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The next topic is, “Here’s why i never told you…”

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Sea Glass Girl for Nancy

Barb – My Father Never Told Me

 

 

 

 

My father never told me about marriage or anything much of an emotional nature.  He was old fashioned and such things simply were not talked about.  It’s amazing how you can live with a person for decades and still not really know them.  Is that the nature of the parent child relationship?  It’s not part of the job?  Was that how he saw us, my sister and me?  Was it the circumstances he found himself in?  My forty year old eyes can see that he married too young, and for the wrong reasons.   These things were far beyond my twelve year old brain. 

 

 

 

 

Hindsight, polished by experience is the only clear lens I have on his life.  Some of the lessons of that life are left behind like footprints on my soul.  Don’t smoke, talk to your spouse, and listen, too; if you’re depressed, get help.  He never told me how much I would miss him, I guess neither one of us knew.  Would it have changed things to know I’d only have him for 38 of my years?  I’d like to think it would have changed us both.    

 

 

 

 

Besides, ‘It’s about time’, I wonder what he would have told me about parenthood.  I am due to give birth to his granddaughter in mid September.  I didn’t know much about his childhood except that he had no siblings and hints that he may have been a handful.  Maybe he would be relieved we are having a girl.  I was disappointed I couldn’t name her Richard.  I remember him telling me once “You guys didn’t come with instructions!” He also told me “Don’t expect anything, you won’t be disappointed.”  I am working on replacing this with positive expectations.  I had no idea how much work that would be.  I don’t remember my father attempting it.  His pessimism and lack of patience were not a welcome legacy but it seems only time and distance allow us to see our parents as human; human beings who married, had jobs, bills, arguments, flaws, and kids. 

 

 

 

 

I am told we’re a lot alike, me and Moose.  There are gifts that are visible too, his sense of humor, his thriftiness, and I sometimes see his smile in my mirror.  He led by example in a sense, and by the time I reached my early thirties, I knew in my bones I did not want the marriage they had; another gift.  I am grateful I have memories of him being proud of me.  Report cards as a kid, the CPA exam, and my black belt, were all made sweeter with that icing.   

 

 

 

 

When he became ill, it didn’t really sink in; another function of parenthood?  Don’t let the kids worry about you.  At first it was the heart attacks, ‘ He’ll be ok, he just needs to lose weight.’ Which college are you going to?  Then it was emphysema, ‘ He really needs to quit smoking’, How’s the new job?  Then it was lung cancer.  The chit chat stopped. 

 

 

 

 

Chemo followed by radiation followed by seemingly endless worry.  Months pass.  ‘The tumor is unchanged, have you found a new house?’  My father was still able to walk when we took him through the home we bought.  I remember his childish delight at seeing the house before my mother did.

 

 

 

 

When the cancer returned there was bottomless anger and tears.  We became furniture at the hospital, the rehab center, and my parents’ house.  Free time was spent searching for Charlie Chan movies and WaWa coffee.  We do these things not because they make sense.  They are from the heart and some of them are for ourselves.  We are helpless angry and frightened in the face of goodbye.

 

 

 

 

A part of me knew he was no longer living when he had to wear a diaper.  This was not my father, it certainly wasn’t living.  Living was meeting him for dinner when my mother worked the evening shift.  It was the father daughter dance at our wedding.   It was my husband taking him to a guy movie us girls weren’t interested in.  

 

 

 

A year after the funeral, my husband and I sat in one of his favorite restaurants eating a broiled seafood combination and drinking coffee.  If it could be said he had a drinking problem, it was hot coffee on a summer evening.  I never understood that attraction.  I lost count of how many times I wanted to pick up the phone and call him.  He never told me how much I would miss him.  I don’t expect the ripples to stop.    

Julie - My Father Never Told Me …

 

            …that all men were not sweet and kind and honest like he was.  Being one of five daughters left me more than a little ill-prepared for the world of testosterone.  Having Big Mitch (big of heart, not big of size) for a Dad filled me with love and safety and goodness.  But it also left me wide open to men who had radar that could easily detect a naive, petite female with a trusting heart, wishful thinking and blinders where I should have had discernment, boundaries and the ability to say, “NO!”.

