What Makes a Good Daughter

A lesson in squeezing blood from a stone

I call my dad every Monday at 9 A.M. Well, sometimes it’s Sunday at 11, or Wednesday at noon. The point is, I’m a good daughter, and it is not easy being good when most of my life has been an accumulation of rebellions against my father.

Dad and I talk for at least an hour. We cover the basics, dive into nutrition, and skate around BIG questions with relative ease. How hot will it be today? What young nurse at the VA hospital did he educate on the parameters of healthy triglycerides? Why does he call death “jumping to lightspeed”?

Dad lives two time zones away. Each day is a system of tracking facts. Data keeps us sane, grounded, and focused. For people like us, purpose and knowledge walk hand-in-hand into a desert sunset, where nothing is ever as it seems, but doing the right thing is decided with a unanimous vote.

My dad has always been my dad, but the last couple years I’ve gotten to know him as a person. He was in the Air Force and worked on airplanes during the Vietnam War. The military paid for him to go to college so he could become a biologist and keep live snakes in a bucket under the sink. When he and mom moved to Las Vegas, he taught safety protocols to linemen who thought nothing of tromping along power poles forty-feet in the air.

In every call, Dad says, “You and your sister were our greatest gifts. I’m proud of you both.”

I’m not sure sis and I have come by his pride honestly or through default. We’re both in our forties and have children on the high side of grown. Sister has birthed three gentle giants. The youngest is twelve and over six-feet tall. The middle child has type-1 diabetes. The oldest created his own language, a mix of Druid and god knows what, at the age of ten. It’s a marvel to me how she feeds them.

I married early, got pregnant early, and divorced early. My daughter is the apple of my eye, stable where I float in the clouds, methodical where I impatiently rush ahead. It is a marvel to my sister how I raised a Zen-like girl.

More pride from Dad. “My grandchildren are sweet as honey. Not a taciturn delinquent in the bunch,” he jokes. He’s not exaggerating. Our children are spectacles of good behavior and compassion, but I bite my tongue lest I jinx them. We won’t know if the rebellious streak is hereditary until the kids hit their twenties and get the first taste of presumed independence.

Sis and I were late bloomers, which is another way of saying we waited until Dad was distracted before exploring the fun side of adulting, also called drinking, drugs, and sex. This sounds worse than it was. Sis was smart and kept her experiments within a controlled environment. She called it marriage. I ran through the freedom years like my head was on fire and a pox upon those who tried to extinguish the flame.

Both of us were loved, and through epistemic congruency, decided blaming anything on our parents was a waste of precious energy.

We don’t tell Dad our trite idioms, what little we remember, unless they’re funny. Dad has enough on his plate. Our mother, his beloved wife and soulmate, has been disintegrating in a nursing home for four years.

This was not how they planned living out their golden years, and while dementia comes in all shapes and sizes, the majority of Alzheimer’s patients are afforded a gradual descent. Not so with Mom. She is a meteor falling from the sky. One month, she leaves the mail in the grass. Three months, she gets up six times a night, racked with debilitating urinary tract infections. Nine months, she can’t wash herself. No diet change, drug regimen, or sensory protocol can transform her to a feather drifting toward earth.

I call him once a week, every week, because he’s smart and interesting, but let’s face it, I am grateful not to have front row seats. It’s taken years, but I’ve built a tolerance to watching my parents uncouple and become almost hollow from the gravity of their forced individuality.

The buffer of distance helps me remind him there is a life to be lived, and it would really suck if both were lost within a short period of time. Some days, I can parlay the distance into making Dad laugh. Others, I grit my teeth and keep the tissues close. These are the days we must talk about my mom, extracting loss from an infection site before the wound turns gangrenous.

Enough of that. If my mother is a rock, it’s too easy to clutch my hand around her memory and squeeze until my fingers are numb. This is not what good daughters do.

Good daughters forge ahead. Take stock. Weigh their options. They talk and reach out and say uncomfortable things.

At least, I think that’s what they do.

