The formula isn’t too complicated.
The first step is to be the perfect son. Now what the hell does that mean? It means good grades. (Daddy certainly wouldn’t want a child who gets a ‘B+’). It means always doing your chores: taking out the garbage in a manner that left no trace of you having even opened the dumpster, drying dishes until they looked like they belonged next to the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, and making your bed to the military precision of a West Point cadet. It means helping your younger sister with her pre-Algebra homework and keeping your two idiot younger brothers from beating the snot out of each other over who gets to put the final piece on their LEGO Star Wars’ Star Destroyer. It means helping Mom carry the grocery bags from the car and making dinner twice a week.
Then it’s on to college. Preferably an Ivy, but in your case Duke will do (after all, Daddy would surely appreciate you being close enough to home so that you can check in on your sister and her boyfriend troubles, make sure that Beavis and Butthead haven’t flunked middle school yet (or perhaps more likely bashed each other’s skulls in with a 31 inch aluminum Easton baseball bat), and ensure that all of this hasn’t led Mom to fully take to the bottle. Maintain a 4.0 GPA. Walk onto the football team and, in less than two seasons, become the starting tight end and the team’s leading option in the passing game. Graduate Suma Cum Laude in three and a half years (in order to save a semester’s worth of tuition) with a double major in economics and political science.
Next, join up with the Marines. Their motto: Semper Fidelus, always faithful (Daddy would like that, wouldn’t he?). Ship off to Afghanistan where, as a member of special forces, you earn a Silver Cross and Purple Heart for your service and ascend the ranks, eventually rising to gunnery sergeant. After four years, receive an honorable discharge and return to the States to see your family. Semper Fi, after all.
Visit your sister, who’s now a junior at UNC and is a lot better than you at algebra, and a lot of other things too. Go home to your brothers, who must have finally gotten over their fear of spinach while you were away, because they are dangerously approaching your six-foot-four-inch stature. Help them with their college essays; yes, somehow these morons are going to go to college. Make sure Mom’s still going to her AA meetings and not putting too much pressure on herself between work and getting Thing 1 and Thing 2 through high school.
Then, it’s back to Duke for law school. Get more good grades. Meet a girl and go on a few dates. Realize that she is “the one.” You didn’t know what the hell that meant until now. Continue to go out for another 10 months. Prepare to ask the question, dammit Gunny you’ve faced mortar fire from Taliban infantry and got hit by a sniper round in the shoulder in Kabul, and yet this is the most nervous you’ve ever been. Finally, you do it, you ask her to marry you. She says yes.
Five years later. You’re both done with law school. You are living in a modest two story home fifteen minutes outside of your jobs in Raleigh. Mom moved up here to be closer to you. She has retired and has completely kicked the bottle in favor of knitting and her biweekly bridge game. Your sister is up north of the Mason-Dixon in New York doing cancer research. One brother is about to wrap up his senior year at Duke and wants to go to aviation school. The other one is at finishing UNC, where he has already lined up a job post school at an architectural firm.
Oh, and you have a son now. He is a year and a half old with a full head of blonde hair, pudgy thighs, and lanky legs that forebode a threat to your status as the tallest in the family. You know that this chubster will never have to win his daddy’s love because he already has it and always will. You give him the type of love you never had from your father.
And eventually (hopefully), you do the thing I never could. You come to your senses and realize that this shouldn’t have been about your father. You never will get Daddy to love you. After all, he has been in a wooden box six feet underground in Elkwood cemetery since you were 11. You never did win Daddy’s love and that’s ok. You don’t need Daddy’s love to prove to yourself that you are a good person. It is merely your own love that needs to be won.