 

 

 

 

            Big Mitch lived for his family and knew no other way to be in the world other than hard-working, family-centered and open-hearted.  I remember when he dropped me off for my first semester at the University of Rhode Island.  Big Mitch and Lolly (Lauren, my younger sister) helped me unpack all of my soon-to-be-collegiate belongings in my box of a room with two single beds and a closet the size of a vertical coffin.  We hugged good-bye with tear-filled eyes then Big Mitch and Lolly drove away … leaving me to fend for myself with my own under-developed devices.  Big scary world … little, clueless Julie.

 

 

 

 

            I lived in a co-ed dorm with characters straight out of “Animal House.”  Amidst the smell of marijuanna, scary fights in the hallways and loud male voices, I shook myself to sleep those first few nights –  fear mounting, bed vibrating, heart pounding.  Where’s my Dad to protect me?  How do I protect myself…?

 

 

 

 

            They call it “date rape” now, but there was no such terminology in the late 70’s.  I could have written a thesis on the subject for one of my psychology classes because I had experienced this violation on several occasions with several deceptively sweet, secretly selfish suitors.  They weren’t at all like my Dad.  And Big Mitch was far away in the world of the safe. But I was on my own, floundering in shame, constant confusion and a devastation so deep it’s a wonder my Julie spirit kept me above ground.

 

 

 

 

            That was then – this is now, 30 years later.  I have had my share of sickness and heart break and losses, but just as a broken bone heals itself back to wholeness and then some, so too am I so much stronger – scars and all.  And my Julie spirit now soars high with the gratitude, love and wisdom that can only come from living the life of a Warrioress.  I remember Who I am… and I know the Source of my Power. 

 

 

 

 

            My Dad just told me how much he admires my strength, my courage and my resiliency.  Amazing Big Mitch told me that I amaze him!  This is my kind of Mutual Admiration Society – father to daughter, grown-up to grown-up.  Now I realize that no father can protect his daughter from the wounding ways of the world.  But my Dad and I love each other more every day … and that tells me all I need to know. 

Toni – My Father Never Told Me

 

 

 

My father never told me why he liked Jack Daniels, a stiff vodka martini, a Heineken better than he liked me.  And I could never figure it out.  And so we fought, he and I, and though I suppose you could say I lost, since he never stopped drinking, in fact, never would admit it was a problem, I’m pretty sure neither one of us won.

 

 

 

My daughter trusts my husband like a bird trusts its wings.  She knows that he will protect her from whatever’s under the bed, or clobber the robbers, she’s so convinced are lurking just outside of our house as soon as the sun sets.  She’s sure he has the answer to most any question she can dream up, and that he will be patient with her for as long as she needs him to be on days when her mood is ugly. That he will be at every moment of every soccer game, every basketball game, every baseball game every play, every inconsequential class breakfast, despite a bad schedule or a bad weather forecast. She also knows that he will notice and compliment her simply for breathing in and out. She knows he believes in her like a good Catholic believes in Jesus.  And she believes in him back. 

 

 

 

I watch them like I am visiting another planet and observing how aliens interact.  I picture how I must look watching them sometimes– a puppy with his head cocked sideways, big eyes asking, “What is it you do when you’re human?  How come you don’t eat out of the bowl and why do you use your hands to catch a ball, when you could use your mouth?”  I’m very clear about the fact that I don’t get this relationship. I only know that I am grateful for it.  It’s so big and so filled with all that is good that I can almost feel what it must be like to have a father.

 

 

 

The guy had stuff, my dad.  Sure, he had plenty of stuff.  Psoriasis covered his body in scaly raw patches that made him itch and fell from him like an Aspen blizzard.  This disease with no cure brought him on more than one occasion to spend weeks on end in the hospital bathed in tar—yeah tar–one of the only treatments available back then.  And if that wasn’t enough, he’d also lost the sight in one of his eyes in his 3ad’s, the product of an accident, I think, and had serious problems with the vision in his “good” eye, so he carried with him like a cavernous backpack, the fear that he’d one day become totally blind and unable to provide for his family (he never did, which I take credit for, since I spent every girlhood birthday cake blow-out-the-candles-wish that he wouldn’t).  In hindsight, he likely had undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and anxiety and depression, too.  So, there was reason to self-medicate.  Plenty of reason.  But with three kids, and a wife, that’s more than enough reasons not to.

