This Weekend I Was A Daughter
Daily I am a wife, a friend, and a neighbor. One to two days of the week, I am a mother and a grandmother. A couple of times a year, I am a sister and a daughter to my mother.
Once a year, I get to be my father’s daughter.
This weekend, my father came to stay with us for two nights, something that has happened once a year for the past 7 or 8 years, barring those COVID years. I really do not like the fact that we measure so many things by COVID. But I digress.
My parents divorced when I was 18 years old. My mother moved out, and we lived with my dad. Let’s go back further than that. Growing up, I strived to please my dad and make him proud, seeking his approval in the things that I did — playing basketball, and running track — although I never seemed to be quite good enough.
f you have a sibling, I am sure that you have asked your parents who their favorite was, and who they loved more. Parents always answered, "You are both my favorite, and I love you the same." Even though this, too, was my parents’ answer, I was always more like my dad and my sister like my mom. Whether he would admit it or not, I was my father’s favorite. At the same time, although he denies it to this day, I am pretty sure my dad wished I had been a boy.
When Dad was on the roof, I was the one holding the ladder, helping him install the brick walkway in the backyard and the deck on the back porch. Helping Dad, I learned how to saw wood and understand the difference between plumb and level. My dad and I still share a love of cars, and when I was eleven, I could identify a Porsche 944 from three blocks away.
As so often happens when parents split and a daughter lives with the dad, I took on part of the wife role, picking up the slack in the house and growing even closer to my father. When he started dating, he would tell me what he did or did not like about the women he had gone out with — their looks, their athleticism. The prospect of having a stepmom did not seem daunting…
Until my father met his present-day wife. My dad, who had always admonished me when I ran like a girl or drove like a girl, brought home a woman I would only describe as “prissy.” She wore frilly shirts, was not athletic, and acted meek — not at all who I thought he would have chosen the second time around.
Suddenly, my sister and I, who had been raised properly and had exceptional manners, were not greeting her friends properly, and she proclaimed that my sister and I were too old to be calling my dad “daddy.”
Speaking only for myself, I was hoping their relationship would not last, and based on what my dad shared with me after about six months of their dating, it seemed that they would not be together much longer. Needless to say, the afternoon that my sister and I were asked to come into the kitchen for a moment, I was beyond shocked. We were greeted by my dad and his fiancée with glasses of champagne and an ice cream cake. Someone had told them this was a good way to announce your engagement to your children.
Soon they were wed. I am not sure what my dad thought it would be like when “she” moved in, but things started to change rapidly. There were rules about what my sister and I could and could not do in our own home, and how we were expected to behave, and suddenly their bedroom was off-limits. Within six months of their wedding, I left for college 45 minutes away; my sister was left alone and still in high school. I later learned that my dad started giving my sister money so that she could eat dinner out every night and not return home until bedtime. Our new stepmom wanted to live a fairy-tale life with her new husband that did not include the Cinderella stepdaughters.
I was miserable at college and quit after only one or two semesters. When I moved back home, I was now in the way of the fairy-tale.
While the neighbors were on vacation, I was feeding their fish. As I approached their house at dusk one night, through the windows, I saw two men in their house; they turned out to be painters, but I was spooked. I rushed home to get my dad to go back with me. When I found them, my dad and his wife were in their bedroom, the door shut. I knocked and told my dad I needed his help; he told me to come back later. I told him what happened and that I was scared. No matter how I asked, he was not coming out of their room to help me. I left the house that night and never went back. I stayed at the neighbors' house until they came back from vacation. My dad knew where I was but never checked on me or asked me to come back.
Twenty-plus years passed with no contact with my father except he mailed me a birth announcement about the arrival of his two new kids.
As my grandmother came upon her 90th birthday, my dad reached out. We started to talk on and off. Now that his second set of kids were off to college, his wife was encouraging him to have a relationship with me. There was a lot of anger that I needed to get off my chest, phone calls where I said what I needed to say to him. There was not and never has been a moment of remorse or an apology from my father over what he had put me through, how he had completely chosen her and walked away from me. But I had a choice, and if I wanted a relationship with him, I had to move beyond the past. Forgiveness is for the forgiver, as they say.
The first time we saw each other after 20 years, we met in Dayton for dinner as he had work in the area, and he brought a stuffed SpongeBob for my daughter. The next visit, he was going to stay in a hotel, but I finally convinced him to stay with us; it was a one-night visit. We have since settled into the groove of texting weekly, speaking monthly, and he comes from Connecticut to visit every summer, staying at our home for two or three nights.
When he visits, we have always kept busy; one year we visited the Ohio State campus, another year replacing the columns on the front of our home. The last few visits, things have slowed down; our brisk walks with the dogs are now strolls, he is not comfortable sitting for long periods of time, and he is slower to get moving in the mornings.
During this visit, I took more care of him, and brought him water when I picked him up at the airport because he does not drink enough of it; each morning I set his coffee and breakfast out. Instead of a home project, we went to the park and then to lunch with my daughter and granddaughter, his granddaughter and great-granddaughter. Afterward, my dad came home and took a nap.
As I am writing this, the tears keep flowing. Why the tears… because of all the years I missed with one of my favorite people in the whole world. Even though he completely walked away from me when I was 20 years old, I love him so much. Tears because to this day I have not met his second set of kids; his wife still wants to keep her life separate from mine. She has always told my dad not to speak of her or their kids with me. Tears because every twelve months he has aged more; tears because he still calls me champ when he hugs me goodbye. How many more yearly visits will there be?
When I arrived home after dropping him off at the airport, he was not here; the bed he slept in was empty. When he is gone, there is nothing here to remind me of him. It will be another 12 months before I get to kiss him goodnight again and be his daughter.