who are you?

my father is probably the most intelligent man i know. he's captain of the united states park police and was just recently promoted to major. people say i look like him sometimes, and yeah, i have his eyes. only his are icy blue. okay, so all teenagers are at some kind of war with their parents; but i try really hard not to be because i mean look, without my parents i wouldn't even be here right now. i wouldn't have a home, clothes, friends, a future. i wouldn't have any of that without my mom and dad. but i'll admit- sometimes it's hard to call this man dad.

you see, the only kind of love he knows is cold, icy. it drips with "you won't make it"'s and "you're not good enough"'s. my mother feels it, my brother feels it, i feel it. there's nothing i can do to make this man happy and you know what, after seventeen years, that's okay. i mean we try and hide our resentment behind "how are you"'s and "how was work?" but, we all know it's there. we all remember the way he screams louder and louder and louder while i'm in the background screaming STOP!

why can't anybody hear me? my pleading voice gets caught in the twisted web of resentment and hatred my parents built instead of a home.

at my father's promotion ceremony, he looked at my mother with tears in his eyes. he said "to my lovely wife, eileen: you are the glue that keeps this family together and i thank you with all my heart". he left his tears in my eyes when he took a deep breath and swallowed his pride but i couldn't help but to wonder: who is this major martin zweig? who is this man up there speaking, dropping lies? because i didn't know who that was. that wasn't the same man i call dad it was, just a disguise. who was this man up there speaking about lovely wives, and children of whom he was proud? because that was not the same man screaming, yelling so loud, at his son when he told him he was droppin out. and after thinkin real hard, i got it all figured out.

dad and major martin zweig are like two different people, like jekyll and hyde. major zweig hides behind those deep ice eyes, what he goes home to and how his lovely wife cries. it's all just a facade and he's got it down to an art; and his frozen love- it's breaking my heart because i'll always remember that yelling you do while i'm in the background screaming DAD!




who are you?