 

 

My son is unusually loving.  At 13, 5’10, he will still lay his head on my shoulder as we watch a movie together, or wake up in the morning and give me a kiss.  We talk about what’s happening in his life—girls, sports & school & did I mention girls–in an adult way and tease each other until we laugh so hard, we need to run for the bathroom.  Sometimes I wonder if this is how it could have been with my Dad if he had been himself and not his disease.

 

 

 

For a long time I secretly and then not so secretly wished my mom would divorce my dad.  I could have a whole new life, without the crazy guy who would ground me for a month, after yelling at me so loudly that the walls would shake, because I’d forgotten to replace the shampoo cap, but not for skipping 7^th period science, who made every dinner time for a kid who hated all foods except spaghetti a loud and violent battle, with my sisters and I prisoners of war, and my mother an innocent casualty, who, for no reason would do the unreasonable, like make me go up to bed by myself refusing to allow me a night light in a creaky 100 year old house where Jack Nicholson in The Shining seemed about to appear behind every door. When it was clear she wasn’t going to divorce him, I wished she’d at least leave him. I would live with her, and no longer be tortured by the inconsistency and screaming fights that made my stomach ache and gave me headaches.  But my mother, who I loved more than anybody, would never leave him.   Not because she was a martyr, but because she didn’t know how to leave him, how to take care of her kids with barely a high school education, how to tell her Italian family, for whom the word divorce seemed not to have a definition, that this marriage wasn’t going to make it.  And so she stayed. And I created a new wish—I wished that maybe at least, maybe I was adopted (I wasn’t).

 

 

 

It was the unpredictability and fear, and total irrationality,  the not knowing that my father was, and let’s call a spade a spade, here, a drunk that made growing up with him the hardest.  In my town, it was commonplace to have a martini or two come 5 0’clock, so much so that we never knew that my father’s anger and tantrums were because of his alcoholism.  It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that it all became clear, through my oldest sister, who found herself in therapy and uncovered what was really wrong with our father.

 

 

 

Once we learned what was underneath all the craziness, we talked to him, each of us, alone, together, in a group, in every configuration we could, dozens of times, over and over again, but he didn’t seem to hear. “I don’t have a problem with drinking—I love it,” he would say with glee.  “That’s funny, dad, gee, that’s a good one, a knee slapper.”  Is that what he though I was going to say during the hundreds of times that I tried to tell him how I felt?  How bad I felt.  How bad I felt about myself.

 

 

 

 

It all came down to one thing and one thing only.  It was that I never mattered enough—nobody ever mattered enough for my father to change, to look at himself and who he was and the options there were for him to be in the world in a different, better, way.  For his family.  For himself.

 

 

 

 

My father died without ever telling me why it was that we couldn’t matter, why nobody could ever matter, why the numbing ingredient in alcohol was all that ever mattered.  And so, six times a day, I tell my kids in actions and in words, how much they matter, in hopes that their story will be different than mine, when they, one day sit down to write it.

Terrie - My Father Never Told Me

 

My father never told me that my tenth year would be our happiest one.  Maybe he didn’t know it himself.

 

 

I was the second of three girls and the only one who didn’t win beauty contests.  My hair was short and chopped-looking, since I couldn’t stop wiggling during my mother’s haircuts.  I had a lazy eye that wandered freely during conversations, so people were always wondering if I was looking at them.  My glasses were so thick I could start fires with them.  I was a tomboy and a talker, though, and both of these traits endeared me to my father.  

