a rehabilitation center. During my treatment at the center I matured a lot. I learned to forgive people that may have hurt me and make amends to those that I may have hurt. On my first visit to my parents house I decided to have a talk with my dad. In this talk I apologized to him for my past actions. I explained to him that his decision to take soccer away from me angered me, and that anger caused me to act out against him.

My father acknowledged that he was wrong to try to force me into competitive soccer just because my sister was into it. He apologized for not realizing how much playing soccer meant to me. On this visit my dad took me out to the movies and to dinner. We started to mend our relationship after years of rough times. Every time that I came to visit their house, or my parents came to visit me in the rehabilitation center, my dad would take me out to do something special with just him. During this father-daughter time we would have long talks about things that we enjoyed. We came to realize that we had quite a bit in common.

The next time I saw my father was when my daughter was born. They drove down the day after she was born. We spent several hours together as a family, my mom, my dad, and me. At some point my mother left my dad and I alone in the hospital room. My dad was holding his first granddaughter. He looked over at me and told me that I did a good job bringing her into the world. He then told me that he admired me for not letting the fact that I was having a child at 17 get in the way of graduating high school a year before I was supposed to. He also told me that he was very happy that I started attending classes at the local junior college despite the fact that I was having my baby two weeks into the semester.

“I am very proud of you, Michelle.” I waited 17 years to hear those words come out of my father's mouth. When they finally did an overwhelming feeling of happiness and joy washed through my entire body. It took 17 years, but my father and I finally had a meaningful and close relationship. I think that Sarah kind of felt this way the day that she shot the cannon with her father. I believe that when Sarah had asked to go with her father to shoot the cannon he felt a sense of pride. Just like my dad did when I graduated high school and was attending junior college at 17 with a new baby.