Holidays

...For too long, I took these details as symbols of a deficit of Dad's love...

...Within a couple of years, Dad had moved into a new place, with a new woman...

...And one by one, we went off to bed, like the family von Trapp: so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night...

...Our leaving always began with a weary look from my older sister, and then the hushed voice—"I think we should get going soon, maybe fifteen minutes"—and the consultation and confirmation with our younger sister...

...You are near and dear to my heart...

...Mom cooked by herself during the hours we were away...

...As I drifted off to sleep, I always felt content, but also impatient for the return of normalcy...

...All four of us helped put the last touches on dinner and brought out the good china and crystal...

...We called ahead whenever we came to visit him, even though we knew we didn't have to...

...We saw less of him during most of the year, but for the winter holidays, we always made it to his house...

...Over the years, my sisters and I undoubtedly gave her more grief than we gave Dad, all too often over slight things, because there was never any Big Thing...

...She picked presents with the quotidian attentiveness that's often mistaken for motherly intuition— how did she know all my socks had holes in them, that I really wanted that book...

...and Dad, in a way that suggested that much remained to be said and done...

...But gestures are only necessary when you're a guest, and these overtures never made us feel otherwise...

...Dad came back for Christmas the following month and returned for both holidays the next season...

...When he, his wife, their kids, and whoever else was over seemed about ready to sit for dinner, we headed toward the door, because Mom's meal was bound to be almost ready by then...

...Those hours at his house passed slowly, but they were never enough...

...The first hours of hazy happiness, after waking early in the morning, were spent at Mom's...

...Even when my parents were still together, I saw more of Mom—she was the one who stayed at home, who knew our plans, and made plans for us, questioning us about our goings-on with warm concern...

...Mom stuck with us...

...He then left the United States, right before I entered the eighth grade, to spend a year-and-a-half in Paris on assignment for the Internet company he worked for...

...His goodbyes took a long time to finish...

...His younger children had more gifts, of a greater variety, chosen with the care of a father deeply involved in their lives...

...The onus placed on her after the divorce was unjust, in terms of the parental division of labor and the precepts of feminism...

...On Christmas, the gap between new and old family yawned wider...

...I was mostly wrong, I think...

...A baby girl soon followed...

...My blue-tinged memories of holidays with the family are regularly interrupted by recollections of uncommon love...

...on the way home, the three of us seldom spoke, instead hiding from our own thoughts in the fading winter light...

...Tolstoy delivered his judgment of familial dysfunction in the way only a self-assured mystic (with a dysfunctional family) can: "Happy families are all alike...

...Well, I was pretty sure you didn't have this already....I heard someone at work talking about it____It's pretty cool, right...

...She never worried about her choices, but Dad worried, and worried about worrying...

...On both Thanksgiving and Christmas, days began at Mom's by default, since that was our home...

...In the early afternoon we departed for Dad's...

...Looking back, Dad's love for us remained close to what it had always been—sometimes quiet but occasionally strangely fierce, messy and inconstant but always searching...

...We sat together and told each other how happy we were to be in each other's presence, to be eating such a wonderful meal, to have stepped back from the speed of our separate lives...

...We passed our morning eating pancakes and candy, watching the Macy's parade or fiddling with our presents...

...We would eventually gravitate toward our half brother and half sister...

...their mother, with the gratitude of a host ("We're so glad you could make it...

...So he was able to let go a little more, to expend the energies of the second half of life doing right by the children he would never leave...

...The kids would say good-by, sometimes distractedly and sometimes exuberantly...

...He removed price tags with inconsistency and left holes in the wrapping paper where the pieces he'd cut were too short...

...young children are indelicate, a relief in a carefully worded milieu...

...Our fondness for them was always genuine, if a bit self-interested...

...I was usually the last left awake...

...I want happiness for you and for all to be right in your world.'" I didn't discover the note until months after he gave the book to me, but I called him right then, not telling him what I'd just read...

...We all deserve moments of connection without reason, in the midst of so much trying and falling away...

...One recent Christmas, Dad wrote me a message on the inside jacket of a book that I didn't plan on reading: "I never really understood until recently that when Grandma gave me a book that made me say, 'huh?' it was just her way of saying, 'I'm thinking of you always...

...Our route from Westford into Cambridge, where Dad lived, went along tortuous roads running through old farming towns...

...They gripped onto our legs the minute we walked in the door, so it wasn't hard to do...

...We talked the way that we'd been trained to speak to extended relatives: asking the courteous questions, avoiding the taboo subjects...

...He knew that Mom, whose attention was spread less thin, could pick up the balance, and that his first children had reached an age where they were less materially demanding...

...But for my father to have been a constant presence would have rung false, much the same as Mom's love was rarely spontaneous and carefree...

...And then we sat around and mocked bad holiday movies on TV, just as I imagined other families did...

...My sisters and I never stayed there for more than a few hours...

...Our holiday nights at her (and our) home advanced with quiet decency and regularity...

...His gifts betrayed the habits of a busy man...

...One Christmas, my then five-year-old brother asked me, in a state of complete innocence, how it was possible that our fathers were the same person, but not our mothers...

...He usually shopped for both sisters and me at the same one or two stores each year, often from the novelty item section of a local record shop...

...When he returned, it was with a baby boy...

...After an itinerant decade, his family settled in Westford, Massachusetts...

...There was a key under the mat, a parking pass always at the ready, and an open invitation to stay over...

...Nick Serpe was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1987...

...Our nascent tradition didn't last long...

...There was nothing like it to remind me of the absurdity of the innuendoes the adults had been using all day long...

...Dad made many small gestures to encourage us to feel at ease at his new home...

...Thanksgiving is a holiday about and for a meal, but we never ate with Dad...

...The drives to the city passed quickly and with good conversation...

...Sadness and affection often fit together quite well...

...More than once he forgot my friends' names, and sometimes the name of a girlfriend, but when he did forget, it was easy to see the frustration on his face...

...The first months of separation were marked by his efforts to reach out to my two sisters and me...

...Despite the tough few months behind us, the meal passed without fighting, so we decided it was a good pattern to keep up...

...He came to all our concerts, helped coach my football team, and when Thanksgiving came around, he was back at our dining room table, sitting across from my mother...

...He was wrong—not because happy families are different too, but because he assumed families are either happy or unhappy, when they are invariably both...

...Soon my siblings and parents would retreat to the background of my life, nestled into houses just far enough away...

...every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...

...As Dad took on the responsibilities of caring for his young children during my high school years, it became my sisters' and my responsibility to visit him...

...He has been the online editor for Dissent since graduating from Columbia in 2010...