 

 

On the Christmas of my 10th year, my father was stationed in France.  I got a fishing pole while both of my sisters got Barbie dolls.  That was all right with me.  My father would wake me on winter mornings while it was still dark and we would drive to Verdun to go fishing.  I recall those early morning drives, the fragrance of coffee from his thermos filling the car with the smell of adventure.  I would grin as he laughed at his own jokes and stories, slapping his leg and cackling like Dick Van Dyke did in Mary Poppins.  It was pitch black outside when we left home, but after awhile the sun would rise and light up the countryside, transforming the twin columns of birch trees along the road into gilt-edged pillars.  We would stop in the village on the way and buy a crusty loaf of bread still warm from the oven, and we’d rip chunks off and eat our breakfast, smiling.  Then we’d bait our hooks with leftover bread and pieces of cheese, luring one beautiful rainbow trout after another to our poles with the same food we ate for lunch.

 

 

These were the best times I ever had with my dad, frosty and windblown mornings on the lakes and streams of France, catching fish and spinning tales, pretending that I really was the son he would never have.

 

 

“We had some good times, didn’t we?” my father said wistfully a few moments ago when I called him to wish him a happy birthday.  He is 77 years old today.  He is unbearably thin and stooped now, his eyes weak behind his enormous military-issue glasses.  There was something in his voice that tore my heart a little.

 

 

“I love you, Dad,” I told him, imagining him back then, a handsome ginger-haired sergeant, driving through the countryside with his tomboy daughter, throwing his head back and laughing.

Kim – My Father Never Told Me

 

 

 

My father never told me how much I would miss him. Well, he kind of did in his Italian father way -  “someday when I’m dead and gone you’ll miss me….” joking shortly before he died. He would tease me a bit, saying I was too dependant on him. He wanted to buy me a tree so that when he was dead and gone I’d remember him, except that he was dead and gone before we bought the tree, and I don’t need a tree to remember him every day of my life.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me how to do all those things that I took for granted – his carpentry, and fixing and creating and building. Well, I did absorb some of his knowledge through a sort of osmosis – I have a sense of how things should be done, I just can’t do it myself. My father and I contracted our Indiana house. My husband fired the original contractor, because my father said he didn’t know shit, and he was a crook. My father called these kinds of contractors, “monkeys.” The kind of guy that never swung a hammer, that wouldn’t know a straight line if they tripped over it. This was my dream house, the house where my dad lay gasping his last breath. I had to sell this beautiful new home, to escape back home and lick my wounds.

 

 

 

 

My husband and I, we built another house. Oh, I sort of designed this one, we had a contractor that was familiar with a hammer. But with a three room apartment, a toddler, and a need to recreate a nest, there wasn’t any time to lovingly plan every minute detail, each electrical outlet, every light fixture.

 

 

 

 

It’s a lovely house, bright and sunny, a home where we’ve watched our son grow from a  toddler to a boy, dents in the woodwork, fingerprints on each windowpane, a fluffy cat, a little frog pond, butterfly gardens, and recently, a rescued gray tree frog and a boy beside himself with joy.

 

 

 

 

But my father’s absence is still. Not only because we have to pay contractors now, to fix and create and build; not only because my mom lives with us in the summer; not only because my son asks about his grandfather; but because he is not here. This larger than life man, gone before we realized what was happening. I have yet to plant that tree.

Kathy – My Father Never Told Me

 

 

            My father never told me about the years he was the housekeeper’s son.  The years his mother, Ethel, abandoned by her husband with no child support, sent his brother and sisters to live with relatives, and kept the youngest, my father, with her when she took a job as a live-in housekeeper to a wealthy widower with two sons.  My father never told me how the sons forced him to use the servants’ entrance, never letting him forget he was the maid’s boy.  My mother told me, instead, how the rich man proposed to Ethel, but his two sons were opposed.  Ethel refused to marry, moved out of the house, and lost her job. But maybe, that time at dinner, when I was five and reached for a cucumber with my fingers, and he lost his temper, maybe my father was telling me then, to use social graces to shield myself from shame.

 

 

            My father never told me I deserved better than what he gave. Never suggested that two weeks out of every summer starting when I was nine, an occasional phone call, and an intermittent letter was not stellar parenting.  He never asked me if I missed him, if I needed him. But maybe, when I was fifteen, and he wondered out loud in a phone conversation, if he should have allowed my step-father to adopt me, he was telling me then, he was afraid he hadn’t been much of a Daddy.

