ちち + とき = ただのひと
father + time = just a human
It was 3:12 a.m., the hour when the world feels like it has been drawn with a thin, trembling pencil. The refrigerator in my kitchen was humming a low, purposeful G-sharp, a sound that seemed to be vibrating not in the room, but somewhere deep inside my own marrow.
I was sitting at the table, drinking a glass of water that was slightly too warm. On the wooden surface sat an old, silver wristwatch—the kind you have to wind manually every morning or it simply gives up on the concept of time. It had belonged to my father.
When I was a child, I thought that watch was a magical object. I thought my father was a man who possessed a secret map to the universe. I believed his silence was a form of wisdom, and his occasional anger was a calculated storm meant to keep the world in order.
But as the years pass, and I find myself sitting in the same kind of quiet kitchens he once sat in, I have begun to realize a heavy, quiet truth: He was just a man. He was an amateur at being alive.
The Mystery of the Amateur
We are born into a world where we view our parents as finished products. We see them as statues—solid, unmoving, and permanent. We assume they have a manual. We assume they know why the bills are high, why the car makes that clicking sound, and how to navigate the complicated geography of a human heart.
But lately, I have been thinking about the sheer terror he must have felt.
Imagine it: You are twenty-five, or thirty, or forty. You have never been this age before. You have never had this child before. You are walking into a dark room with no flashlight, and someone hands you a tiny, crying human and says, “Here. Don’t break this.”
He was living life for the first time, too. Every mistake he made—every cold silence, every missed connection, every word he shouldn’t have said—was the error of a beginner. He was practicing being a person, and unfortunately, I was the material he practiced on.
The Story of the Dark Car
I read a story once about a man who grew up hating his father for being distant. He remembered his father coming home from work and sitting in his car in the driveway for thirty minutes every single night. The boy would watch from the window, fuming. He thought his father was avoiding the family. He thought his father didn’t love them.
Decades later, when the man had his own children and a high-pressure job, he found himself doing the exact same thing. He realized his father wasn’t avoiding them. He was decompressing. He was sitting in that dark car, gripping the steering wheel, trying to shed the skin of the office so he wouldn’t bring the stress inside to his children.
He was a man who was exhausted, trying to find the strength to be “Father” for just a few more hours. He wasn’t a hero. He was just a guy trying to keep his head above water in a world that didn’t care if he drowned.
The Ledger of Invisible Sacrifices
We often measure our parents by what they didn’t give us.
- We remember the toys we didn’t get.
- We remember the “I love you” that stayed stuck in their throats.
- We remember the birthday they worked through.
But we rarely see the Ledger of Invisible Sacrifices.
I think of another story—a woman who discovered after her father died that he had been a talented jazz pianist in his youth. He had a chance to tour Europe. Instead, he took a job at a chemical plant because his wife was pregnant and they needed health insurance.
He spent forty years in a grey building, breathing in fumes, so his daughter could go to a university and study art. He never told her. He didn’t want her to feel the weight of his unlived dreams. He chose to be “boring” so she could be “vibrant.”
When we look at our fathers, we see the wall they built. We don’t always see the bricks they had to carry to build it.
The Geography of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is not a grand, cinematic event. It is a slow, quiet adjustment of the light. It is the realization that if you were put in his shoes—with his specific trauma, his limited education, his economic pressure, and his lack of a support system—you would have likely made the exact same mistakes.
- Release the Manual: Stop looking for the guidebook he didn’t have. Accept that he was winging it from day one.
- Look at the Scars: Understand that he was raised by people who were also amateurs. Trauma is a relay race, and sometimes a father is just the person who tried to run a little slower so the baton wouldn’t hit you as hard.
- The Humanity of Failure: To forgive him is to allow him to be human. Not a god, not a monster. Just a man who was sometimes tired, sometimes scared, and often overwhelmed.
The Winding of the Watch
I picked up the silver watch from the table. I began to wind it. Click. Click. Click. The sound was rhythmic and small, like the heartbeat of a mechanical bird.
I realized that my father was just a version of me that had arrived earlier. He was a traveler in a different time zone, navigating the same fog.
I forgave him. I forgave the silences. I forgave the times he couldn’t see me because he was too busy looking at the obstacles in his own path. I forgave him because holding onto the anger was like carrying a suitcase full of stones through a desert. It didn’t hurt him; it only slowed me down.
He did his best with the tools he had. They were rusty tools. They were broken tools. But they were his, and he used them until his hands bled.
The watch started ticking. It was 3:18 a.m. now. I stood up, turned off the kitchen light, and felt a strange, light sensation in my chest. For the first time, the house didn’t feel hollow. It felt like a place where a man had lived, tried, failed, and left behind a small, ticking piece of himself.
I went to bed and slept the sleep of someone who has finally put down a heavy weight.
life 
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