It has been eighteen months. I have not seen my father. Nathan and I have been happy. My uncle Denis comes for dinner once a month. I am, slowly, thinking about whether to respond to my father's letter. My therapist has told me I do not have to decide today. I do not know what I am going to do. I want, more than anything, for my father to be in my life in a way that does not require me to swallow the thing I refused to swallow on a Tuesday night in May. I want him to be at Thanksgiving next year. I want him to meet the child Nathan and I are planning to have. I also know that nothing has been resolved,
because Tanya is still in that house, and he is still in that marriage, and he is still the man who called me at 7:18 PM and told me Tanya was going to walk me down the aisle as a family. I do not know if the letter is the beginning of something. I do not know if I am ready. What I do know — what I know with the specific, clean certainty that I will not walk away from — is that on my wedding day, my mother's brother walked me down the aisle to the man I love, and I was walked by family, and my mother's ghost was at my shoulder, and my father's absence was the space in the aisle where he had chosen not to be. So tell me honestly — was uninviting them both the right call, or should I have found some way to keep my father at my wedding?
Was uninviting both of them the right call, or too harsh?
* Story inspired by real-life situations. Names and details have been changed for privacy.
