Dear Dad,
I am writing to tell you that I have grown up.
I know that now you will think "it is normal that you have grown up", but I am talking to you about growing up without you. So I start again:
Dear Dad,
I wanted to tell you that I grew up, even without you. Growing up without you is not growing like others grow up, growing up without you means sweating, it means watching a sunset and being sad, it means feeling stupid because at night you talk to yourself, because you hope someone hears you. You are my someone, but hoping hurts too much when I beg you to come back. Growing up without you means loving different, it means loving wrong. Yes dad, that's right. The absence of your love in my life has turned my heart into a boulder. And I'm not saying it just for effect. I haven't been able to love since I lost you, because watching you go was so painful that I no longer have the courage to let myself go. I don't want to relive a pain like that.
I wanted to tell you that I grew up, but that I wanted to see myself grow up with you. And you? Have you ever thought of me? Did you feel like kissing my forehead? To touch my hands? To sit at the table on Sunday? You should try the chicken cacciatore that mom makes ... It's really special. We eat a lot of it and then we compete to see who finishes first, so we take what is left. We often fight over this and if you only knew how much we laugh at each other. Maybe if you were there there would still be no chicken left in the pan, maybe the dishes would be right […] I wanted to tell you that I grew up, even without you. And I would like to show you how much my face has changed. I look a lot like you, the square jaw, the huge smile and the straight teeth. Besides, I like wine, like you.
I grew up but I still can't tell about us, I can't admit that I know what I'm missing. I can't say it out loud. The other day my mother and I had a fight, she said I don't open up to her, that I don't trust her because I never cry. He said "talk to me, tell me it still hurts too much." But I didn't answer her. I didn't even have the strength to look at her, but I felt her dead eyes on me. "I'm sorry you came across it." And he wept. In front of us he always tries to resist, but punctually cries a lot. She really can't do it. She is not afraid to cry, she is not ashamed to be seen. You were his great love, and his great pain. And now if he smiles, he smiles differently. This to God I will never forgive him.
… You really didn't have to go away.
I always listen to your favourite song to feel you with me every day.
Research shows that British women do 60% more housework. Is there any hope for balance when it comes to emptying the bins?
Why, exactly, is housework so annoying? Certain specific chores are obviously pretty unpleasant: few people relish cleaning the toilet, or extracting mouldy vegetables from the bottom drawer of the fridge. But why housework in general? Part of the answer, surely, is that it’s unending, so you never achieve that satisfying sense of getting it out of the way, nor even of having made a little progress. The only reason you’re stacking the dishwasher is so the dishes can be dirtied again tomorrow; you’re fishing the toddler’s toys from under the sofa so he can fling them back there as soon as he wakes up. “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, published in 1949. “The clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.” Needless to say, De Beauvoir wasn’t objecting solely to the work, but to the division of labour: housework is also annoying because, if you’re a woman living with a man, it’s highly likely you end up doing most of it, no matter who earns more, or who spends longer at the office. To be fair to us, men do a lot more housework than in 1949. But women still do a lot more than that. So now both sexes have grounds to resent how much of their lives they spend with Toilet Duck in hand, or scooping bits of spaghetti from the kitchen sink.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 