babbling brooke.

I know a lot of words.

I don’t know if you’re hip with the dating-discourse of the youth. But there’s this big thing about “daddy issues” going around right now, mostly on the internet. Every single female problem is for some reason immediately attributed to “daddy issues.” Hate driving? Daddy issues. Can’t fix a toilet? Daddy issues. Seek out older men who take pride in your own personal accomplishments? Daddy issues. It’s ridiculous and annoying and honestly deeply sexist. I can’t even tell a funny story on a first date without a guy exclaiming I have daddy issues. And he’s always way too excited about it too. 

The thing is, I don’t think I have daddy issues. But my dad did have issues. He’s a good guy and all. I just think there’s a good chance his being a weird guy made me a weird girl. Well, I used to think he was weird. But I’m now wondering if he was actually just insane. I was thinking back to one of my first memories of my dad (I don’t remember him much before I was five. I’m sure he was there, maybe he was just busy?). 

I was either freshly five or a jaded, chain-smoking six. Either way, he was driving me around the neighborhood, probably to celebrate my newfound ability to read, or to hold an inappropriately adult conversation with one of his work friends. I don’t know. He pulled over by the side of a house and said, “see this house? We almost bought it when you were a baby. A doctor and his wife used to live here —“ and he’s smiling some creepy Cheshire-Cat-I’m-gonna-irreparably-fuck-up-my-daughter’s-perception-of-medically-accomplished-men-among-many-other-things grin. — He went on. “One night she overcooked his pasta just slightly. So you know what he did?” He asked me like I read the news. Again, I was five. Or six.

Anyway, he tells me. “He brought her to the bathtub and chopped her up into little pieces.” I think he held for some applause, laughter, or a gasp of utter horror. But I was his daughter, after all. And I had only one question.

“Why didn’t we buy the house?”

He said it was out of our price range and we drove away.

The other day, I matched with a med student on Tinder. Don’t think I’ll see him though. This better judgment is what keeps me safe, I think. Also, I don’t cook. So there’s no chance of me overcooking my new beaux’s linguini and becoming bathtub ratatouille.

==

Again, I’m very stable. I learned about the eternal destruction of humanity when I was 7, just like every other well-adjusted debutante. In the most abrupt and unnatural way too. My dad just leaned over to me one night and asked, “Do you know what a nuclear bomb is?” And he was doing his Cheshire-Cat-I’m-gonna-give-my-daughter-something-to-write-about grin again. Anyway, he asked me if I knew what a nuclear bomb was and I said “no, I’m 7.” Because I didn’t know and I was indeed 7. So he told me, keeping his grin as he became death, destroyer of his wide-eyed daughter’s world. After his explanation of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, and skin-peeling radiation poisoning, he topped it all off with “and it could happen at any time on any day.” 

He could see my eyes welling up. That’s when he decided to take the matters of comforting his daughter into his own hands. On his giant speakers (he’s an audiophile, on top of all this), he played “Radioactivity” by Kraftwerk. If you don’t know the song, it’s this 80’s new-wave song with robotic German voices chanting the names of cities decimated by radioactivity. “CHER-NO-BYL.” “HARR-IS-BURG.” He played it so loud the house literally shook, as he laughed. Maniacally.

Years later, I found out that as President Truman dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki, he also laughed maniacly. I wonder if he had the same thing my dad has.

My mom’s pretty nice, though.