I Grew Up Thinking My Father Didn't Like Me. It Was Decades Before I Learned The Truth.

In one of my earliest memories of my father, he doesn’t appear at all.

I see only me, a girl of 5 or 6, tiptoeing down a dark hallway toward a closed door, my insides all tied up in knots. Normally I’m a girl who creates commotion, loud and unruly, the kind of kid some might call a lot, but right now I feel like a little. I need something from my father, but I don’t want to bother him. Moments earlier, I told my mother as much, and said, “Oh, honey, don’t be scared. Just go ask him.”

My parents and I lived in a working-class Phoenix neighborhood, in a tract house shaped like a matchbook with three bedrooms. The closed door led to the spare room my father used as his art studio. And while the memory ends before the door opens, I can conjure for you the man behind it: a young man, not much older than 30, with eyes the color of melancholy and feathered hair like a 1970s teen heartthrob, transfixed by the painting in front of him as if under his own spell.

My father taught high school art for a living, but he was also magic. He could
manifest beauty from squishy tubes of paint. He could disappear right before your eyes. He was a closed door, moody and distant. A car pulling out of the driveway, restless and impatient. A faulty water faucet that jumped to scalding with the tiniest of nudges. I didn’t know how to adjust him, so I tried adjusting myself. I tried not to bother him.

If my dad were still alive, it would hurt him to read these words. Because he loved me. Because he never intended for me to feel like a nuisance. So why, then, did I so often feel that way?

This question has taken me decades to answer. Partly because, until relatively recently, crucial information was missing. You can’t put a puzzle together if you