I spent fifteen years waiting for the Sunday call to deepen, and then realized the call wasn't a placeholder—it was the relationship
I've been calling my father most Sundays since I was about twenty-three.
The call lasts, on average, five to seven minutes. I know this because I've timed it, occasionally, out of a kind of dark curiosity. The call has had, with very small variations, the same structure for fifteen years.
It opens with my father answering. He says, "Daniel. How are you, son." I say I'm fine. I ask how he is. He says he's fine. There's a small pause. He fills it by mentioning the weather where he is. I respond by mentioning the weather where I am. We discuss, for thirty seconds, the small differences in temperature between London and Bangkok. This part of the call is, I've come to believe, the most important part, because it sets the register. The register is going to be: surface.
From there, we move to the football. He asks if I caught the match. I usually have, or claim to have. We discuss, briefly, the result. He says something dry about the manager. I laugh. There's another small pause.
Then the car. He's always working on something with the car. The car has been the same car for nine years, but there is always, somehow, a new small task that the car needs, and we discuss it for forty-five seconds. I have, over fifteen years of these conversations, learned more about that specific car than I know about most of the cars I've owned myself.
Then work. He asks how the work is going. I say it's going. He says good. He says I'm doing well. I say thanks. There's a small mutual pause. We both, by this point in the call, know we are approaching the end.
"Alright then, son," he says.
"Alright Dad," I say.
"Talk soon."
"Yeah, talk soon. Love to Mum."
"I'll tell her."
And the call ends. Five to seven minutes. Sunday, late afternoon his time. I have been having this call, with very few variations, since 2010.
The relationship I thought I was waiting for
I want to talk, honestly, about what I spent most of my twenties and early thirties hoping these calls would eventually become.
I thought, at twenty-three, that the call was a starting point. I thought it was a placeholder for the deeper conversations my father and I were going to have once we got the hang of being adult men together. I assumed that the weather, the game, the car, the work were the warm-up routine—the small talk before the real talk—and that, eventually, one of these Sundays, we'd ease into something more substantial.
I had, at twenty-three, a clear if slightly idealized image of what these substantial conversations were going to look like. We were going to talk, eventually, about his life. About my life, in any real sense. About what he was actually thinking about, in his sixties, as he watched his career wind down. About what I was actually thinking about, in my twenties, as I tried to figure out what kind of man I was going to be. The five-minute call was going to expand, naturally, into the half-hour call, into the hour-long call, into the kind of relationship some of my friends seemed to have with their fathers, where the call was an event rather than a logistical update.
I waited. Not impatiently, at first. I figured these things developed at their own pace. I assumed that as I got older and became more obviously a man rather than a son, my father would start engaging with me in a fuller way. I made small attempts, occasionally, to extend the call. I'd ask a slightly more open question. I'd offer a piece of information about my life that wasn't strictly logistical. I'd give him an opening to take the conversation somewhere else.
The openings, almost without exception, were not taken. He'd respond politely to the slightly more open question with a slightly more closed answer. He'd absorb my piece of personal information without volunteering one of his own. The conversation would, within a sentence or two, return to the register of the weather, the game, the car, the work. The opening would close. The call would resume its normal trajectory toward the goodbye.
For a long time, I told myself this was timing. I told myself I just hadn't found the right moment, the right tone, the right opening. I told myself that one of these Sundays, the conversation was going to break through.
It didn't. It hasn't. It isn't going to.
The slow acceptance, and what it cost
Somewhere in my mid-thirties, I started to understand something I hadn't wanted to understand for a long time.
The five-minute call wasn't a placeholder. The five-minute call was the relationship. It had always been the relationship. The expansion I'd been waiting for was not delayed. It was not coming. The relationship I'd been hoping to develop with my father would have required him to become a different man than the one he was, and he was not, in his sixties or seventies, going to become a different man.
I want to write this carefully, because I don't want it to sound bitter, and I don't want it to sound resigned. The acceptance, when it came, was neither of those things. It was something more like grief, but grief without an event to anchor it to.
The grief was for a relationship that had never quite existed and was never going to. Not because anyone had done anything wrong. Not because either of us was unwilling. But because the relationship I'd been hoping for required a kind of conversation my father had, for reasons rooted in his own upbringing, never been given the equipment to have. And the equipment doesn't, generally, get installed in your seventies. He wasn't withholding the deeper conversations. He simply didn't have access to them, in any reliable way, and the small experiments I was running on him each Sunday were asking him for something he couldn't, in any honest sense, provide.
The acceptance cost me something. It cost me the hope. The hope had been, for fifteen years, a kind of low-grade engine running underneath every Sunday call—the small belief that this Sunday might be the one where the relationship cracked open. Once I let the hope go, I had to face the fact that the relationship I had with my father was, more or less, the only relationship I was going to have with him. The Sunday call was going to be five to seven minutes, every week, until one of us died. There was no second act coming.
