39: Talking With Dad

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just realized that Rocket should've been 24 this entire time and not 23 because his birthday (august) would not have lined up with him being 18 during the draft (june). so he should've been 24 turning 25 during the summer not 23 turning 24 during the summer which would put him a year and a half younger than Håkon instead of 2 and a half. 

also this is like INSANELY long whoops

ROCKET:

"So." Rey smacks her hands together, bowls empty, small talk mostly exhausted, tension a little high. "I'm going to leave, go upstairs, leave you two here where I expect you to not skirt around that discussion that needs to happen."

I glance at my Dad who seems to be just about as nervous as I am about the simple prospect of this.

I give her a thumbs up.

She points between us. "I don't know you as well, Milo, but Dad you gotta talk about this. I know you wanna be goofy and avoid it."

I lean back in the chair, letting it squeak a little.

"I will come back in a half hour and redirect if needed." Rey says. "Enjoy." And then she disappears up the stairs, leaving me alone with my Dad.

I glance sideways at him, averting my eyes when I catch him looking back. It's a little too much for my exhausted and overstressed brain and I can't quite stifle a giggle.

He lets out a little laugh a couple seconds after me. Then we're fucking hopeless laughing.

"She's exactly like mom." I wheeze, hand over my chest. "I expect you two to talk seriously about the situation at hand." I say, putting on a false voice. "C'mon who does she think I am?"

He bursts out laughing.

"Focus on the task at hand." I hold up a hand, trying to gain my breath to say something else. "Like, Rey, focus isn't even in my vocabulary, much less my ability. I've got two settings, space cadet and holy-shit-I'm-about-to-die. We've got Neptune and shootout and that's it." I look up at him and start laughing again.

"How are shootouts? I know this is off topic but I can't imagine they're fun." He asks, suddenly interested.

"Awful," I respond, running a hand through my hair. "Takes a couple months off my life every time I have to be in for one. Just you and the shooter and 20,000 people watching and the whole game is on your shoulders, most of the time I go home and lay on the floor for a couple hours wondering why in god's name I decided to go pro with this."

"So you really like hockey, don't you?" He's trying to get me to talk and I bite.

"Yeah," I sigh. "Well, okay, no, here's the thing. I got to Canada and I didn't speak english so understandably the only thing I had in common with Canadian kids was hockey, so I absolutely dove into it. I was awful at school because I was an ESL student, english as a second language, and I didn't know the half of what was going on. So hockey was what everyone said I was good at, and I was, and I love it, except I don't think I gave myself time to think about what I would do if I wasn't doing hockey. One day I'm 13 and we're winning province championships because I came out of nowhere and was insanely good compared to them, and the next I'm standing on the stage at the draft, pulling on the Boston jersey and I'm thinking to myself, was I supposed to be doing something else? I love it, don't get me wrong, I adore hockey and the playing and the rush and all of that, but sometimes I get so exhausted and overwhelmed by the amount of traveling and full-day practices and I wonder, what would I be doing if I stayed here? Would I be like you and go into engineering? Would I be an artist? Would I have done something other than hockey?" 

I shake my head. "I'm not made for it, mentally, my structure and functioning isn't made for those types of stressors. I do badly with loud noises I can't control when I'm tired, my body type isn't exactly right for what I'm doing, socially it's more than I should take on day-to-day, a lot of the time I come home absolutely exhausted, a lot of this is incompatible with me but at the same time, I owe my life to it. I adore the team and I love being goofy with fans and in interviews and with all of that, I love watching progress in myself, I love the energy of playing a game and I love the stakes and the action and the movement and a ton of things. I love getting up and going to work and I wait most of the offseason ridiculously excited to head back for preseason, there's just things about it I can't give up. So yeah, I really like hockey, but I'll be okay when the time comes where I have to give it up because my body can't handle it anymore."

"When is that?" He asks. "I don't pay close attention to much of it, so I don't know when the average retirement time is."

