avatarPam Winter

Summarize

Father’s Day is a Day to Celebrate Your Dad for the Man he is/was.

In order to do this we must accept that few fathers are great yet each deserves a measure of understanding

My parents, Bill and Keturah — 1941'

I didn’t have what anyone would call a good father. Instead, mine began to drink soon after I was born in 1950, and he had always had a difficult personality that I later learned came from enduring a traumatic childhood. My mom divorced him by the time I was six or seven after he’d become a full-fledged alcoholic.

But despite this, I always knew he loved me in his own mostly unspoken, weird way.

For one thing, he referred to me as, “my baby girl,” for way too many years which was an endearment he never called my older sister. He merely called her by her name. For this reason and a few others, I knew I was his favorite.

He was also gifted in the way people are who make beautiful things with their hands, like furniture and later on leather goods. Over the years he made me a billfold with a school pic of me etched on it in color, a purse, and a notebook binder he hand tooled that were all amazingly intricate and perfectly made, because he was a perfectionist. I never used any of them as they were different and I didn’t want to be seen as different. Although I have kept all of these well-preserved for over 50 years.

He died when I was 30 and I’m 72 now so he’s been gone from my life for many years and I’ve long accepted that this is for the best. As I said, at best he was difficult.

By the time I became a teenager, he was a recovering alcoholic who was attending AA meetings faithfully. His home was an apartment in Long Beach, CA., and he had remarried. He worked for McDonald Douglas Aircraft, as what I don’t know. He was working at Boeing in Wichita, KS when I was born but they fired him when he hit rock bottom, which came soon after the divorce.

I don’t remember ever having conscious feelings of love for him.

He was just my father whom I didn’t know, who I tolerated from a distance through monthly letters we exchanged that always had a check enclosed to my mom, and one I only visited every summer for a brief time because some judge said I had to. We rarely talked over the phone because long-distance calls were expensive back then over landlines. I mostly dreaded my visits to him as they were always awkward as he was like a man, a stranger, I didn’t really know who didn’t know me and neither of us knew how to relate to each other.

His new wife was a woman I described as a fat lump of clay who would perch herself across the room from my father and me and never said two words as she stared holes through me. Probably wondering how on earth he had produced me. She stayed an enigma who sold Avon products until she left him a few years before he gave up his sobriety and drank himself to death on Christmas Eve in 1980.

Father’s Day and Mother's Day weren’t celebrated much when I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s. Maybe kids gave their parents a handmade card or handed them some hand-plucked flower from their own mom’s garden, but no one made a big deal out of it. That would happen later on due to over-marketing and the greed of florists, advertisers, and Hallmark, Inc.

You would think I probably imagined what it would be like to have a wonderful father, one I would’ve lovingly called ‘dad’ and had a real relationship with, right? But I didn’t and it took growing up, looking back, and maturing to figure out why I didn’t. On the block where I grew up, there were 20 houses all built in the 40s that housed families with kids. I used to play with all the kids and got to know their parents and siblings very well, and I’m here to say none of them had what I would call a good dad. Or, someone who could make me feel bad for what I was missing…

There was the dad who everyone said was shell-shocked and rarely left the bedroom he and his wife shared in his wife’s parent’s house. They had 5 kids over the years and stayed in that house until I was in my 20s when mom’s parents bought them dry cleaners figuring maybe their SIL could handle working there. Of course, we now call what he suffered from PTSD.

There was the doctor and his wife and 2 daughters, who my mom told me wasn’t a real doctor, although he made sure his whole family called him “Doc.” He was actually an osteopath and they weren’t recognized back then. Everyone knew he had an oversized ego from the sports car he squeezed his oversized frame into whose horn he honked every time he announced his arrival home.

There was a girlfriend's stepdad next door who had a long, suspicious scar running the length of his face that was never talked about, who rarely said two words. Now he was spooky! Forty years later she told me she always knew her dad was the one who had freed her pet parakeet to the great outdoors because he was tired of the mess he made in their unfinished basement.

Across the street, there was an older dad who owned and drove a Dr. Pepper truck and had 5 kids, plus two others from his 1st wife. He came home exhausted every night and just wanted the kids to stay outside, or go downstairs so he could watch tv in peace and quiet. Although he was likable, I noted all the kids did exactly what he said immediately, like maybe they feared his dark side?

I could go on but you get the picture. None of the other dads seemed like much to celebrate either. They all had their faults and foibles, and none of them were like the dad’s on popular tv shows like Father Knows Best, or Leave it to Beaver, so I guess this is why I never daydreamed about a Mr. Perfect dad.

I deliberately waited until now, after Father’s Day to write this wouldn’t pale too much in the face of stories written about great dads which usually appear here. I no longer feel the need to write a tirade against my father because I have grown to accept him for what he was. A flawed, confused, unrealized, insecure man of great intellect who had a terribly difficult upbringing and was abandoned by his own father when he was very young.

He was a man who didn’t get much love or support while having to endure endless taunts from his older sister and brother. A man had a mother who was an undiagnosed, untreated depressed woman who did the best she could to raise 3 kids with only the learned skill of sewing to earn a living. A young boy had to pull a wagon full of homegrown vegetables up and down the street for people to buy in order to supplement his mother’s meager wages while other kids made fun of him. A boy of 13 was forced to drop out of school in order to get a job so he and his mom could eat and stay in their tiny home because he was the only one left at home.

Yes, I know there are great dads out there because I married a man who became one. Our daughter is the apple of his eye and she knows it. She is a ‘daddy’s girl’ and she’s not ashamed to admit it even now that she’s in her 40s. If anyone could write a glowing story about a great dad it would be her, but sadly she’s not a writer. But my husband, who I lovingly and comically refer to as Mr. Pam, has sometimes had to father me too. But I guess he should have expected this. Either way, I sometimes wonder how I got so lucky to have found him.

So every year on Father’s Day why not try to give a modicum of understanding and respect to your dad, even if he wasn’t a good one? Oh, I know there are some men who don’t deserve any respect, but even if you have to reach way back or deep down, isn’t there some little something you can find to honor him?

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