Getting father and I on the same page - Essay Example

I’ve always written, for school assignments, college essays and term reports and sometimes just to let off steam or communicate with another person, but none of what I have written in my life has been as meaningful to me as the letters I wrote to Father when I was in Boston. These letters embody in writing the foundation and building of our relationship in words and are more precious to me than anything I ever wrote or was written to me. These writings embody the bridge that brought Father and I back together.

I spent my childhood in a closely knit and fairly large family in Korea. My sister and I used to play together at home and were very close and strongly attached to mother, but father remained a potent yet detached presence in our house. My father ran his own business; he used to work long hours during the week and was hardly ever home. Even when he was; he seemed too tired to want to hang around with my sister and me. To my young self, father seemed like a big and imposing figure of whom I was mostly scared.

Throughout middle school, I spent most of my time outside the house hanging out with my friends in an effort to stay out of father’s way. . However, this pattern broke when I was 20. At 20 years of age, I moved from Korea to Boston and had to live away from my family for the first time in my life. Being away from home like this made me miss father, even if initially I just missed his mere presence. With time, I began to want to talk to him, to share my life with him and tell him how I was doing and in return ask him how life was back home.

The only problem was that due to strained relations with him in the past I was still uncomfortable with the idea of initiating a conversation with him, especially an emotional one. However, I really wanted father and me to finally get along so I decided to write him a letter. I thought since this was a less direct way of communicating with him, both of us would be less uncomfortable trying to get our thoughts and feelings across to the other person. My initial letter to father was in some ways my shyest and in other ways my most courageous attempt to communicate with him.

I wrote it so that I could finally build a bond between us which had been absent during my childhood, a bond which I now deeply craved that I was away from my home and family and living in a foreign land hundreds of miles away. I say this letter was my shyest attempt at writing to my father because it contained only a few preliminaries and pleasantries and redundant comments about Boston and its weather. I told him my mundane routine and asked him his even when I knew it already. This was my way of engaging him in conversation, of making him a stakeholder in the rebuilding the relation between us.

But this letter was also my most courageous attempt to communicate and reconnect with him as only an