That's a small grief, but it's a real one. It took me a few months to fully feel it. I felt it in waves, over the course of a year. The waves were not dramatic. They were just the slow internal acknowledgment that a piece of my emotional architecture, which had been built around waiting for the relationship to deepen, needed to be redesigned around the relationship as it actually was.
What changed, after I stopped waiting
I want to be honest about what changed, because I don't think the picture is purely sad.
What changed, mostly, was my experience of the calls. When I stopped waiting for them to become something else, the calls themselves got easier. I stopped probing for openings. I stopped feeling, at the end of each call, the small disappointment of having not made progress. I stopped tracking the conversation as a project that wasn't going well.
The five-minute call, taken as the actual relationship rather than as a placeholder for a different one, is, in its own modest way, a real form of contact. My father is calling, every Sunday, at the same time, for fifteen years. He is doing this because he loves me. He is doing this because he wants to know I'm okay. He is doing this because, in the dictionary he was given, the Sunday call is one of the principal ways a man expresses ongoing care for his son. The fact that the call is short, and surface, and structurally identical from one week to the next, is not evidence of a lack of love. It's evidence of the specific kind of love he was given the equipment to express.
I had, for fifteen years, been treating his available form of love as inadequate. I'd been comparing it, silently, to the form of love I wanted, and finding it short. The comparison wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to him, and it wasn't fair to me, because it kept me from being able to receive what he was actually giving.
Once I stopped comparing—once I let the wanted form of love stop existing as a measuring stick—the actual form of love started, for the first time in fifteen years, to look like what it was. Which was, in its small and imperfect way, a real and consistent and surprisingly durable expression of a man who, in the only language he knew, was making sure his son was okay.
I started, around this time, looking forward to the calls in a way I hadn't before. Not because they had changed. They hadn't. But because I had finally figured out how to receive them as what they were, rather than as the disappointing version of what I'd wanted them to be.
Where I get the deeper relationship now
I want to be clear about one thing, because I think it's important.
I didn't give up on having deeper conversations in my life. I just stopped expecting my father to be the one having them with me.
The conversations I'd been hoping to have with him, I started having with other people. With friends who had the equipment for that kind of talking. With a therapist, in some periods. With one or two relatives of my father's generation who, for whatever reason, did have access to the deeper register and were happy to meet me there. The conversations didn't disappear. They were, in fact, freely available in my life. They just weren't going to come from the specific person I'd been waiting for them from.
This sounds obvious, written down. It wasn't obvious to me at the time. I'd been so fixated on getting the deeper relationship from my father, specifically, that I'd been underinvesting in the other relationships in my life that could have provided it more easily. Once I started letting other people fill the role I'd been trying to draft my father into, the role started getting filled. The lack of deep conversation with my father stopped being a deficit in my life, because the deep conversation itself wasn't missing. It was just sourced from elsewhere.
My father, for his part, got to keep being who he was. He got to keep calling on Sundays. He got to keep talking about the weather, the game, the car, the work. He did not have to become a different man to be a good father to me. The good fatherhood was already there, in the specific form he was capable of providing. It just needed me to accept it on its own terms.
What I'd say to anyone running this loop
If you've been having a version of the five-minute call for years, and you've been hoping it would eventually expand into something deeper, I want to offer two things.
The first is that the call probably isn't going to expand. Not in any structural way. The dynamic has been set for too long. The equipment isn't going to be installed at this point. If you're waiting for the breakthrough, you may be waiting for something that isn't coming, and the waiting itself is costing you the ability to receive what you're actually being offered.
The second is that letting go of the wanted relationship doesn't mean giving up on having a real one. It just means accepting that the real one is, structurally, different from the wanted one. The real one might be five minutes long. It might be about the weather and the car. It might never include the substantive talk you've been hoping for. And it might still be, in its modest way, an expression of love that, once you can see it for what it is rather than for what it isn't, is more sustaining than you've been giving it credit for.
The deeper conversations can be sourced elsewhere. Your father doesn't have to be the only person you have them with. He probably can't be. He was given a specific set of tools, in a specific time and place, and the tools he has are the tools he has. Letting him off the hook for the tools he doesn't have is a gift you can give him, and it's also a gift you can give yourself.
I called my father last Sunday. We talked for six minutes. We covered the weather (warm in London, hot in Bangkok), the football (his team had drawn), the car (something about a new battery), and the work (going fine). We said goodbye. He said love to Mum. I said I'd tell him the same. The call ended.
I sat on my balcony afterward, the same balcony where I'd recorded the voicemail. I felt, for those few minutes after the call, something I hadn't felt for most of my twenties and thirties. I felt content with the call. Not disappointed. Not waiting for the next one to be different. Just, for the duration of a Sunday afternoon in Bangkok, in receipt of the relationship I actually had with my father, and at peace with the fact that it was the relationship I was going to keep having with him until one of us was no longer here to have it.
That, I think, is the version of acceptance worth aiming for. Not the kind that gives up. The kind that finally, after years of trying for something else, sees what's been there all along.
