Kismet Dad

Becoming a mom was scary and exciting, but I never thought I’d become dad, too

The story behind the film

Grainy 8 mm film shows me sitting on my grandpa’s lap in our backyard, at three years old, eating cotton candy, patiently trying to teach him “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins. He’s tickled by me.

I only remember him living in a nursing home, with Hershey’s kisses in his nightstand drawer for me. My father’s visits were his weekly highlight. Overpowering stenches of Ben Gay and urine permeating carpeted hallways were primary in my young brain, so I frequently turned down the invites, which I regretted for years after his passing.

His son, my father, is the person who taught me everything I knew about men. While my mom worked multiple jobs, dad took me to his favorite bar just down the street, where I entertained myself swiveling on a high barstool, slurping my Shirley Temple, laughing at one of the regulars who made quarters magically fall out of the swamp cooler bolted to the wall.

I’d skip over to the jukebox, select a familiar song that Dad and I both loved, and I’d hum along. When mom was home, busy in the kitchen preparing delectable meals, I’d watch The Twilight_Zone, The Incredible Hulk, and dozens of other shows with Dad, relaxing with him on his giant recliner. Unable to sleep on summer nights, velcroed to my sheets with sweat, the oscillating fan clicked warm air back and forth from its perch on my dresser and helped drown out my parent’s yelling in the other room.

All kinds of dads

Sometimes I thought about my grandpa, whose whiskers were soft within the folds of loose skin on a face dry from decades of tobacco and sun, wrinkled from more decades of smiles and laughter. I can still smell his plaid shirts, a unique scent all his own; not great, far from bad, but just, him. I remember his aftershave, laundry detergent, a little muscle ointment, and something else that only he had that I never smelled again.

I wondered how a sweet, happy-go-lucky man who easily laughed could raise a guy like my dad.

My first husband, the father of my two older children, never knew who his father was nor how to be one. When my second husband was arrested on Father’s Day, I quietly removed all the decorations and Happy Father’s Day handwritten signs my middle daughter had lovingly adorned our home with only days earlier.

I knew then that I would raise my three children on my own.

Heartwarming surprises

A year after his arrest, our shattered lives were partially reassembled, and we were living halfway across the country, reinventing ourselves in every way. My three-year-old ran into my arms with pure abandonment when I picked her up from daycare. She pulled my hand with her tiny, sweaty one and eagerly tugged me over to her cubby, where she pulled out a Happy Father’s Day, Mom card that she proudly handed me.

“I made you something, Mommy!” She yelled, dragging me to a row of bright blue aprons, and she went directly to hers. Her tiny handprints were in the center, and this was also for me.

She hadn’t skipped a beat. I was dad, too. I’ll always be both mom and dad to her. It won’t be any other way, and she was okay with that.

Time loop reality

My three kids are now grown. All are hard workers and know the value of a dollar.

My youngest plays beautiful music on the cello and chooses music meticulously. As a young girl, I spent countless hours at the jukebox at the bar I grew up in, selecting the next song I wanted everyone in the room to hear, and oftentimes it was Blue Moon.

I could hear the longing in the singer’s voice, crooning about being alone. It was many moons before I discovered who my grandfather had been in his younger years. He ran illegal card games in town for most of his life. He hobnobbed with a lot of the local politicians, business leaders, attorneys, and cops. A bootlegger, he loaded his trunk with alcoholic beverages during Prohibition and drove to Chicago, delivering to Ralph Capone.

So many layers

All three of my kids have artistic abilities, whether building, creating, drawing, painting, or music. My dad is talented in theater, has performed in stage plays over the years, and still writes and directs small local films, even now, in his eighties.

I think back to cartoon birds, each on a three-by-two-foot posterboard my dad had drawn that adorned the walls beside my crib when I was a toddler. He’s a cartoonist and frequently sent in editorial cartoons that landed in our local paper, where I searched the drawing for my name, which he always hid somewhere.

Whenever I read stories to my kids when they were growing up, I’d change what was written on the pages to match something we’d done that day and turn things into something silly and funny.

Sometimes when my kids looked up at the stars at night, I’d remember doing the same thing with my dad when I was young, lying on the hood of our car in the driveway. After all, the end of the Blue Moon song tells us the moon turns to gold, and the singer no longer feels alone.

There’s more to the story

During my fifth-grade summer, I joined Dad in his pursuit of selling individual pages to businesses for a cartoon book he later published called “Des Moines the Surprising Place.” He created a similar hospital cartoon book called “It Only Hurts When I Laugh” that sold in hospital gift shops and cartoon T-shirts for various cities.

On Thursdays, over lunch, we’d drive to a restaurant for Toastmasters, where he was the President of a local club that year, and I often spoke at table topics. Decades later, I easily stood in front of crowds to speak about things I never could’ve imagined would happen in my lifetime. When Dad and I drove around that summer, we never missed Paul Harvey on the radio. His stories were my favorite.

The media loved to give snippets of the surface of stories, the major, horrible parts. But Paul Harvey told us all the minor things everyone else left out; he completed reality. There’s always so much more because no story and no person are all good or all bad. I insisted we wait until the end of his program when Paul told us, “And now you know the rest of the story.”

You don’t have to say dad

To everyone who has ever loved someone enough, they thought of that person as dad, no matter who that person is or may have been.

And to everyone who is, was, or ever wanted to be a dad, or was chosen to play that part, even though they never auditioned for it.

Happy Father’s Day