How Coffee Helped Me Rebuild My Relationship With My Father
By: Chase Bridwell
Tags: Father And Son, Coffee, Reconciliation, Coming Of Age

How Coffee Helped Me Rebuild My Relationship With My Father

It was November of 2019. Through my college transition, my ex-girlfriend had broken up with me and I lost most of my high school friends. In addition to this, I was broke and stressed beyond belief, to a point where I felt sick every morning. A lovely start to college right?

All the pillars of my mental health had taken a significant hit and I was seeing it affect my everyday life. Then the final straw came; my mother and father went to court over the sole custody of my little sister. I was caught directly in the middle, and boom, I snapped.

This is the first time in my life that I can, with all certainty, say I had a mental breakdown. I was furious! How could my father come back after all these years and attempt to keep custody of my sister? A person who, according to my mother, didn’t care about my sister at all. However, about a month later, I felt driven to talk to my father. I couldn’t tell you why, but my gut told me to reach out.

Now this is uncharacteristic for me. All my life I had blamed my father for what had happened to my family and I. Leaving my mother to fend for herself and take care of two children. Sending us right into poverty and leaving us with a house we couldn’t maintain. But something told me I needed to hear what he had to say. So I texted him, “Do you wanna grab coffee?” To my surprise, he said yes.

We met at a little coffee shop in my hometown of South Bend, and it was the first time I’ve been nervous in a long time. I was finally facing my childhood boogieman. Though the man that I ended up sitting down with wasn’t the rough, gruff man I had remembered and been told about over the years. The man that sat across from me who was once a sharp stone was now smoothed over with age. A stone where you could still see where the edges had once been but had noticeably been run under water for years.

He smiled at me, something I hadn’t remembered him doing much before. It was soft like it had only been a couple of days since he last saw me. “You look good. You’ve really grown up in these last few years.” It had been such a long time since we’d last shared a conversation that I forgot the sound of his voice.

With coffee in hand, we both talked. I talked about all of the things that had happened in the years since. All of the problems, the triumphs, and the heartbreaks. All of the years that he missed came flooding out of my mouth like a waterfall. All of the pain I had been holding onto began melting away. It was one of the most beautiful interactions I’d ever had, this reconciliation between father and son. We stayed like that for a while, sharing stories back and forth. It felt like no time had passed at all.

The more we talked, the more I realized how much of my imagination I had poured into making my dad this horrible guy. The boogieman of my life that had caused all the bad things to happen in my childhood. All the commitment issues and problems with authority figures, I had blamed him for. In the end, it was me holding on to all that strife and pain. I had been inflicting it on myself.

After some time had passed, we got up and embraced each other, promising to see each other soon. It was the first time in a while that I trusted what my father said. From then on, we’ve made sure to see each other regularly.

It’s been a little over a year now and we spend much more time together. We’ve laughed, cried, and made more memories than I would have ever thought possible this year. And every day since then, I’m so glad that I decided to send that text, “Do you wanna grab coffee?”