The Joke That Landed Later

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There was this joke my dad once made — I must’ve been quite young.
It was in front of my mum, and he said with a wry smile,
“Put that away — someone’s really going to enjoy that someday.”

At the time, I felt embarrassed. My mum didn’t like it.
And I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
But now… now I see it differently.

It wasn’t just a crude or awkward comment.
It was, perhaps, a sideways gesture of belief.
A way of saying:
You’re going to be loved one day — really loved.
Even if you don’t feel it now. Even if you’re not getting that from your own mother.

And maybe my mum’s discomfort wasn’t about propriety.
Maybe it was about the threat she felt — that he saw me,
that he valued me,
and that I would one day grow up and grow away from her control.

Looking back, there are so many moments like this.
Moments that felt confusing at the time,
but make a strange, soulful kind of sense now.
Little crumbs of care left in odd places.
Gifts wrapped in humour — a kind of love that only fully lands years later.

He used to say to me, often,
“You don’t get to choose your family, but you get to choose your friends.”
It didn’t hit me until much later how true that was.
And how, beneath the humour and the struggle, he was giving me permission —
to choose love, to choose truth, to choose something better than what I was born into.

One thing I noticed over the years was how much he respected
anyone who looked after me, in any way.
Whether it was a teacher, a friend, or even just someone kind —
he noticed. He respected that.
As if a part of him was deeply grateful I was being seen
in ways he didn’t always know how to offer.

He believed in me.
And in his own clumsy, brilliant, sideways way — he told me so.