My parents did an amazing job of keeping us close, staying in love, and working as a team. This is a recipe for a good daughter, but my rebellious side makes me question the nature of “goodness” in a child.

A young mind doesn’t know how to isolate a conscious desire and dissect it for rational conclusions. I’m not sure it’s supposed to do anything but be open and vulerable. The business of childhood is feeling, absorbing, and letting go. “Goodness” is a natural state of being.

What I felt in childhood is simple. My parents loved me — I saw them sacrifice to give me things I didn’t know were important — It hurt them when I hurt — I hurt when they hurt — I experienced positive self-regard when I pleased them — I felt shame and guilt when they were disappointed. Pain, like pleasure, was shared in the nuclear bubble, and it was worth fighting for.

I grew into someone who could love herself and others. Simple? Not so much.

The one aspect of being a good daughter I had not anticipated was remembering the moments I was a bad daughter. This includes but was not limited to divorcing my husband for no apparent reason, smoking cigarettes, becoming a hustling ticket broker, and dating nefarious bad boys. Dad and I fought, argued, and kept a brooding silence. We were on the same side but had vastly different ideas on how to win.

We can talk about it now, but it’s through a fog of hindsight. “Honey,” he says. “I was just so scared for you. You did things that scared me.”

When I put myself in Dad’s shoes, I wince at the harrowing moments when he must have thought, What is going on? This is not our child. Still, it’s hard to explain, when you grow up watching two people share true love, and you can’t replicate it, it does a number on your head.

Other aspects I’m coming to terms with, being cut from Dad’s biogenetics isn’t so bad. It’s comforting and alarming to know we don’t mellow over time. Our obsession for knowledge boils into stronger, more potent concentrates. We make it hard to be gentle. We scare people with intensity. This sounds as terrible as it is, but our saving grace, the voice that makes us hypercritical alerts us to our own hypocrisy.

We like being right, but we don’t let it prevent us from saying “I’m sorry” when we push too far.

Dad explains what we’re doing in Ancient Hebrew, a language he’s learning to better understand the Bible. “Our talks are like a massourah. It means ‘to throw a fence around,’ or to completely giving one thought to another without losing anything.”

Massourah. It’s a beautiful phrase and rare on the tongue. Both of us realize complete understanding is an illusive zenith, but he is the chicken. I am the egg. We cross the street for different reasons and keep meeting in the middle. Despite the difficulty of generational translation, we will keep talking, listening, and asking questions. It’s in our genes.

Try as I might to isolate desirable “good” daughter traits, it’s like squeezing blood from a stone: nearly impossible.

The more I learn about my family’s history, the more I realize everything has been given to me, passed down like bridal trinkets and patchwork squares. At best, I’m a Frankendaughter. I have scavenged parts from adjacent families, biblical fiction, and real mythology. I keep what works and ditch what doesn’t.

The only thing I can claim as original daughter material is my will.

My will insists I call Dad every week. He has been my mountain, my core of stability, my hardest lesson to learn. There will come a time, our conversations will solidify into another kind of rock, this one inscribed with a name, date, and epitaph. There will be no more blood, also known as wisdom, to squeeze from the stone.

At the end of every call, Dad tells me how thankful he is I make the time. How much he looks forward to our talks. How, if I need to do other things, it’s okay, he’ll understand.

I say to him in various regurgitations, “Dad, I realize how much you and mom sacrificed for us, and it’s not okay for me to make excuses about time, money, and distance. It’s not okay to take you for granted. It’s not okay to miss out on the stories I will tell my daughter and her children. It’s not okay for me to forget, before I became a mother, sister, and friend, first, I was your daughter.”

At the base level, I have done my duty as a daughter. Survive. Thrive. Adapt. Ideally, the best gift I could give my parents is to absorb the knowledge they’ve amassed, add to it, and pass it to my offspring. The work required is — exorbitant? Necessary? A great privilege?

All of the above.

Needless to say, it’s not a job I want; it’s the job I was made to do.