Daddy Issues

Absolutely (Story of a Girl) - Nine Innings

I caught up with an old friend the other day.

It had been a while, but her voice sounded the same.

Maybe a little tired, but still… hers.

We talked about life when it was simple.

Before almonds were milk, burgers were beyond, and AI was still MIA.

Then she brought up a memory I only vaguely knew from her Instagram.

The baseball game with her dad, the one she was proud of. The one she posted with a clever caption and a beer she wasn’t old enough to drink.

alias “coco jewel” inspired by a stripper name generating website lol

For a few hours, she let herself believe they had the relationship she’d always wanted.

A normal one.

Something out of a Greta Gerwig coming-of-age movie: a father and daughter planted in the nosebleeds, his arm slung over the back of her chair, stadium lights glaring, summer air thickening the frizz in her newly overly balayaged hair.

For nine innings, she played pretend that they were like the others.

The fathers who explained the rules without impatience, the daughters who laughed at their dad’s dumpster fire jokes with a humbling confidence that the joke was probably on them.

She played her part well.

She let the beer in her hands warm.

Let her freckled, blemished face flush with the humidity. Let the moment settle in like the childhood memories she wished she had.

A girl and her dad.

Nothing more, nothing less.

A game that meant nothing but the score and a cold beer in her warm hand.

But pretending only works if you never look too closely. If you don’t press too hard against the edges or anticipate the pattern before it arrives.

There was one rule that night, and it was this: Never let her mind wander too far past the outfield. Because if she did, she’d remember his heart of flowers. And how the path is never as neatly paved as it seems.

How his flowers never bloomed from just a stem. They had thorns. Ones that pressed sharp enough to draw blood.

Never something easy to pluck, easy to hold.

Like barbwire.

Wrapped around his ribs, wound so tight it cut both ways. Reaching for him meant enduring love that came with lacerations. And loving him meant learning where not to reach, where to spare.

Fuck that barbed wire.

And fuck the hurt that put it there, too.

She used to hate that stupid pointy thing almost as much as she hated him for wrapping himself in it.

For making it hard.

For not being the kind of dad who made it easy.

For being so stubborn, he’d sabotage it all.

I asked if she was still mad. She just shook her head. Said she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

That made me smile.

I like to think there’s an expiration date on blaming your parents for the way you turned out.

I’m glad we both have seemed to let that day come.

We spoke about how, the older you get, the easier it becomes to see your parents stripped of their titles—Mom, Dad—and instead, as people. Full and fallible. As raw and contradictory as we are.

We’ve learned to admire them in a way we never could before. Not as children wanting more, but as strangers might.

Like the barista who hands them their coffee and smiles at the extra dollar they’ve placed in the tip jar.

The colleague who watches them in their element, commanding the room as they present their vision to their team.

Their best friend from high school who knows the pieces of them they let die so we could live.

The real them.

The humans beneath the wire.

Stripped of expectation, unembellished by our never-ending needs.

Dads and their daughters—it’s an interesting relationship, I like to think.

It shifts, bends, tenses under the weight of life and time and responsibilities and vices. Each relationship different, shaped by circumstance, personality, family matters, etc. And yet, somehow, they are all the same.

They share a chromosome.

That sneaky, devilish double-crossing X.

They are the makers of us.

And we are the sum of them.

And in understanding them, the full, complicated, messy, human version of them, we unlock something within ourselves.

A tether.

A breadcrumb.

A mirror.

Never quite the answer, simply a piece to the puzzle that is us.

I think some things are easier left unsaid, but that doesn’t mean they go unheard.

She wonders if he’d recognize himself in these words, if he’d piece together the edges of their story.

If he’d see the weight she’s carried. The sharp and the soft, the grace and gratitude. Because despite it all, she wouldn’t change a thing. Not the hard parts, not the history, not even him.

She hopes he knows that. Hopes he understands, in his own way, that their relationship is different. That at times, it’s been hard. That it has shaped her. Sharpened her. Even makes her proud. That it made her who she is. And for that, for all of it, she wouldn’t change a thing.

When I asked how she feels about her father now, if she’s still mad or if their relationship still feels distant, she just exhales.

She said she doesn’t resent him anymore, but she doesn’t try to save him either.

She doesn’t reach through the wire. Doesn’t try to bend it into something he’s not.

She just sees him.

Loves him.

And hopes, in a quiet, unspoken way, that he understands her. Because she understands him. And in that X, she is and always will be him.

I admire that response. It takes guts and a certain type of growth to come to terms with that.

Thinking back ten years is a trip. I struggle to remember where I put the remote ten minutes ago.

I wonder if, even back then, she sensed what was really happening that night at the baseball game. If she sipped her warm beer, cheered at the right moments, and watched him out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he was pretending too.

Or if she believed that somehow he had really changed. If the curtains had finally closed on the past, and they could be, at last, what she had always wished they were in real life.

Normal.

Happy.

Perfect.

Either way, when the game ended, she let her Instagram post serve as a relic. Proof that for one day they were able to play pretend.

That they were like the rest.

And that it was so nice.

Just a girl and her dad, side by side, being okay the only way they knew how.

And maybe, for a moment, they were.