The Father’s Days you don’t see

Her dad’s social feeds are suddenly full of photos of their Father’s Day dinner. With only her dad and his other daughter in any of the pics.

She’s just seen them, scrolled through them all — the dinner, the event they took their dad to after, the captions referring to it as a great “daddy-daughter date”… All posed or cropped such that it’s as if she didn’t exist.

So now she’s smiling, glassy-eyed.

ME: “What’s up?”

HER: “Oh, nothing. It’s just… he’s not even my real dad. He adopted me. Because my real dad didn’t want me either.”

I inhale, hold it a second, let it out.

“OK,” I say, “Let’s just… Objectively, you must know that a lot of the people who feel this kind of rejection are really incredible, awesome people.”

“Yeah.”

“So, objectively, you probably know on some level that when this kind of rejection happens, it says a lot more about the person doing the rejecting than about the person being rejected.”

“Mm. Yeah.”

“OK. I’m sorry your dad is such an ass-hat.”