Tag: growing up

Daddy

As Fathers’ Day approaches, I realize I’ve written about my mother many times on this blog, but have not shared much about my father.  I don’t like to leave the impression that my father was not part of my life or that I somehow don’t appreciate my father.  He lived his life for me, my brother, and my mother.  I am who I am partly because of him.  He died in 1996, at the relatively young age of 72.  

Like many little girls, I went through a period of hero worship with my father.  I clung to him.  He fascinated me.  He was bigger than life in my eyes, even though he wasn’t a particularly large man.  When I think of him, I think of him singing or making something or teaching me how to do something.  He called me Dooley, for some unknown reason.  For years after he died, I would see him when I was out walking my dog and would hear him call me by that ridiculous name.

My father knew lots of songs and he had a beautiful voice.  He used to sing when we were in the car or when he was working around the house.  Some of the songs were not the most appropriate for children, but I thought they were funny.  Navy drinking songs might be a strange choice for entertaining a seven-year-old, but I didn’t care.  I just loved to hear my dad sing.  My mother always used to try to get him to join the church choir, but he never did.  I don’t think he liked the idea of having to “measure up.”  I think he got a lot of confidence from his family and from his ability to take care of us.  Outside that family unit though, I think he felt somewhat insecure about his abilities.

My father was the oldest of six children.  He was born a couple of years before the stock market crash of 1929.  By the time his siblings came along, the Great Depression had the world firmly gripped in its jaws.  I think most people in the 1930s saw working together as the only way of surviving this financial monster.  Individual hopes and dreams did not mean as much as banding together with family and friends to make sure everyone came through safely.  My father’s childhood and, also, his young adulthood, was structured in such a way that others came first.  He helped raise his younger siblings.  He helped his parents during the lean years. He enlisted in the Navy upon graduation from high school to fight in the war.

 He did not get to pursue a college education or go to drafting school or learn to play the piano.  These were all aspirations that he one day told me he wished he had been able to fulfill.  When the time came in his life when he could have pursued these interests, I think he was too afraid of failing to embrace them.  I wish he had felt surer of his ability to reinvent himself.  It was almost as if he was resigned and reasonably satisfied with what he had accomplished and was afraid that he would fail at a new pursuit.  He felt that such a failure would erode what he already had. I think my father’s life was full of accomplishment and success and there is nothing more he could have achieved that would make him any “more than” in my eyes.  I just hope that now, in Heaven, he is fulfilling all of his dreams deferred.

My father was inventive and creative.  Some artists write.  Some artists paint.  Some artists compose music.  My father’s artistry used a different medium.  He built me a purple baby doll bassinet when I was four.  He built me a playhouse with a fort on top for my brother when I was seven.  He worked with me on a science project when I was nine, building a device that demonstrated how primary colors could be combined to make secondary colors. 

My father kept me safe.  When I proved myself inept at using a pogo stick, he rigged up a rope on the limb of a sturdy tree in the backyard.  He attached the pogo stick to that rope and I was free to bounce without breaking.  When all the other kids at school knew how to swing from one end of the monkey bars to the other, I couldn’t even get from ring one to ring two.  Daddy took me to the schoolyard on the weekend and practiced with me until I confidently flew from ring to ring as competently as any lemur.  He taught me to swim.  He taught me to drive.  He taught me to sacrifice, not just by example but by noticing when I did something unselfish and recognizing me for it. 

When I was a little girl, I think I was my father’s princess.   I think he marveled that I was his creation.  He couldn’t imagine that there could ever be any fault in me, which is why he tended to overreact when I did something that clearly demonstrated that I do have faults in me.  He told me once that he was sorry for sometimes being too hard and too harsh on me when I was young.  He said it wasn’t ever because he wasn’t proud of me.  It was actually the reverse.  He said that I seemed to him to be so wondrous and miraculous, he couldn’t imagine me being anything less than perfect in any way. Therefore, when I did something wrong or churlish or immature, it was a shock and he didn’t always show good judgment or patience in his response.

