ACCOZZAGLIA

Well, it is teh over. I am a graduatededed. I actually now have a nifty piece of parchment. My only gripe is that they should have scanned the important people’s sigs with a higher res, since a $70K education should not have pixellated images on it ANYWHERE. Digital FAIL.

Now I’m in this annoying limbo, enrobed in a sense of post-celebration blues and coated with a sense of disillusionment at having invited my father to convocation. But the big one is I’ve yet to hear from CIC on whether I get to work here for the remainder of the summer or not. If not, then this is going to be a sucky-shitty remainder of the summer as I try to figure out how to set up things at McGill.

McGill. Wow. I’m going to McGill. Almost four months later, now it’s finally beginning to hit me. Am I good enough for them? Will I do good things? Not sure if I asked myself these questions in 2005 when the UofT admitted me, but I’m sure a variation of this crossed my mind. Then again, I think my head space was more, “My ex got in, and I got in. I’m as good as her, dammit, and I’m going to prove it.” Or something like that.

My dad showed up at convocation. I invited him, as I explained to him, because “it was the responsible thing to do.” He had hoped I was going to say, “Because I wanted you here.” But I didn’t. My ex-gf, cheekybrit, said “You weren’t just cold or icy, but total dry ice — with limbs falling off.”

I’m sorry. The guy pretty much didn’t honour the one and only non-negotiable thing I asked of him after I tried to give him a second chance at a father-daughter relationship from 1998 to 2005: if my remaining grandmother (and last grandparent) got sick or lost her health, he was to notify me asap, no matter the state of our relationship. My other grandmother, the one who raised me for two years? I found out she died in 1998, eight months after the fact.

And, well, he failed: his mother was succumbing to a hip injury for two weeks in June 2008 after falling from a city bus, but it was only after she passed away when I got this out-of-the-blue email after not hearing from him for three years how she died on Canada Day. I was livid, and I also couldn’t figure out why he didn’t write or phone me for three years after sounding agitated in the last three phone calls I placed to him in 2005 just after I moved here.

So I had lunch with him after three days of friends running interference for me. He alleged how he was never mad at me, despite his testy tone and then dead silence for three years. He alleged that he doesn’t remember the promise of notifying me immediately if his mother was dying, even though I drilled this into his head repeatedly after I learnt my other grandmother passed away how I didn’t want that to happen again. He did, at least, broach an unprompted apology for not being a protector as a parent when my mother abused me (and to other capacities, my siblings), but added, “I was a victim of her, too.”

So I told him, “You were also an adult and had agency in the situation that we as kids did not. You were an enabler as much as a victim.” He was slower to admit to that. He said he was proud of my graduating, even though I equivocated by saying, “Well, it was only ‘with distinction’, not ‘with high distinction’ or a degree from Cambridge, Oxford, Yale or Harvard.” I tried to stay stoical through the whole meal, but in trying to explain to him that being outcasted by my own family of origin ever since being a child — with my mother taking the four kids she bore and invariably “three-plus-oneing” us, with me as that “one” — hurt me and made me believe that I was a failure up to the present, I couldn’t entirely keep it together.

But I looked at him so infrequently the whole time he was here. I brought up the paternity issue, insomuch as I just want to know what the other daddy candidate looked like. My dad offered to do a paternity test, but I said I was disinterested, because my interest isn’t in claiming another father or worrying about hereditary disease — just a clearer understanding of what the other man looked like and whether it might explain why I don’t much look like my dad or my siblings. And I told him I wasn’t inclined to give third chances at a relationship. I sugar-coated nothing. I don’t know how he took it.

So while I presented him with my best stony-hearted bitch façade, I was hurting like hell inside. Still am. So this adds a little dimension as to why I feel so wiped out right now.