"Thirty? Mid thirties is somewhat normal. I've got a four year contract I'm in the second year of now and it doesn't look like they're looking to move me and I hope I can build enough of a bully on the program to keep me in Regina for the rest of my career, just to stick with my friends. But I'll probably be out in my early thirties unless I get severely injured or start getting fuzzy in the head or getting more common injuries. I love hockey but I'd rather not sacrifice a fulfilling life after it to stay playing as long as I physically can."

"When's he going to retire?" Dad stops for a second. "Håkon, I mean."

I shrug. "I haven't talked with him about it yet, he's under a ten year contract, though, so depending on what happens with us and where we are when mine closes out and when his closes out, we'll see. Mine ends a year after his does." I pull in a breath. "Honestly, both of us are probably alright to not reenter the workforce when we're done, he makes 11 million dollars a year and I make around four."

Dad raises his eyebrows. "Wow."

"Yeah. We get taxed around half, but, it's a lot. We're both well off and together even better."

"After hockey what are you planning on?"

I sigh. "Art, maybe, I always wanted to get into art so maybe that's going to be my post-career crisis. Him, I'm not sure. It is important to mention that he's got an alarming soft spot for kids."

Dad thinks on that for a moment. "So you think he'll want to be a parent when he's done with the league."

"I think, if we're still with each other, we'll consider that. It's going to be a few years, though, and we both have to grow into ourselves a little more before taking on a responsibility like that." I let out a little nervous laugh. "What about you? What have you been doing?"

He shrugs. "Waking up and going to work just the same as I did before you left. Pretty much the same lunch every day, same sort of tasks, it's been kind of bland. The biggest thing for me has been watching Rey grow up."

I nod for him to continue and he breathes for a moment.

"It was a lot for me to lose you and Hel and I know it's completely my fault but I realized I was absolutely wrong the night after. I just laid there alone and thought and thought and thought and I was up most of the night going back and forth, trying to justify my own hatred because I didn't want to admit that I was wrong about it. Eventually as the morning came I came to the same conclusion I had a hundred times before in that night, what does it matter who he loves? It doesn't bother me. It doesn't involve me. It doesn't make him any less human. It doesn't make him any less of my son. It doesn't change who he is, who he wants to be, what his personality is. It might say it's wrong in this stupid old book of folklore that I supposedly was supposed to adhere to to achieve eternal whatever and the next but if I know, fundamentally, that it's wrong to hate someone for that, then what the hell is that book even supposed to mean?" 

He shakes his head. "I went into this sort of crisis, picking things apart, coming to the conclusion over and over and over again that I was right that it didn't matter who you loved and that the book which I'd spent most of my life thinking was supposed to be law was wrong. Which made it so much worse because everything I was supposed to believe about everything had this sort of huge fundamental flaw in it, hating someone else for something they can't control. I abandoned it. I felt like shit going to church in the first place, felt this weird guilt that mentally, every second of the day, I was picking my kid and who he loved over the things assigned to me in that stupid book."

"Religious guilt," I sigh, setting my head down on the table. "I know what you're talking about. It happened to me, arguably the same feeling. Mom still made us go to church, still does to this day and brings me sometimes when I can, but I sit there and the way we were taught in this house was one way and the way I am contradicts it entirely. When I was littler, I thought I was going to get struck out of the sky or some shit for it." 

I'm fiddling with my spoon on the table. "It was one of the bigger talking points with Håkon when we first got together. He's from sort of the same start, hyper religious, different denominations, but the same religion. We sat down for a couple hours once and went over everything we were taught to believe and what we think now and how it feels even years after both of us have abandoned most of the organized part outside of doing it with our families. It was a weird conversation and he definitely thinks about it differently than I do but it was good and fun and almost healthy in a way to talk about how it was used against us when it was supposed to be for us."

