The lesson wasn't in anything he said. It was in what his hands did every time something hard happened.
There's a memory that comes back to me sometimes when I'm running by the river in the morning. I'm maybe seven or eight. My grandmother had just died. The house felt heavy in that way houses feel after a death, where adults speak in lower voices and meals get strange. My father walked into the garage, picked up a hammer, and started fixing the back fence. He worked until the light went.
I remember thinking, even then, that this was what grown men did when something terrible happened. They went and fixed something.
It took me a long time to see that I had been studying him.
What he did when things got hard
My father was a good man. He still is. He raised three boys, kept the lights on, showed up to everything that mattered. When I look back at my childhood I don't have grievances so much as patterns. The pattern was this: when something painful arrived in the family, he absorbed it by doing.
Lost his job once. Built a deck.
A friend died young. Repainted the house.
His own father went into care. He took on more work, more hours.
There was a kindness in this. He was holding the family steady. He was making sure that whatever else fell apart, the practical things didn't. I understood it as love because, in his case, that's what it was.
But what a child takes from a parent is rarely the thing the parent meant to give.
How I read it as the rule
I absorbed something else. Not love, exactly. A rule.
The rule was: when you feel bad, do something useful. Move. Solve. Produce. Don't sit there. Don't be the person who sits there.
I never heard my father say this. I'm not sure he ever thought it. But I built my early adult life around it. When relationships ended, I worked harder. When I felt lost, I started another project. When something inside me went quiet, I made sure the outside got louder.
For a long time it looked like I was thriving. I built a publishing business with my brothers. We grew it. I moved countries. I ran every morning. I had a hundred things going.
I was very good at being competent.
The cost of always being useful
What I'm only starting to understand, at 37, is how much this cost.
It cost me the ability to feel things slowly. Grief turned into a project I wanted to complete. Sadness became something to optimise out of my schedule. Even joy got compressed, because joy that lingers is also a kind of sitting still, and I had been quietly trained that sitting still was where bad things happened.
It cost me intimacy. My wife will sometimes try to tell me about a hard day and I'll feel my hands twitching toward a solution before she's even finished speaking. I have to physically slow myself down. I have to remind myself that she isn't bringing me a bug to fix. She's bringing me her life, and she wants me in it, not above it.
And it cost me, I think, a particular kind of self-knowledge. If you're always reaching for the next useful thing, you never quite find out who you are when you stop.
Saigon, and a small reckoning
Living here has accidentally helped with some of this. Not because the city is calm. It isn't. But Saigon doesn't reward my brand of head-down competence the way home did. There are mornings where the rain just decides nothing is happening today. The street floods. The cafe closes. The plan dissolves. You sit with your coffee and watch the water move past the curb, and there is nothing useful to do, and the city seems perfectly fine with that.
Buddhist practice has helped too, though not in some clean, enlightened way. One thing meditation has taught me, slowly, is that a lot of what I call thinking is actually a kind of fleeing. The mind is moving away from something. Often the something is small. A tightness in the chest. A mood that hasn't named itself yet. A sadness that wants thirty seconds of attention.
Sitting still, you start to notice how much energy you've been spending not feeling things.
What I'm trying to do differently
I don't want to make this sound like a clean recovery. It isn't. The reflex is still there. When my daughter is upset, my first move is still to find the thing that will make her stop being upset. I have to talk myself down from that almost daily.
But I'm trying. Some of what I'm trying is small.
When something hard happens, I try to give it a few hours before I do anything about it. I try to let a feeling be a feeling for a while before I turn it into a task. When my wife is sad, I sit next to her and I don't speak. I have learned, slowly, that this is harder than working, and more useful.
I'm also trying not to pass the rule on. My daughter is going to inherit something from me, the way I inherited something from my father. I would rather she inherit a man who knows how to sit down when things get heavy than a man who is always halfway out of the room, looking for a hammer.
The thing my father couldn't say
I called my dad recently. We don't talk about feelings, but we talk. I asked him about that period after my grandmother died. He was quiet for a moment. He said he didn't know what else to do.
That has stayed with me.
He wasn't choosing competence over feeling. He just didn't have anywhere else to go. The fence was what he had. The hours were what he had. He was a man raised by another man who probably also went looking for something to fix.
I love him for it now in a way I couldn't have at twenty.
I just don't want it to be the only thing I know how to do.
