When Your Father Is Your Bully

Bullying is never a good thing.

Some people grow out of it. Some grow older and carry it with them. And some fathers somehow turn teasing their children into a language of their own.

He picks on you whenever he gets the chance.

Your hair.

Your clothes.

Your mistakes.

The way you speak.

That one embarrassing thing you did years ago that he somehow still remembers.

You tell him to stop.

He laughs.

You get angry.

He laughs even more.

Sometimes you wonder if he knows how annoying he is.

But then something happens.

You need something, and somehow he's already there.

You fail at something, and he's the first person asking what happened.

Someone else makes fun of you, and suddenly the joke isn't funny anymore.

He can spend an entire evening making you wish he'd leave you alone, then spend the next morning worrying about whether you've eaten.

It's a strange kind of relationship.

You can be angry with him and still look for him in a crowded room.

You can complain about him to everyone and still become strangely defensive when someone else does the same.

You can grow tired of his jokes without ever becoming tired of having him around.

Maybe that's the part nobody tells you about growing up.

One day, you begin to notice that behind all the teasing, there are little things.

The extra food left for you.

The call asking where you are.

The money he pretends wasn't a sacrifice.

The quiet way he checks whether you're okay without actually asking.

And suddenly, some of the things you once found irritating begin to look different.

Not necessarily better.

Just different.

Because perhaps a father's love isn't always delivered in the language we expect.

Sometimes it arrives as advice.

Sometimes as silence.

Sometimes as sacrifice.

And sometimes, inexplicably, as a joke you have heard a hundred times.

You laugh because you've heard it before.

He laughs because he knows you will.

And somewhere between the two of you, there is a kind of understanding neither of you ever really talks about.

Until one day, you realize the house is quieter than it used to be.

And you catch yourself missing the voice that used to annoy you so much.