The very first thing I ever wrote that I tried to publish was an essay about him.  A national teen magazine was holding an essay competition and asked contestants to write about the world’s best father.  I submitted my essay and never heard back (which should have been a clue to my future in publishing).  My father found a copy of my essay and read it.  I remember how touched he was.  I remember him looking at me in amazement and saying, “thank you, Dooley.”

I do think my growing up scared him.  We went through a lengthy period in my adolescence and young adulthood during which he didn’t really understand how to relate to me.  I think the notion that I was moving away from being his little girl made him believe I was moving away from him.  It took some time for us to figure out how to be special to each other in our new roles… father and grown-up daughter.

Even when we gingerly settled in to a new, deeper, more mature understanding of each other, I was still his cherished little girl. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  I probably needed the daddy that still saw me as the princess in a tower who needed his protection.  To everyone else, I was strong and in charge and capable.  To Daddy, I was precious and deserved a knight in shining armor.  It was more valuable than I can say to have had a father who I knew was willing to fight my battles, even though I was completely capable of fighting them for myself.

Happy Fathers’ Day! What memories do you have of your father? Please share your perspective by leaving a comment. In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.

Have a wonderful day!

Terri/Dorry 🙂

The First Man I Remember

I have many warm memories of my father.  Most of them are as vivid and dimensional as if they happened just yesterday.

I remember waiting in line to go on the Matterhorn at Disneyland with my father when I was a little girl.  I was the only one who would join him on this first Disney thrill ride.  Thinking back, I can almost feel the anticipation and adrenaline building as we got closer and closer to the front of the line.  I usually had enough time to get good and scared by the time it was our turn.  I always came very close to backing out at the last minute, but I always boarded the ride… and loved it.  I knew, if I was with my Daddy, it was going to be okay.  The ride was always wild and frenetic and absolutely entrancing to my young self…. partly because it was an experience that was special for just the two of us to share.  My father was brave.

I remember my brother and I waiting in the car with my father while my mother visited my dying grandmother in the hospital.  It seemed like we were in that parking lot for hours and hours at a time, night after night.  I’m not sure what all we did during that time, but I have a very clear memory of my father entertaining us by singing navy drinking singing songs.  My father was funny.

I remember visiting the Kern River when I was about nine or ten.  I was a little fish as a child and loved being in the water.  Little fish can get carried away with the current and survive.  Little girls, not so much. I have a picture of my father sitting on a flat rock on the river’s edge.  He is holding three lengths of rope.   One is attached to me, one is attached to my brother, and one is attached to Baron, our dachshund-ish puppy, as our squirmy little bodies whooshed down the river with the current.  It still gives my mother fits that all that stood between her little darlings and certain death were the ropes my father tied around our tummies.  Since I lived to tell the tale, it is proof that my father passed basic seamanship.  He could tie sound knots and haul small bodies out of the brink.  I’m not sure anyone in the navy quite envisioned him using these skills to keep his children and dog from meeting a brutal end crashing against the rocky banks of the Kern River.    My father was innovative. 

I remember camping out in the backyard in a teepee my father made out of bedsheets he dyed the color of buckskin.  He decorated it by having each member of the family make a handprint with a different color paint on the fabric.  My father, for some completely unknown reason, just decided he was part Native American sometime in the late 1960s.  There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this assertion was true, but my father willed it so.  I think he felt his interest and passion for Native American culture should have been enough to entitle him to at least some connection.  Even if there was no true bloodline connection, he loved his way into the tribe.  He and my little brother became extremely active in Indian Guides.  My father tooled leather and created war bonnets with feathered trains longer than he was.  He did intricate beadwork designs on moccasins.  He read everything he could find about Native American history and culture.  Long into his retirement, he and my mother rarely took a vacation that did not involve travel to some ancient Native American tribal location.  When my brother “aged out” of Indian Guides, my parents actually came very, very close to adopting or fostering another child so my father could continue.  When they decided that action might be a little too extreme, my father just continued his exploration of Native American lore, culture, craft, and history on his own…. a sort of independent study version of Indian Guides.  My father was passionate. 

