What is in a Name

Honesty is something that I’ve always admired in a person. For better or for worse if you were honest the masses are left with the purest perception of you so whether you’re liked, loved or even hated, its you. I think the reason I feel that way about honesty is because of my father, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that he was the most serious person Ive ever encountered in my life. Even at a young age I could feel it, almost like you could cut it with a knife, but I believe partly its because of how intelligent he is. I think that he doesn’t have the patience to deal with people who don’t understand something that he perceives to be so mundane. I don’t actually think I saw him treat other people this way but, my sister and I had to grow up a lot faster than he would have realized. Some people when they love someone they just want so badly for them to grasp every ounce of ambition or talent or anything really, that it doesn’t always manifest in a way that radiates love and affection. My dad loves harder than most and i think that he didn’t always know how to show it. If I’m being honest ive never been more scared of someone in my life. I used to just hide anywhere that I could so that i didn’t have to come into contact with him. I would have rather never seen him than not have been able to live up to his expectations that he would always raise once something was achieved it honestly made you not want to try at all. It’s really crazy to think about, we’ve known our parents our whole lives but we are only a fraction of what they’ve had going on for a good period of the time we are alive until we reach a point where we are supposed to be sent out on our own. When I was 13 years old my dad’s older brother died, and he was my uncle but there wasn’t a lot of memories of him in my life, not very distinct ones anyways, but it shattered my dad. He couldn’t explain and I couldn’t understand why someone that was never really mentioned to us that we never really saw could turn our world the other way on his axis from his passing. It always perplexed me, but what I did see was that my father was destroyed. Most people never see their father cry just because nothing really warrants them too especially when their child is young, but for a huge part of my life my father was the person I’d see cry the most and whenever he would cry I would cry. He is the strongest man that I know and I figured it had to be something earth shattering for this man to break down. I went on a mission to understand why it hurt so badly because I had a little brother and to be honest i hated him, he’s six years younger than me and we shared a room since I was maybe 7 or 8 and you could imagine going through the growing pains of adolescence mixed with the constantly advancing always changing psyche of a toddler. In short he was my least favorite person on the planet. Always wanting to go where i was always wanting to be like me and i just wanted him to leave me alone. My father would always get on us because he would be upset when he saw us fight which helped and hurt because we weren’t allowed to act naturally around him but we also always spent time together because he emphasized it. My dad and his brother taught me what it meant to be a brother just from seeing how hard it was for him to lose him. My little brother is my heart beat, an extension of me. If something ever happened to my brother I wouldn’t be able to breathe and it would pull the plug on any light i had in my entire body, just a complete shutdown. My father did shut down when it happened but he also took care of the essentials that we needed. Which are subjective and it’s different to different people but we always had clothes and food to eat, and that was more than a lot of people. Of course I wished he was someone I could just openly talk to, or someone that cared about the ongoings of his teenage kids’ relatively smooth lives but he had things he was dealing with. I hated him for a long time, and i think that i was just angry and when i had moved out it had given me a different perspective on my life. Those of us who are mad at our parents it’s usually because we think that they could have done better or been different and I think that we are just mad because we weren’t loved the way that we wanted to be loved so we don’t see the significance of how you were loved. Our parents are human too and when I realized how much my brother meant to me he did more than i ever could have to support a family with that sort of insurmountable pain. My father and I have the same name, and I think that he really takes pride in it, with me being his first born son, but we had a lot of clashes. The way that he is intelligent, just isn’t the way that I am and we didn’t understand each other, but one thing i do understand is that whether I agreed or not he p-ut these expectations on me to be the person that he could hang out with and go visit and talk about life with because his brother is gone. He never made it known to me that that was the goal and so we were working towards different things. I needed to find who i was going to be and he wanted me to already be on my way and thats okay because he worked very hard to give me the tools that i need to be someone that i can be proud of. I honestly never wanted to name my child after me because of my dad and that sounds kind of bad but its just how I felt I wanted my child to have his own identity and pave his own legacy. Now, I can’t wait to give our name to my child because I need to know him to know what kind of strength he comes from. He needs to understand the gravity of his intelligence and how he can do absolutely anything he wants too. I want him to know about the undeniable greatness that is in a name. I will never be able to thank you enough for the man I’ve become because I love myself more than most people think someone should. But it’s because you live in me too and I love you dad.