help me navigate this

[Sparrow]

my dad wants to get to know me.

what he actually said was, "i want to get to know sara."

since changing my name, i've been super fine with people who knew me as that continue to call me that. it is now my middle name, so no foul. people call me sara all the time.

my dad was an EMT until the AIDS scare. i'm not real sure what went down, but it was a job he loved and was good at; whatever it was freaked him out enough to never return to it. all the while I grew up my dad was/is a factory machinist, 2nd/3rd shift. he's missed out on all the things he's loved most of the time; church on sunday, my band events, flying hobby airplanes, daylight. he stopped having a running knowledge of who i was at [6]. [16] slipped by. [21] made more sense when i got married. [25] was a shock to his system.

the cost of providing.

my mother and i are close and i'm guessing she's had something to do with this recent outreach. and, truth is, i don't want him to be someone i don't know. i want it to really hurt when he dies. i'm doing some very exciting things in my career and my dad is missing it.

i don't have a problem letting him know who i am, but there are some baseline identity issues that need addressing. he has no real understanding of what happened to me between 'sara' and 'bird' or that the two, while the same, are very, very different beings who existed/exist in their own rights. he won't be open to understanding The Bird if he's expecting the grown sara he's had to craft from bits of pieces of twenty years of second hand information and occasional lunches. he named me before i was even born, so that i would 'reject' that as well as my maiden name probably hurt.

i'd like to think i'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, but his reaction to my divorce was surprisingly sharp (didn't speak to me for three months) and in the spirit of better safe than sorry, i'm going to prepare for something similar to the atheist liberal thing.

i don't mind a fair bit of delicate patience, but where i need him to be is, "i want to get to know the bird." he can still call me sara. any advice on how to best approach this? i love him very much, all my birdie bravado is in them genes. he's a good man and we deserve a closer relationship.