Don’t Accept Defeat
After Lorrie Moore

First, don’t be anybody but yourself. Be you. People will appreciate you more for it. Don’t be a copy. Don’t force yourself to be somebody you aren’t. Don’t fall into the pattern. If you do, you will regret it for years until nobody, even yourself, cares anymore.

Be the best daughter you can be. Your dad is alone and you’re the only person he can rely on right now. Don’t complain. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t cry about things you can’t change. He will tell you he’s doing okay but you have to make sure he is. You have to wake up every Saturday and make him breakfast in bed to make sure he knows you care about him. Every Sunday you have to put on your white socks and pink bow and walk hand in hand down to the closest church. When you walk back make sure to tell him about your week at school. Tell him about your friends. Tell him about your teachers. Tell him about what you’re learning: the math you can’t quite seem to grasp but the science that amazes you. Tell him you want to be a doctor one day. He’ll look at you with a face of hope and concern, but you’ll tell him it’ll be ok. When you get home, don’t go straight to your room. Sit downstairs and do your homework. Put on the television so it fills your mind with background noise. Sit with your dad so he remembers someone is there. It’s been a while since your mom died but every time you catch a glimpse of the family photo from three years ago the same feelings from the night you found out come rising back up. Sadness, anger, resentment, defeat.

You wake up every Saturday doing the same thing you’ve been doing for years. It begins with the switch of the coffee pot and ends with popping sounds from the scorching pan, indicating that breakfast is ready. You bring it over to your dad who has already started work at 7 am at the kitchen table surrounded with stacks of useless papers so high they’re almost ready to come tumbling down. They’re all filled with incohesive and incoherent thoughts that have spewed from mind to hand to paper. He’ll have under eye circles with the darkest shades of purple and blue you’ve ever seen. He’ll have untamed salt and pepper hair with a similarly unkempt beard. You know the days escape him but you don’t say anything. You let him be and go back to your room. Plastered on your walls are diagrams of hearts and the human body. Scattered around your room are your dreams. But at the moment that is all they are. Your dreams are still there and your Sundays are still exactly the same but you’ve ditched the white socks and pink bow. You still walk down to church together but not holding hands. You still tell him about school and your life but you purposefully leave out some details. You tell him nothing is going to change but you both know it is. You’ll go out some nights but only until 9 because that’s your curfew. You’ll meet someone and think he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to your 14 year old self. The way he tells you he only has eyes for you. The way he holds your hand and buys your ticket to the 7pm movie on Friday nights. You’ll think that he’s the best thing that this world has to offer you. You won’t tell your dad though because you know he would give you at least a 30 minute lecture about how if you want to do extraordinary things in life you can’t surround yourself with ordinary people. What does he know.

It’s your last year in high school. The same guy you thought was your everything has moved to a different state and out of your constant train of thought but that’s ok. Your dream of becoming a doctor has faded slightly every year since it first appeared in your childish mind. Somehow your dad’s under eye circles have gotten darker and his hair lighter. You know he’ll be ok because he’s an adult and can take care of himself but sometimes you wonder if that’s the truth or if it’s something you tell yourself to feel better. Saturdays have been replaced with waking up at 6:30 for a job so menial it hurts your brain but at least you get paid. Sunday trips to church with your pink bow and white socks all those years ago have been replaced with random trips around town with the same small group of friends but that was until you had the two month breakdown caused by everything collapsing at the same time, like the papers all those years ago that were so close to falling down. You don’t have a mom, you feel like you don’t have a dad anymore, and your dreams got caught up with the chaos and whirlwind of everything else. Why not one more thing. Everything had come falling down on top of you and you didn’t know how to deal with it.

It’s close to the end of your last year in college and you feel more lost than you did when you first started. Everybody says by the end you will know what you want to do and where your life is going to take you. But contrary to what everybody else says, your future is anything but clear. You’ve fallen in with the “wrong crowd” to put it in the terms your father used. Sure they’re not great people but who really is a “great” person because you’ve surely never found one. They were the only people that accepted you during this time so you felt the need to assume the “rebellious” lifestyle they all seemed to portray with great ease. You know it’s detrimental to your being but why not add another problem to the growing pile you’ve been ignoring for years. Within the last four years you’ve fallen back into the pattern of drinking, not drinking, drinking and then not drinking again and again until your father couldn’t be a bystander anymore and forced you to confront your ever growing list of problems. You found a temporary fix but that is all it was. Despite all of that, remember the dreams that once gave hope to your childish mind. You always try so hard to go back to the person you once used to be and find the drive you once used to have but remembering how good the past was only makes the present seem that much worse.

You’re in your early 30s and whenever you catch a glimpse of that frayed poster you still keep on your wall, you begin to wonder where time has gone but you don’t pity yourself because you know it was your own fault. You accept responsibility but you don’t accept defeat. Your mom always told you to not fall into the pattern of being someone you aren’t because you’d regret it for the rest of your life. Sure enough it’s the rest of your life and you regret it. You know if she saw you now she’d say you’d have to keep going and you’d nonchalantly brush her off and say you would be fine. However, deep down you’d know you would have to listen to her. You know you can’t accept defeat.