Each year on Father's Day I experience this conflict deep within. Friends post amazing photos and tributes to their awesome dads on social media, and I sit silent. Silence has been a big part of my life. In my minds' eye, my painful relationship with my dad began at the breakfast table when I was about five or six years old. My older siblings were at school, and seated at the table was Pa, Ma, my younger brother, and me.
Ma had cooked oatmeal for breakfast. Oatmeal always caused me to gag on the slimy texture, and I couldn’t seem to swallow it. I asked Ma if I could make a piece of toast for myself instead of the oatmeal. We had a wood cookstove and the fire was hot, so all I needed to do was slice a piece of bread and plop it on the hot cast iron stove top. Pa said let’s pray, and began the usual table grace, but in place of the typical “thank you for this food and the hands that prepared it” he berated me to the Heavenly Father for being an ungrateful child. Pa continued to scold me through his prayer that ungratefulness was a sin that was punishable by eternal hell. A place where you went at the moment of death and suffered intense heat and torture for eternity.
As I understood it, hell punishment was not on a sliding scale for the nature of the wrong committed. It was where you would spend eternity whether you were ungrateful for the oatmeal or for committing premediated murder. There was no sentence in between.
Hot tears silently streamed down my face. I never sobbed loudly or talked back. When the prayer was done, Ma passed the hot bowl of oatmeal, and I dipped out the tiniest spoonful possible and eventually was able to swallow it. My tears kept flowing. I couldn’t seem to stop the tears from spilling out and dripping off my chin. Ma was silently sympathetic (somehow at that young age I knew that) but she didn’t want to go to hell, so she was unable to disobey my Pa and take my side in this matter. After what seemed like an eternity of silence at the table where each one dished up their oatmeal, Pa started talking about the weather and the farm tasks that he was planning to do that day. It was as though that scorching scolding prayer had never happened. Life went back to “normal.”
At my young age, I believed my Pa. Ungratefulness was a sin that I had committed and I would spend eternity in hell.
Me and Pa about 1957
Pa on the tractor with Larry, Doris, Wayne, John, Jane and Mabel. Photo taken about 1957
Confessions from the Sixth Child out of Seven 
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