Seven Days to Understand Her: My Cruise with Dad

I almost cancelled the cruise with my dad three times. Once when I booked it, once when my mom said I was making a mistake, and once more standing in the departure terminal in Miami with my suitcase feeling like I was about to spend a week with a stranger. Because that's what my dad felt like. Not a stranger exactly, but someone I'd stopped knowing around the time I turned sixteen and he stopped trying. We lived in the same house for three more years, but we existed in completely different worlds. The divorce didn't help things—I blamed him, he blamed himself, and somewhere in all that blame, we just... drifted. Fast forward fifteen years. I'm twenty-eight, he's sixty-one, and we see each other maybe twice a year at family dinners where we talk about the weather and his golf swing. My therapist—yes, I have a therapist—kept saying that unresolved father-daughter trauma would show up in my relationships. I got tired of hearing it. So when my mom mentioned offhandedly that my dad had emailed asking if I'd ever want to spend time together, something in me just said yes. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was finally being ready. Maybe I just got tired of being angry at someone I barely…