Honest. To be or not to be?

Message received from Dad today:

"i'm relieved to hear back from you! i wondered if i had offended. will write more later. I was out riding my motorbike thru gorgeous weather.....oxygenated blue October skies...thru some teeny towns....with kids and bicycles out playing....a BIG romantic memory swept over me of how simple it was to go home to mom and a warm meal. Simple adventures of youth to relate to gentle loving attentions. No giant world complexes to be guilty and worried about. Smooth and soft like a simple cotton apron.....what a LOVE STORY!!! I hope you got the same fundamentally wholesome "nucleus" of goodness in your early youth. Remember an oil well engine way back in your infancy? And how 'bout Heidi!? Love, Buck"

Here is where I begin to question the level of honesty and openness that I want to have with him. His message is warm and lovely. I have no doubt that my grandmother was a very loving mother to him. But is it time to tell him my reality? Does he need to know that because my mother had to raise and support us kids on her own; that she was always at work or collapsed in a state of exhaustion on the couch, and therefore emotionally and somewhat physically unavailable to me? That nothing for us was really ever simple? Does he need to know that I was actually a quite lonely child and craved the love of a parent? The adoration and pride? That because of this desire for approval and love I wasted a lot of time pleasing others and lived with a secretive and painful void in my heart? Is it time to really dive into the murky waters of the past in the hopes of untangling the weeds to achieve a state of serene clarity? Is it truly necessary to speak of that which we cannot change? The past which I have spent years slowly releasing myself from the bondage of?

Am I ready? Is he ready?

I refuse to be anything less than honest. Is the unspoken truth a form of deception? What is better left unsaid here? That is the question.