My biggest fear with Matilda (who I think right now has a slight preference for Hec, but who definitely goes back and forth between us) is that some of my own shitty emotional and communicative habits will get worse as I get older, I'll become more and more like my dad and less like my mom, and by the time she's 40 she and I will have the same relationship my dad and I have.

Unpossible!

Also, you are not your dad.

Hmmm... both of my parents are very good at not talking about stuff. In some ways I'm grateful - I think they'd be devastated if they found out I'm an atheist, but so far they've yet to ask me point-blank if I believe in God. Maybe they suspect but are afraid of the answer?

I was getting closer to my dad the last few years. Then cancer got him. I'm still bitter.

Maybe they suspect but are afraid of the answer?

Definitely possible (completely different secret, but my mom admitted later that that was exactly what was going on with her and my youngest brother, whom she knew was gay--as true as she knew it was, it somehow wasn't real as long as no one said the words out loud).

I'm not exactly my dad, but I do have some of his emotional weirdness and I have to consciously fight against a lot of my natural tendencies.

I envy you folk who had parents you could talk to during your adulthood. I considered myself an orphan for twenty years before my mother died. The last time I tried to communicate with her about anything important was when I got married--and when she told me, "Oh, you were serious about getting married? I thought it was a joke." "Mother, I'm getting married tomorrow. Would you like to talk to your future son-in-law?" "You really found someone who would marry you?" I think that was the last time I exchanged words with her.

I'm sure you had to be there, but to me, what Em said sounded purely practical and probably reflected her hearing adults say things like "If you need me, call."

I understand how you feel, java; I feel that way when people talk about being close to their fathers. Mine never kept a promise to me and as the drinking got worse, he got meaner. Looking back, I can feel sorry for him. He had an isolated childhood with a super-controlling father and a crazy mother, and he had mental illness that wasn't diagnosed until his 50s. He was also smart and funny and a great story teller, and I like to think I got some of that from him. He spent his last years in a nursing home in a dreadful physical and mental state. I have never missed him, but I have missed what he might have been.

Oh, I haven't gotten any in forever, either. I'm just taking the chance to poke at her here and say "Zombies? I like zombies ..."

I need to write more of it first. I'm sorry!

P-C, you want to read it? I'd love your take on it.

My dad and I are too alike to be close in a talky-meat kind of way - our phone conversations are comically monosyllabic. So I'd say I'm close to both of my parents in different ways.

Separated at birth, we are!

Lillian's fonder of Paul. He's more fun than I am, and less prone to retreating into his own head. But I'm the fixer of sorrow and needs, or something.

P-C, you want to read it? I'd love your take on it.

I'd love to!

Will send. Um, in a minute. I have to get it off the other computer.

Hey, is your profile address the current one?