EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

The Son Dad Wanted And The Daughter Who Stayed

December 24, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)
This Christmas, I keep thinking about the person my parents thought I would become.

Not in a bitter way—not even in an angry way. More like the way you think about an old set of plans you find folded at the bottom of a drawer. Careful, straight, intentional lines. Measured expectations. A structure that made sense on paper. And white collar. Credentialed. Clean hands. A degree that behaved. A future that stayed inside the margins.

My father wanted a son. That part was never far from the surface, and was never negotiable. He wanted a successful man—one who moved easily through rooms where voices stayed low and language stayed abstract. Someone who wore intelligence instead of using it. Someone legible to other men like him. I was expected to fit that shape, even though I never did.

I did not become that person. I used to talk to the stars as if they owned me an explanation. I was born female—my father thought that abuse could affect biology. My father tried to dress me in business suit—I liked working with my hands, and dressing in comfortable clothing. I absolutely delighted in work my parents considered blue collar. I learned how things actually work—not how to talk about them, not how to outsource them, but how to use my hands to make things work again. I learned systems from the inside out. I learned restraint. I learned when not to touch things. I learned when silence is more powerful than performance.

None of that was part of the plan. And yet, it is the life that held.

I grew up learning repair from my father who was born in 1915—I learned a version of the world that assumed competence was normal and dependency was a problem to solve, not a condition to accept. I learned that things are understandable if you stay with them long enough. That nothing is magic.

That way of thinking never left me. It carried into everything—money, work, identity, relationships. I do not rush. I do not flail. I do not confuse mere signs of motion with progress. I understand preservation. I understand sometimes the best thing to say is no. I understand that holding something together for a long time requires more discipline than building it once.

That includes a life. I have spent years being an outlier without meaning to be. Too practical for the abstract rooms. Too direct for the polite ones. Too capable to be managed. Too self-contained to be steered. People like to pretend this kind of independence is accidental. It is not. It's trained. It's earned. It's reinforced every time you choose reality over approval.

I keep a list of things I'll never say out loud. Some truths don't need witnesses. And yet there was always that secret stolen from deep inside… I was concerned that in the end, I would somehow disappoint my parents.

The reprieve came at the end, when there was nothing left to perform, and no future left to curate. In the last hours of my mother's life, she told me she was incredibly proud of me—and proud of who I became. Not who I could have been. Not who she once imagined. Who I actually was.

This is the first Christmas without my parents. There is a strange mercy in that sort of timing. It does not erase the years of misunderstanding, but it clarifies them. She saw, finally, that I was not a failed version of their hopes and dreams. I was a successful version of myself. Solid. Capable. Intact.

I think about that often now. Success is not always the thing people point at. Deviation is sometimes the only honest path. Being unclassifiable is not always the same as being lost.

I did not become what they planned. And at the end, that was enough.