On Father's Day.

Thoughts from 30,000 feet.

I’m sitting on a plane, the miles stretching out between me and the people I love most, and there’s so much going through my head.

I find myself reflecting on this day celebrating fathers, which is complicated by the fact that I’m also in the midst of writing a memoir, and so attempting to uncover latent and childhood memories that I’ve either suppressed or simply forgotten.

Like so many others, I have a complicated relationship with dad.

To put it bluntly, my birth father, a very smart and very handsome marine biologist, just wasn’t all that interested in being a parent, and he and my mom divorced when I was around two. Mom and I moved to another state to start a new life closer to family, and thus began my airplane journeys to visit him, maybe once a year.

Visits were fraught. When I was very young, I was excited — ecstatic even — to see him. Here was a whole other half of me that I was desperate to know, bond with, and love. But I was frequently let down, my expectations about a relationship that I wanted much more than he did always painfully too high. I often felt like an afterthought or an inconvenience while there. I’d try as hard as I could to be perfect in the hopes that he’d suddenly decide he couldn’t live without me. But at the end of every visit it was clear — he could definitely live without me.

Then, as I got a little older and gradually conditioned myself to expect less, less is exactly what I got. Less time, fewer visits, less interest. But the little girl inside me was hard to let go of. She always reserved a corner of her heart, in hopes he’d one day decide to occupy it.

Through teen years and early adulthood, the relationship went from one that was just sort of there in the background to one that was actually unhealthy.

Now that I was older, he had opinions — opinions about me, my mother, what I did for a living, even my politics. He went from being a guy who barely knew me to a guy who decided he did know me, and didn’t really like me. It felt like I was being left all over again, but this time with malice instead of mere indifference.

Years passed where we barely spoke. Then, in 2016, I was at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia for work, and got an email. From him.

He was very sick with late-stage prostate cancer. He didn’t have much time left. He loved me and was sorry he wasn’t there for me. There to be my dad. There to meet my husband. There to meet his grandson. He wasn’t there for any of it, and he regretted it.

Of course, those words likely meant more to him than they did to me. To me they were a five-cent deposit on the million-dollar loan he owed me. But to him, I imagine they meant everything.

I wrote him back, thanked him for his words, forgave him without conditions, and hoped that he wasn’t in too much pain.

Less than a year later, I got a phone call from a total stranger, telling me he had passed away. That was that.

Except it’s never that simple, of course. When I was seven, my mom married the man who would fill the shoes my biological father couldn’t put on.

HE would go to my ballet recitals. HE would take me to the Grand Canyon. HE would punish my for staying out too late. HE would interview my boyfriends. HE would celebrate my successes.

As much as I felt abandoned by one, I felt equally rescued by another. I DID have a dad — just not the one I was born to.

I’d marry a man who was everything my birth father wasn’t — generous, adoring, selfless, present. I remember when my son turned three I burst into tears realizing his parents — my husband and I — were officially together longer than mine were. Now he’s ten, and I know he’ll never not know his dad.

He’ll never have to bury his disappointment, or wonder if he’s loved, if he did something wrong, or why he wasn’t enough. If I had to go through all that so that he didn’t have to, I’ll take it a million times over.

In the end, I won. I eventually got the dad I deserved, a strong and inspiring mom who recreated the nuclear family the first one took from her, and a husband who never makes me worry or wonder — am I enough? And my son got a dad he never has to doubt.

I spent this Father’s Day with mom and dad, my husband and son, surrounded by love and deeply grateful for our family.

And grateful, in a way, for everything that happened. It made me the kind of daughter, wife and mother I wanted to be, deeply aware that not everyone gets that gift.

As I close this out, about to touch down with now a thousand miles separating me from my family, I’ve never felt closer.

Let’s hear it for the dads. XO