I never confronted him about it directly, mostly out of the particular pride that keeps a lot of family resentments unspoken for years. I told myself, at various points, that it was simply a “boys’ trip,” a gendered tradition I’d decided not to take personally, even though some part of me clearly did, every single summer, watching them pack up the truck while I stayed home with my mother, doing whatever mother-daughter activity was meant to be my consolation prize for a tradition I hadn’t been invited into.
My father died six years ago, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at sixty-three. Going through his belongings the following year, my mother found a small leather journal tucked in his workshop desk, one none of us had known existed, and gave it to me specifically, telling me only that she thought I “should be the one to read it first.”
The journal covered exactly the six years of those fishing trips, and reading it reframed everything I’d quietly resented for over a decade.
The trips, it turned out, had never really been about fishing. My brother Jonah, I learned from my father’s careful, private entries, had struggled with severe anxiety starting around age eleven, significant enough that a pediatric specialist had recommended structured, low-pressure one-on-one time with a trusted parent as part of his treatment plan, a recommendation my parents had decided, together, not to share broadly with the rest of the family, worried about Jonah feeling singled out or stigmatized by a mental health struggle he was still learning to understand himself.
My father had structured the annual fishing trips specifically around this recommendation — extended, low-stakes time away from the pressures of school and social expectations, built deliberately to give Jonah space to open up without the direct pressure of a formal therapy setting. Sam had come along both to give the trip a more natural “boys’ trip” cover story that wouldn’t single out Jonah’s struggle, and because my father, practical as ever, genuinely wanted to give both sons real one-on-one time even while the trip’s actual clinical purpose centered specifically on Jonah’s needs.
The journal entries themselves were remarkably tender — my father’s careful observations of Jonah’s anxiety easing gradually over each trip, small breakthroughs in conversation captured in a father’s plain, unpracticed prose, genuine worry in the early entries slowly giving way to real, hard-won relief by the final year’s trip, when Jonah, then seventeen, had apparently told my father directly that he felt like himself again for the first time in years.
I found my own name throughout the journal too, though not in the way I expected. My father had written, more than once, about his guilt regarding my exclusion from a tradition whose real purpose he’d deliberately kept hidden from me specifically to protect Jonah’s privacy. I hope someday she understands this wasn’t about loving her less. I hope I find the right way to tell her before it’s too late to matter.
He never did find that right moment, or ran out of time before he could, and reading that specific entry broke something open in me that six years of quiet resentment had never quite managed to on its own.
I called Jonah immediately after finishing the journal, and learned that he’d known, all along, exactly what those trips had actually been for — a detail he’d never shared with me, honoring, even as an adult, the same protective privacy our parents had built around his struggle when he was still a child working through it.
“I always felt guilty that you thought it was favoritism,” Jonah told me. “I wanted to tell you so many times. It felt like it wasn’t my story to share without Dad’s permission, and then it just became this thing I didn’t know how to bring up after so many years of silence.”
I didn’t need an apology from Jonah, and told him as much. What I needed, and finally got, was simply the truth — a truth that transformed six years of quiet resentment into something closer to a complicated, retroactive pride in a father who’d built an entire elaborate, protective structure around his son’s mental health, decades before that kind of proactive parental attention to a child’s anxiety was as openly discussed as it is now.
I still wish, reading that journal entry about his guilt, that my father had found the courage to tell me directly while he still had the chance. I understand, better now than I did as a resentful teenager, why he didn’t — the same protective instinct that built the fishing trips in the first place extending, perhaps too far, into silence about their real purpose even with the daughter who deserved to understand what she’d actually been watching all those summers.
I keep that journal now, in the same desk drawer where my mother found it, and I’ve started my own tradition since reading it: an annual weekend trip, just Jonah and me, not built around any particular clinical purpose, just two siblings finally getting the kind of deliberate, protected time together that our father, in his own quiet, imperfect way, taught us both mattered more than either of us fully understood until it was almost too late to learn it from him directly.
