Sorry, Dad

Never again.

My dad traveled for work all the time. He was gone between three and five days and nights a week. That's how being a pilot is. He'd started flying fifteen years before I was born, and he flew for another seventeen afterward.

I was a boyscout when I was a kid. I thought it was pretty fun, most of the time. I could make wooden cars, tie square knots, build fires, and camp. My troop's camping trips happened once or twice a year. I liked the trips, but I felt like a passenger along for the ride. I didn't put any work into planning them or working them into my schedule. It was just "We're going camping in a few weeks, don't forget!" and I'd forget until it was the morning to leave.

My dad didn't have full control over his work schedule. He turned in paperwork expressing preferences for certain days to work and days to be at home, but he never had the final say. I don't think he missed a single campout, but how much time did he spend praying that he'd get the right days off or dreading that he'd miss one?

Is now a good time to mention that I had three brothers? They didn't come on those campouts--except once or twice. My dad set time aside for he and I to have time away from everyone else, making our own bonds in special time independent of everyone else. Those boyscout adventures were rare days of father-son time instead of family time. Three other sons and a wife, and he dedicated entire weekends to me. I remember the campfires and the marshmallows and the tent-pitching and the hikes where you carried me on your shoulders and the cobbler.

Like most people, I was a teenager for a while. It didn't matter how nice my parents were or how much time they made for me, I didn't want to be around them. They didn't understand how much work school was or how annoying it was when they interrupted my afternoons of video games--those afternoons, I should mention, blended together into an unremarkable swath of indistinct memories. I wanted Dad to leave me alone, so I insulted him for things I didn't really care about. If I hurt him, I reasoned, he'd leave me alone.

"You weren't even here for half my childhood," I reminded him a few times. You'd think, that with all the times he'd mentioned wishing he could be at home, I would've realized that he didn't need reminding.

I'm sorry, Dad. I don't know if you remember me acting like I resented you for working all those hours to make enough money to give me a good life--a great life--but I didn't mean it. I wish I'd never tried to hurt you at all, especially not for a fabricated reason. Never again will I try to hurt you by exploiting how much you care about me.

I hope we can go camping again.