Six — The Language He Spoke Instead

Six — The Language He Spoke Instead

My father had a language for love that was not love's language. I understood this eventually, much later, and the understanding did not change the damage but it changed the texture of the damage — made it less like a wound and more like a weather system, impersonal, not directed at me specifically, simply what it was.

He paid for things. This was his fluency: the payment of school fees, the purchase of books when books were needed, the production of money for the class trip that I had assumed I would not be permitted to attend and was, without fanfare, given. He paid without discussion. He paid without attaching the payment to any statement about what it meant or what he expected in return. He paid because he was a father and fathers provided, and the providing was, in his interior language, the primary dialect of care.

I could not speak this dialect. I did not know, as a child, that it was a dialect. I thought it was a transaction. I thought the money arrived because money was required and not because anything feeling-adjacent was being communicated by its arrival. I received the school fees and the books and the trip money as logistics rather than love because nothing in the way they were delivered indicated they were anything other than logistics.

Later, much later, my mother told me he had worried about money every year of my school. That the fees had been a strain that he had not permitted to be visible. That the books he bought without discussion had sometimes required the discussion-free sacrifice of other things he had wanted. That the trip I had assumed I would not attend he had agreed to immediately, without hesitation, before I had finished asking.

I absorbed this information and tried to rewrite the past with it. I tried to go back through the memories and find, in the transactions, the feeling that had been present all along in the form I had not been taught to recognize. I could do this partially. I could see it, intellectually: the money was the love. The payment was the language. The presence in a form I did not speak was still presence.

But here is the thing I could not get past, and still cannot: a child does not need to be told that his father loves him. A child needs to feel it. Feeling requires proximity. Proximity requires the father to come to where the child is, or to create a space where the child can safely come to where the father is. Money creates neither of these. Money is not presence. Money is what you send when presence is unavailable or unwilling or — and this is the possibility I have never fully resolved — when presence is simply too difficult for the man doing the providing.

Perhaps it was too difficult. Perhaps the looking directly at a son and saying the true thing was, for him, harder than I can imagine — not unwillingness but incapacity, not coldness but a different kind of damage, inherited from his own father, who I never met but who I suspect was a man of similar architecture.

Perhaps.

The perhaps does not close the gap. It only gives the gap a different name.