"I can only imagine," Dad sighs. "It was just weird to come to the realization that the one thing I was always told was overarching and never wrong was actually incredibly wrong. I mean, I guess the book still stands and I understand how that's a translation error and mostly people wanting to be homophobic with a reason but it was still something correlated with religion and religion is, inherently, designed to make people happier."

"You researched, didn't you?"

"Hours," he nods. "Days, even. I don't think I went to work for about a week after it and I just sat around here and burned my eyes out staring at a computer screen reading and rereading and trying to come up with a way where some part of what I did could be justified and I know that's not at all what you want to hear, that I wanted to be justified, but I couldn't admit that I was wrong, everything was pointing to me being wrong but I just wasn't there yet, I didn't know yet, I didn't know how to accept that I was wrong and that I had just made the single worst mistake of my life."

I shake my head. "Religion sucks. Especially Christianity. I understand a million times over why it was created and why people believe in it and why it's so popular out of all the religions out there and why all of it, but once you get into it, under their overall messages, it's just all a mess and awful. I guess most major religions are like that because with belief comes power and power is one of the most addictive things we humans have access to so being in a position of power in a belief network is almost inherently corrupting but parts of me know it's the only thing I'll ever adhere to because I'm just so afraid it will turn out to be right and then what?"

"I don't know." He responds. "It was the first thing I looked to, though, you left and I tried immediately to find grounding in religion and all of that, to explain why I did that in such a rushed and angry way. Eventually I turned from that to science, researching what it is that I could have done to-" he shakes his head.

"To make me gay in the first place?"

"Yeah," he sighs. "It's- it's embarrassing, now, but, I wanted to know if there was a fix, a solution, so I could have my little family back and have it without you and who you were attracted to. After that I started arguing the idea with myself, going through it over and over and over again, realizing slowly that it's not at all something you can fix, edit, change, any of that. It took so long for it to fit into my head that it was just like the length of your arms or the color of your hair, you're just gay and that's what it is. I tried so hard to come up with excuses. It's in the brain, attraction is, so I tried to come up with a single proven and reliable research experiment that says you can edit that mentally, like how talk therapy helps with depression, or medications with OCD or- any of that. Your mom has always been better at psychology than me but I knew that it was in the brain and the brain has a conscious overlaid on it so therefore you have to be able to change it."

I let out a tiny laugh. "You can't. If you could I'd bring home a girl."

He nods. "That was one of the biggest things that proved it to me. If you could chose, if it was something you could undo, why would there still be gay people? The environment is so hostile for them, you, all of it, why would they still choose it. Why, if they run the risk of being killed, would they choose it. Why, if their dating options are small, would they choose it. Why, if people like me exist, would they choose it."

"My boyfriend, Håkon, didn't get the little privilege of having the homophobia out of his life when he came out like I did. I came out and you were gone just like that, his parents weren't gone and he didn't even know he had come out to them, I'm not sure if I'm quite allowed to tell this but I feel like it's important to prove that even further. He was eleven. His friend was having a kissing competition with the girls in his grade and he didn't want to. He wanted to kiss Wilhelm. He didn't know what it was, never figured it out, didn't understand it until, damn, I wanna say he was probably eighteen, first season in pros, but his parents immediately brainwashed him straight down into nothingness about it, he's absolutely living proof that there's no way you can change it. I couldn't bear being around his parents for three weeks, much less having them down your shirt about everything for eighteen years and then some considering he goes home every summer. If he could've changed it, he would have in a minute. He might still. I might still. If I had that option, to go back and be straight and avoid all the hurt this has caused me, I don't know. I still don't. We've thought about this, together, talked about it, neither of us are sure that we'd pick the other over going back and being straight to begin with."

