@
Elegy My Dad is not about humiliation and especially mocking. My Dad is a very hard man. He was born and spent his whole childhood in Iceland. He came to the US as a teenager with my grandparents and worked his ass off to become a cattle rancher. He is without a doubt the toughest and hardest man that I’ve ever known my entire life. He is also kind and compassionate but he is never weak and suffers no fools. I’ve always been his princess but princesses have to be smart and tough as nails as well in his book. Probably the only reason I survived my hell is based on what he taught. Don’t remember the exact details but one summer when I was an arrogant teenager, I was helping my dad and he noticed a break in our fence. Somebody on the dirt road must have clipped it with their car. We hadn’t had any cattle wander out but it needed a temporary fix to keep them in until we could fully repair the fence. I told my dad I’d fix it with some bailing wire and he asked if I needed help and I said no because I wanted to prove to him that I can do anything my brothers can. It had been hard to see from the road but when I walked over the break was way worse than I had thought. Some of the fence up was pretty bad and the section was far too long for any bailing wire to work at all. I tried to bail it up the best I could but I knew it wouldn’t hold them if they pushed up against it but I was way too embarrassed to tell him that it was a bigger job than I could handle. My Dad thought he had at least a few hours to fix it. About an hour later we had about a dozen head break through my shit job. After we got the cattle back he went over and saw that I had to have known that the posts were pulled up and I’d be a dumbass to think it would hold. He wanted me to apologize for not asking for help when I knew better. My stubborn pride felt that would be weak. He said any child of his too stupid or too arrogant to apologize when they are wrong and know it, could walk the fuck back home. It was a long way to the house and towards evening by the time I got home but I learned a lot during my long walk back home.
1.) I learned my Dad don’t fuck around.
2.) That I’m strong enough to hold to my convictions even when I’m dead wrong.
3.) I learned my Dad won’t expect me to apologize unless I’m actually wrong because he wouldn’t.
4.) Most importantly that arrogance is not strength, even it feels like it, it’s stupidity & weakness of mind.
I’ve watched my Dad apologize since. Not very often because he’s rarely wrong but all the more moving when he does because it’s very fucking real.
