What My Father Never Said Out Loud

My father never once told me, in words, that he was proud of me. Not at my graduation, not at my first job, not at any of the moments where the sentence would have been easy and expected. And yet I understood it, perfectly, every single time — in the extra ten minutes he'd stay on the phone, in the way he'd mention the news to a neighbour before I'd told him he could, in the specific quality of his silence when I said something he thought was well put.

I spent a long time as a younger man wishing he would just say it, the way I saw other fathers say it, plainly, in sentences. I thought the silence meant something was withheld, some emotional labour he wasn't willing to do on my behalf. I don't think that anymore.

A different vocabulary

My father speaks almost entirely in gestures — the car he'd have washed before a long drive without being asked, the way he'd quietly pay for something and change the subject before I could thank him properly, the specific silence he'd hold after I said something difficult, which I eventually understood was his version of full attention. He said almost nothing directly and I understood almost everything anyway. That's its own language, and I was slow to learn to read it, mostly because I kept waiting for the translation instead of learning the original.

I don't think his way is better than saying it out loud, and I've made sure to say things out loud to the people I love, because I don't want them doing the same slow decoding work I did. But I've stopped resenting the silence, because underneath it, once I learned to read it, was more than the words would probably have carried anyway.

Some love is spoken. Some is translated, slowly, out of gesture, over years, by someone patient enough to keep listening.

Last month I told him directly, out loud, that I loved him — a sentence neither of us has much practice with. He went quiet for a second, the same specific silence, and then said, 'I know.' I understood that too. It was, in his language, a complete sentence.