Dad nods but stays quiet for a few moments. I'm on the verge of opening my mouth again but he says something first. "I came about my wits fully about a month afterward and from there I spiraled, I couldn't effectively keep myself upright and functioning. I remember getting physically sick thinking about it, it got to a point where I couldn't even look at Rey without being absolutely wracked with shame, I had to ask the Svobodas to take her, I couldn't handle it. I was awful to you, I lost my wife, then I was such a bad man I couldn't even look my daughter in the eyes and tell her why half her family was missing. Why they weren't coming back. She asked and asked, you know? Hourly, daily, then weekly and slowly I watched the intervals of her asking decrease and that really pushed it in, how badly I had messed everything up."

He pulls in a shaking breath. "It took a year and a half for me to handle having Reyna in the house again, she was 13 then, newly transitioned, confused, socially anxious. I didn't know anything about being trans and so when I found out, when Basia let me know what was happening, why she'd gone radio silent for a few weeks, I burned any thought I had of it being unusual or bad and I dove into research, if I didn't like something, I learned about it until I knew enough to understand why I should be okay with it. I was terrible with it, at first, I'm sure she's told you, I messed up her name, her pronouns, everything, it was awkward and hard to navigate for me but I wasn't going to lose her too. I wasn't going to let my hate overpower me." He breathes in. "I got a pretty good grip on that in a few months and since then I've just been here. Idle."

I sigh, leaning back in the chair I'm sitting in. "For me, I got to Canada and dove into all this. Things didn't start getting better until I was 16, I met Steph and I started growing back into my skin, with his help, most of the time. He and I had so much in common we sort of glued together. I got used to myself, my sexuality, when I was 18. I was a senior and Steph was dating this girl, had been for a little bit, so me and her friend paired off on accident, we didn't actually like each other but felt like we had to, eventually we decided on being friends instead of our atrocious trying-to-date thing we had going on. She took me to prom, that's this weird American thing where you underage drink but school-sanctioned. We didn't want to be down in the room for the slow dances because we weren't actually dating, though everyone thought we were and had been for months, so she took me up to the roof of the school." I pull in a long breath. "She was the first person I told other than you and Mom, after that, that spring, the rest of it, at least, she worked her ass of wiggling it into my head that being gay wasn't this huge awful thing. I managed to tell Steph the night before the draft and then it stayed quiet again until Jilly, his sister, and then Håkon."

"Hows it been with hockey? The sexuality thing."

"Hostile," I respond because that's the honest truth. "Hostile as hell. I heard the f-slur almost daily in the OHL, just tossed around the locker room, not at me, just at each other with the intent to harm. The hazing wasn't great but it wasn't as bad as it could've been, I saw a kid in middle school get beat up for an untimely boner, all of it. I've seen all of it in hockey. Not with the Wolves, though, for some reason, they're a better group of guys, I'd dare out on a branch saying the best in the high league. Not harmless, I've heard a few things, but not as bad as the OHL and certainly not as bad as when I was playing high school varsity in Whitby."

I shake my head and keep going. "It's like a competition with those boys, nothing has ever not been a joke to them. For me my sexuality was never something I could joke about, probably never will be, and that let me know how serious some of those things are, skin color can't be joked about because we haven't healed that much. Sexuality can't be joked about. Gender can't be joked about. Poverty. Ability. Mental health. All of it. Nobody's ever exposed them to how real those things are and how much they do hurt to someone in those groups, my experience, of course, is different than racism, different than ableism, and I'm still a cis white man in high financial standing but I know some of it. They don't and they refuse to learn because it would be admitting that they're wrong and nobody wants to do that. So it's a game. How many people can we offend, how many slurs can we say. It might be just that on the surface but under it it's a serious thing to them, they know somewhere in there that the only reason they are where they are at the moment is their privilege and they're going to fight to keep it because it keeps them in that higher standing. We all want a higher standing. So it was hostile. Deeply, deeply, hostile."

He stays quiet for a few moments, processing. Then he asks a question that makes my insides go all warm and fuzzy. "So I guess this is the part where I get to ask you about your boyfriend."

I hide a smile,

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