I loved you.

I loved you.

Past tense. Not because I stopped — but because I never found a way to say it that you would hear. I showed it in every way I knew how. I saved my birthday money instead of spending it. I hid my clothes when they got holes so you wouldn’t have to replace them. I walked carefully in my football shoes so they’d last longer. At thirteen, I chose your peace over the thing I wanted most. I spent my whole childhood showing you I loved you in a language neither of us had a name for, and you never once said it back.

Dad, you grew up without a real relationship with your own parents. You shared a house but not much else. No real connection, no real language between you — until you met my mother. Mom, you grew up six people in four rooms in Lod. I don’t know what it does to a person to grow up that crowded, in a city that heavy. But I think it taught you to take up less space before you even knew you were learning it.

Neither of you had a model for what a family could look like. You only had what you knew.

My earliest memories are from Lod too. I don’t remember it as dangerous. I remember my four friends — Ofek, Amit, Noa, Ziv. All girls, not a single boy among them, and I didn’t miss one. They were my entire world and I loved every second of it. Until today, most of the people I’m closest to are women. I’ve thought about where that started.

A year before first grade, you decided to move. You wanted distance — from Lod, from Mom’s family, from Dad’s, from the circles you’d both grown up inside. You wanted to give us a chance that staying would never allow. Between Modiin and Gedera you chose Gedera, because I had asthma and the air was cleaner there. The move cut off the four friends with almost no goodbye. Over the years we kept trying with Ziv — she came to our Independence Day barbecue for a while. But I was too ashamed of myself to talk to her. I’d stand across the garden and say nothing, and eventually she stopped coming.

The house in Gedera cost more than you had. A mortgage, and on top of that loans, until the debt was half a million shekels before we were fully unpacked. You moved us to a city where people had money. Nice clothes, school trips, birthday parties with actual gifts. I could see immediately what we were and what everyone around us was. No one said anything directly. They didn’t have to.

Birthdays in our family meant cash. “So you can choose what you want.”

I had a black wallet. Every birthday I folded the money inside and left it. By the time I was ten it held years of savings — grandparents, aunts and uncles, every occasion. I never spent any of it. I knew we were struggling, and I wanted you to see that I knew.

Dad, I know you came in at night sometimes. Sometimes while I was at school. I’d come back and the wallet would be lighter than I left it. I asked you about it once. You didn’t answer. I stopped asking, because there was already a voice inside me that said I had no right — that whatever you took, you needed more than I did, and that saying anything would make me exactly the ungrateful child you always said I was. So I turned a blind eye. I kept saving what was left, and the next time I turned a blind eye again, and I never said another word.

I was hurt. I felt it for a moment and then I buried it before it could breathe.

The voice had been there for years by then. You gave it to me in small doses, the same phrase in a hundred versions, until I couldn’t tell where you ended and I began. Every time I dirtied my clothes: you don’t appreciate what we give you. Every time I broke something by accident: you don’t appreciate. A bad grade: you don’t appreciate the opportunity. A fight at school — and I had many — you don’t appreciate. I heard it so many times it stopped being something you said and became something that was simply true about me. I stopped questioning it the way you stop questioning gravity.

When you were really angry, you hit us. Mom, it was usually you who lost yourself first. Your hands, sometimes the broom stick. Sometimes you’d send us to Dad and tell him what we’d done, and then it would be him. The pain wasn’t the part that stayed. What stayed was the shame — the feeling that I had just proven you right, that I was exactly what you said. I had so much anger in those years and nowhere to put it at home. I already knew what that cost. So it had to go somewhere else. But that’s another story.

Every summer we went to Thailand. Dad works at El Al — he still does — and that meant cheap seats, jumpseats, empty rows, whatever wasn’t taken. For everything else you took out a loan. Every single year. I’ve been to Thailand more than thirteen times.

In Thailand we felt like a different family. The hotels were enormous, the pools had slides, a foot massage cost almost nothing. My entire childhood I wore fake clothes because real ones were too expensive, and in Thailand even those were almost affordable. But I never asked for anything on those trips. When you suggested something in the market I said no. When you pushed, I’d give in — but I would never point at something and say I want that. Every stall, every shop, there was always something I wanted and I would decide against it before the thought was finished. My brother would reach out and say what he wanted without hesitation. I watched him and stayed quiet every time. I was not going to be the reason you needed a bigger loan.

At home I wore the same clothes every day until they had holes. When they had holes, I hid them. Folded the fabric just right, kept wearing them, anything so you wouldn’t notice and feel like you had to replace them. My football shoes — I had one pair, and I wore them everywhere, not just on the field, until the corks wore all the way down to flat. You said if I kept destroying things you’d have to sell the house. So I stopped going to play football. I stayed in my room. When my friends came to get me, Mom would come to my door and ask if I wanted to go out. I always said no and she would let them know. I never even faced them at the door. They kept coming for a while. Eventually they stopped.

Bar mitzvah year. The drum teacher raised his prices. I watched Dad’s face when he heard.

I had been taking drum lessons — I always wanted to play drums, you both knew that, and you let me choose my after-school class and I chose them. I practiced every single day on the practice pad to show you the money wasn’t wasted. When the price went up I saw what it cost Dad to hear that number. A few days later he came to me: drums or a computer. One.

I chose the computer. Not because I wanted it more. Because drums meant noise in the house every evening. Because the lessons were a monthly cost that never ended. A computer, once bought, was finished. I made that calculation at thirteen years old, and I chose your peace over the thing I’d wanted since I was small.

Dad also asked what I wanted for my bar mitzvah. He even mentioned a party. I tried to talk them out of the whole thing — I wanted to go to the synagogue for the prayer and come home. Nothing more. But they insisted on at least something, so there was a bus to Jerusalem, the Western Wall, being called up to the Torah, family only, a short tour of the tunnels, and home. The one friend I invited didn’t come. My brother’s bar mitzvah had the whole family sleeping over at the local boarding school — rooms free on weekends — his good friends, a real celebration. My younger siblings had full parties. Mine was a quiet Tuesday in Jerusalem, and I hid everything I felt about it because I didn’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate what you’d done.

It took over a year after that for the computer to actually arrive.

When it did, I stayed inside. No reason to go out and ruin clothes. No shoes to wear out. No field, no friends, no monthly cost. I had finally found a way to need nothing from you. Until the electric bill came in. You said it in front of the whole family — that I was playing too much, using too much electricity, that it was my fault. I used the computer less after that. Shut it down when I heard the front door. Sat in the quiet and waited. The depression came the way a light dims when the power is slowly cut.

We talk now. Holidays, calls, the things a family does to stay a family. I come. You come. We sit at the same table.

But I have never hugged you. Not once in my adult life have I held either of you the way you’re supposed to hold the people you love. Every time I see you I feel the distance and I don’t cross it. I don’t know how. You never hugged me either. I have no memory — not one — of either of you holding me and saying you loved me. Not once in my entire childhood. What I heard, over and over, in every version of the same sentence, was that I didn’t appreciate.

So now when I stand next to you and something in me wants to close that gap, something gets stuck in my throat. I can’t breathe past it.

I still love you. After everything — after all the years of staying small, saving birthday money you would take, saying no at my door when my friends came, sitting on a bus to Jerusalem at my own bar mitzvah and pretending I didn’t feel it — I still love you. I don’t know what to do with that. I never learned how to say it in a way that reached you, and now I can’t say it at all.

I just want to know one thing.

Did you ever see what I was doing for you?