I remember being honored at an academic awards ceremony in high school.  In my time, mothers were usually the ones who attended these kind of things.  By the time high school rolled around, it was even rare to glimpse a mother watching the principal award her offspring with yet another certificate indicating “big fish in a small pond” excellence in something or other.  In my family, my mother and father both held jobs outside the home by the time I was in high school.  My father had more vacation time.  My father was the one who always came to school to watch me receive awards.  He was always freshly showered and shaved and wearing his “good” clothes.  I remember the lime green velour pullover shirt with thin violet and turquoise pinstripes (remember, it was the 70s!) that he wore to “dress up.”  I wore that shirt for years after he abandoned it.  My father was never a demonstrative man or lavish with praise.  In fact, some would say that he was too critical.  However, I knew how proud he was and how happy he was with his family, especially on those award ceremony days.  I could see the huge smile that came from the very core of his being.  It was one of the moments that occurred from time to time that made me certain that my father believed that the best and most important touchpoints about his whole life were his wife and children.  It defined him.  My father was loving. 

I remember moving into the condo I purchased on my own.  My father came and stayed with me for about a week when I first moved in.  While I was at work during the day, my father painted things and replaced things and fixed things in the condo.  When I came home, I could hear him whistling and humming as I came up the stairs.  He was busy and active, truly shaping the home where I would live for the next 23 years.  At night, we would go out to dinner, talk about things that we had never talked about, laugh together, and watch television.  My father was a fixer. 

I remember standing by my father’s bed in intensive care as he was dying twenty years ago.  He was only 72 years old.  He had been fine when my mother went to work in the morning.  He was fine when she came home at lunch.  He was laying on the floor in pain from a sudden heart attack when she got home in the early evening.  At the time, I lived about 70 miles away from my parents.  By the time I arrived to say good-bye, he had been unconscious for some time and I don’t know if he knew I was there.  My mother said that he was waiting for the priest and for me before he left us.  When I got to the hospital, the priest was in his room.  I went in and told him I loved him and didn’t want him to go.  While I was there, he passed away.  My father was gone.

I’ve always said that my father could fix anything.  I believe that, had he been conscious enough to open his own chest and wrestle his heart from his body, he could have jerry-rigged some way of keeping it going.  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. 

When my father died, my life changed forever.  That was one of the pivotal moments of my life when I could literally see my world transforming as it happened.  It was the end of being a child.  I was in my thirties.  One could certainly argue that I had not really been a child for a long time.  I had graduated college, married, supported myself, advanced significantly in a career, gotten divorced, and bought a home on my own.  Still, as long as my father was alive, part of me was his little girl.  My parents were a safe place to land if things did not go well.  They were the safe haven to protect me when being a grown-up got too difficult.  Once my father was gone, I not only lost his protection, but I also became the one who had to protect.  My mother has always been a strong, capable person.  Still, her loss of her life’s partner was even greater than my loss of my father.  It was now my role in the parent/child relationship to let her feel her loss, absorb as much of it as I could, and provide her with the safe haven she and my father always provided me. 

It has been a lifetime since my father’s lifetime ended.  I have continued to grow and change.  The way I look at life and death and joy and grief and protection and support continues to evolve.  That is as it should be.  Still, some part of me still mourns for that last bit of childhood I lost the day my father died.  I hope, even in Heaven, Daddy sees a part of me that is still his little girl.

Happy Fathers’ Day to all the fathers out there!  This Sunday is a dedicated time for us to thank “the first men we remember” for being our dads.  What are your best memories of your father?  Please share your perspective by leaving a comment.  In the alternative, you can send me an email at terriretirement@gmail.com. 

Have a wonderful day!

Terri 🙂