Love Through Apple Peels
The small and silent ways emotionally estranged fathers and daughters show love to one another.
Mary Wallace
When I was little, my father would grab a green apple and cut the skin off, letting me eat the peels one by one as they fell onto his plate. We sat in silence, eating our parts of the apple until we were done, and then we would return to our own lives. Separate. We never spoke about it. He would peel, and I would eat—every night.
When a girl starts growing up, some invisible line forms between her and her father. As she fumbles to form an identity for herself, she realizes that her shapeshifting will act as a barrier between her and her father. Some fathers and daughters make it through this awkward transitional period and remain close or even grow closer. And some allow the silence to keep stretching on until one day, neither of them recognizes the other anymore. Me and my father fell immediately into that second group.
Gone were the days of watching sitcom reruns together or crying to him after a bad fall at soccer practice. Gone were the days of the green apple peels.
It’s not like we didn’t get along, but I can’t recall any time we said I love you even before the adolescent onset of silence. Even birthdays couldn’t escape this silence; we never said happy birthday out loud but instead diverted to texting it. Father’s Day always filled me with uncertainty—the cheesy cards, the overt displays of love and affection. I would watch fathers and daughters with close relationships on TV and wonder where exactly everything went wrong. Why couldn’t we show love to each other in the same way? Why couldn’t we emulate the expected behaviors of love?
Then in the summer of 2018, my dad had to undergo open heart surgery. He would need to recover at home for at least a month. And since my mom couldn’t take much time off work, the task of caring for him fell to me.
I panicked. It’s not that I didn’t want to take care of him. I recognized why the responsibility fell on me, and I was ready to take it on. But taking care of my father required a sort of closeness that we had lost years ago. I would need to spend every day with him, help him with his food and medicine, help him in and out of bed, and help him with exercises the doctor ordered. We could no longer be ships passing in the night, only exchanging a sentence or two when I wanted to go to a friend’s house or figuring out what’s for dinner. I would have to take walks with him and put his shoes on for him, and make sure his bandages were clean. I would not be able to escape, and neither could he.
The first time I helped my dad get into bed during that period, I panicked. Yes, it was out of fear of hurting him, but it was also because I hadn’t touched him in years.
I couldn’t remember the last time we had hugged, yet now I was supposed to use my hands to lift him, support him. It felt unnatural. I went into autopilot as I walked him to bed, placed my hands on his back and hip as he sat down, lifted his legs, and turned him over so that he could lay flat before putting the blanket over him and getting out of there.
I chastised myself for this. He’s your father, he made it through a major surgery and is lucky to be alive, and you’re sitting here anxious to even touch him. He held you as a baby, cared for you, carried you to your bed when you fell asleep on the couch. What is wrong with you?
So I shifted gears. The next day after dinner, instead of watching TV on my laptop like I always did, I brought my laptop to the living room and asked Dad what he wanted to watch. He said I could choose something, so I chose an old favorite of ours, The Golden Girls. We fell into a routine almost instantly, laughter and occasional commentary breaking the emptiness between us. There was comfort to it. And I realized quickly that the burden I had been feeling in our relationship were the limitations and unrealistic expectations that I placed on our relationship.
I realized that by comparing who we were now to who I thought we were or what a ‘typical’ father-daughter relationship looked like from TV, I was longing for a dynamic that never really existed in the first place. I may have been daddy’s little girl at one point, but his love for me had never faded. Instead, its ways of expression just became more silent.
That may sound sad to some. There are women who would give anything to tell their fathers they love them one more time, to share a meal with them. But there are also women like me who share this kind of silence with their fathers. Women who don't say or hear I love you but receive cut-up fruit. For now, it is enough to know that love is present even in the silence. The love is there when I remind him to take his medicine and when he reminds me to text him that I got home safe. We may not hug or have conversations, but we do laugh and wash dishes and enjoy sitcoms. Love isn’t always expressed in dramatic declarations.
One day during that summer, I was walking the grocery store aisles and saw green apples. When was the last time we had apples? I picked up a bag and brought them home. After dinner that night, in front of the TV with a Golden Girls rerun on, Dad asked me to bring him a green apple and a knife. He peeled the skin off, and the peels fell, one by one, onto the plate below. I wondered if he remembered. I took one peel for myself. Then another. Until I ate all the peels and he had finished the apple. Without saying anything, we did it again the next day.
