Stumbling Into Relating

Abstract

Father–son relationships can be tricky, often fraught with tension or bogged down in painful shared histories. Writing about these relationships is similarly tricky, and fraught with various tensions. As an accidental ethnographer who follows the organic flow of my own emergent writing—and who wholeheartedly embraces writing into and through communication problems—I have written my way into some messy little corners while writing about others. But I have also stumbled into some intriguing, deep, and powerful relational turning points. In this essay, I stumble into writing my relationship with my father, and thus toward re-writing the terms of our relationship.