 

 

            My father never told me that he understood what it meant to be a seeker, to need to step away from the people you live with, to dive deep inside your own skin ~  to feel, always, a little restless and lonely.  He never told me that he was well acquainted with melancholy, that “sometime sadness” that blind-sides like a sucker punch.  But maybe, when he was lost in swirls of cigarette smoke and Duke Ellington swing, he was telling me that his soul understood yearning too.

 

 

            My father never told me we were like two peas in a pod.  He used to say, instead, “You’re so much like your mother, you make me sick”, but the smile lit his eyes when he said it, and I knew he was seeing in me what he had once loved in my mother. If he were alive today, I would tell him, “Dad, you were wrong. Turns out I am your daughter through and through.”  So much of what you never told me, I know anyway.  Your temperament travels in my veins alongside of our shared Type B blood. Wordless, you whisper to me daily, the things you never told me.  I write to make them real.”

My Father Never Told Me
by Mary Agnes

The Dancing Warrior Manitoo
       
                        (*A manitoo in the Algonquin tribes is a spirit)

My Father never told us
We come from a tribe.
My uncle said “We’re Miq’mac.”
We laughed –”Big Mac”?
My Father hung his head.

Now we learn the stories
We were never told,
Seeking our songs on the internet,
The myths and tales we could never get
From silent fathers.

“Dancing Warrior Manitoo.”
A wise elder gives the youngest son
A box. Inside, a tiny warrior dancing,
Dancing so much he was sweating
(My ancestors noticed that.)

“What do you want of me?”
The dancing manitoo would ask
When you opened the box. He would do
Anything you wanted him to.
Why wasn’t I told this?

There’s much more, but I stop there,
Feeling the story beat in my blood,
My manitoo lost.  I grieve.
He could do anything from his box but leave.
I know him.

Joy - My Father Never Told Me

 

 

  

My father never told me that he was the best one of all. He didn’t cheat or hit or drink or lie or fail. Not ever. He occupied himself with things that mattered to him from sun-up, stopping only in the evening for a hearty meal and an hour or so of precious nothing-doing before falling into the heavy sleep of those who spent the day changing the world somehow.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me he was faithful to my mother — not because of a devoted, undying and lasting love between them, but because such moral defiance would never cross his mind. He didn’t need to tell me such things, and I didn’t need to ask. He wouldn’t leer at or flirt with young women the way many of my friends’ fathers and fathers’ friends would do – still do – with me. He didn’t tell me that his integrity was suspended high above that of most mortals, and therefore I came to expect that everyone possessed such character. My father never told me I couldn’t trust everyone.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me why he worried about me, why he was over-protective, why he had so many silly rules, why he wanted me safe and close. He only told me that he wanted me near, he only asked me why I felt the need to spend every night out with my friends, or later, when I’d moved out of his house, when the next time would be that he’d see me. My father didn’t tell me we didn’t have a whole lifetime to spend together.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me he would disappear so quickly, completely, and without warning, with so much left unsaid. But he did, somehow. He did tell me. Because I never doubted that that was the precise moment in history he was supposed to go. He told me clearly that it was the best thing he could have hoped for – cashing out hastily, before age or infirmity could even slightly compromise his strong hands, his sharp reflexes, his analytical mind, his strength in the eyes of the world.

 

 

 

 

He’d never told me things so clearly as he did from the other side, from the moment of his passing – comforts and assurances that fortified me so that I could be there for those who did not hear him and could only feel the void of his absence. And when later he told me to leave them, that I’d done what I could and now it was time for me to go, to live my own dreams thousands of miles away, I could leave with a mind that was clear and open to whatever was to come – just as I’m certain he did.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me why he clung to me so tightly in this life, and even when I came to understand I never told him, never thanked him.

 

 

 

 

Here we are now, though, my father and I, dimensions apart and suspended in perfect understanding, perfect freedom, perfect love.