Tough Love

It’s shown and said out loud. Permeates the shields of your ears with questions. Born of truth.

“Are you a coward?“

Immediately, you defend your honor with a staggered stance. Surely you are warrior material, but you pause and look down only to see your own nakedness. The only protection you’ve mustered exists in hiding. Your pursuit of peacekeeping has left you agreeable, “fine” and dishonest.

You’ve fooled no one but yourself and now you are confronted with questions and dares.

You wouldn’t take this prodding from just anyone. Certainly not your own mother, yet this person is wise; healed from lessons learned and you sense the opportunity. It is a rare gift for a strong man to divulge his own pain and choices and offer it to you. Not even as a guide, per se, but rather the exact food your thoughts have been craving. Circumstances are different, yet the emotions tied to the experience, are universal. And they are delivered only in a time when you could understand them.

Before, it was too easy for you to cast stones because you played it so safe. You dodged the grey and settled for binaries.

“Guilt is a worthless emotion,“ He says. Though so much of your life has been driven by it.

Though the words slice through your tensed muscles to your core, you are gifted the chance to assess the pieces of your life in a judgment-free home. “We have done it all,” means they’ve lived a full life. There is a comfort in that you cannot shock him. He listens to your pleadings, your defenses blind with love’s intoxication, but stands firm. No hugs for you or your tears. Instead, space given for words to land and room to process.

“You could’ve had a corporate job.”

“Did you settle for a fleeting minute?”

Words that a year ago would have brought shame and shut you down yet in this moment his facts rattle your soul awake.

And in this home of no judgment, you can devise plans on how to act forward. As a warrior, unafraid, though knowing intense, physical and emotional pain await. A pain that is necessary, he assures me, to live differently.

“You can only control how you act now”

To be stronger. To have my own life and one not lived for others. So that when again I’m asked by him or anyone

“Who are you?”

I’ll know because my actions will prove it thus.

Not to please or to follow a pattern because everything else is fabrication.

An act, instead, of the soul’s expression. A battle for honesty.

How lucky to receive this gift, these calls to action and truth from a father figure.