Tag Archives: family

The Things Fathers Do

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“Call when you get home,” he said.

Halfway between my car door and a couple hundred unspoken words for each goodbye stacked one on top of the other from New Hartford to Philadelphia to Stamford to Boston to Columbia, he stood.

Call the rain clouds. The summer storms. The neighbors who are trying to sleep when you bang bang clang up the steps. But him? Call him maybe?

There should be a law against goodbyes on days reserved for Thank Yous and Hellos and It’s Been Too Longs. We ought to give Goodbyes a stern talking to, tell them we have been booked for the remainder of the evening, but do come back some other time when we’ve run out of ways to spend our evenings. Come back when we’ve forgotten the words to our summer soundtracks and eaten the last of the chocolate chip cookie pie and vanilla bean ice cream. When our stomachs are too full and our eyes too droopy.

Then, maybe, we will let you sweep us of our feet and whisk us away.

It is a cruel world we live in. And I am just not sure I will ever be cut out for parenthood. Just not sure who thought up this whole thing called Fatherhood.

Because they raise us good and teach us right. They sit in the same parking lot as they once did when we were tiny tots, just five years old, learning to ride a Tickle Me Pink bike, hoping we won’t break the clutch on their station wagon while stalling out seven times in a row.

And they teach us to sneak cookies for breakfast. Pull our hair out of our faces while we color at the kitchen table. Stir pasta sauce on the stove all Sunday afternoon.

They pat us on the back when we’ve done all we could and squeeze our shoulders as they walk past us, dozing in front of Saturday morning cartoons. They rustle our hair and stay up well into the morning to make sure we make it home from the party down the street. They never say they’re worried or nervous or scared.

And they ask us to ignore the damp corners of their eyelids as we back out of the driveway with cardboard boxes.

That is all they ask. When five hours’ sleep seems longer than normal and when paychecks put them through the workweek and the only thing we do is repay them in Goodbyes and I’m Going Out With Friends.

That is all they ask.

And me? Well, I am fairly good at wishing for words spoken out loud and typed acknowledgements and handwritten letters. I would be fairly horrible at Fatherhood.

At letting go when the world has other plans. At learning goodbyes that mean forever and ones that mean for now.

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Carry him in your pocket.

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Dear Eilis,

Last night, sitting in the passenger’s seat of my best friend’s car, parked halfway inside my driveway, I wrestled with the idea of losing a father.

I don’t know how we ended up at that table, hammering hope into regret, but I think I know where it began.

At the tail end of 2003, when funerals were for the movies. When, six months before, a motorcycle accident was the closest some of us had come to saying goodbye. Back then I learned to hate the number 13.

So when, that same year, I spent the 13th of December learning that the world did, in fact, keep rotating on its axis while sixty or seventy preteen girls sniffled and sobbed on either side of me, I started toying with that idea of losing a father. A fourth father, perhaps, if I counted them right.

The Father I read about in books.

The man who named me. Who held me when I was just the length of his forearm. Who worried I’d never be bigger, grow stronger, if my mother didn’t write down every ounce of food I ate.

The man who held me and my sister to his chest on Sunday mornings as people filed out of wooden doors on either side of us, stumbling down red velvet stairs, whispering to Please Be Good For Your Parents This Week, OK?

And then this man. The one who taught me lessons every afternoon. Who looked after me long before he had a daughter of his own. Long before he never got the chance to hold her in his arms or look her in the eyes or dance at her wedding to Butterfly Kisses after Midnight Prayers to Father Nos. 1 & 3.

I have a feeling your father took the pieces of 1, 2, 3 & 4 and threaded them together. Piece by piece. Heartstring by heartstring.

And as you jump from one lily pad to the next, fumbling for your balance, I know it seems near impossible to land correctly without his hand stretched out to steady you. I know how it feels when you’ve never felt too good at this whole Life thing, this whole Change thing, this whole New thing, and he has always had your back. The perfect words when you fall on the floor.

And then, in a flash, he slides the cushion out from under your feet and whisks away to someplace else. Someplace that’s Gone far away.

I know it. So badly. Know the tears that last for hours as everyone says how wonderful he was, how it is such a shame to see him go so soon.

But I want you to know this: I believe in angels.

I see his eyes and his smile in the photos of his daughter sitting in a card from his mother, a woman who hung through pregnancy and grief all at the same time, just two weeks of We’re In This Together before his car smashed itself into the road and left her alone, holding out for the baby he left her to love.

He was my Father No. 4 for six years, the one I spent the most time with. The only one who never did the leaving. No, no, that was my job. Until, one day, it wasn’t. Until, one day, he didn’t show up for practice, to steady my balance on the wooden beam, to catch my flailing limbs when I smacked onto the ground.

Your dad is up there, hands on his knees, watching you from the sidelines of life. He’s in your smile and your eyes and the way that you carry yourself from this lily pad to the next. He is right here, right inside you, right where you can always keep him close.

And he’s not going anywhere. He’s left you with his words and his heart and his love. For you to take and spin into something wonderful, something he would have loved, with this next chapter in your book.

Carry him in your pocket. Unfold his words like roads on a map. Trace the outline of your smile and see his love in the corners of your eyes.

It is there. No matter where you position yourself on this Earth. He’s there.

Love,
Kaleigh

Note: Eilis lost her father two years ago. She’s graduating high school, jumping into college life, and needs your words. Want to write to her? You’ve got until June 5.

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Middle school boys with too many girls to dance with inside dark cafeterias were not meant to feel like Less Than Enough.

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With a hair flip and a sideways smile, he captures all the girls in the seventh grade.

His younger brother rattles off the list of middle-schoolers swooning over the college boy in a twelve-year-old’s body. Hollister hoodie sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Ray-Ban sunglasses shield his eyes inside the living room.

“Five out of six girls respond to the look,” the younger one says. He darts his head dramatically to the side, chin to shoulder, his sixty-pound four-feet-tall body not having quite the same effect.

He says he won’t date any of them. The southern mothers wouldn’t want that. Would rather their daughters wait a few years to find themselves standing in the foyer, some sweet talker’s hand around their waists as the father looks onward from the living room couch.

Weeks later, in the comfort of my own living room, four states away, I learn that he has forgotten the art of loving himself. The boy with too many girls to ask to dance. The boy with the football arm and hot-sauce-lined lips. The middle of the Oreo, the creamy gooey goodness we are first to reach for, has forgotten his place between the Tall and Lanky and the Small and Slim.

He has turned husky into a curse. Swapped strong for weak. Twisted thick into a something he does not want to be.

Instead, he’s taken to skipping out on sandwiches. Pining for afternoon walks around the entire metropolitan area. Fifteen miles of feet padding across foreign sidewalks. Fifteen miles to shed the ounces of him that glue together the Small and Slim boy to the Tall and Lanky.

I do not have an answer for this boy, hovering between sucking in his insides and scarfing down every last morsel of meat on the baby back ribs.

I only know that middle school boys with too many girls to dance with inside dark cafeterias were not meant to feel like Less Than Enough. They were not meant to take solitary laps around the neighborhood until all the damage of yesterday and the day before fall off them in beads of sweat around their necklines.

They were meant to play basketball beneath hanging nets. To finger piano keys in auditoriums. To scribble football predictions on portable white boards.

They were meant to be nothing but themselves, to love with strong hearts, to glue together the wild and crazy older and younger ones.

They were meant for so much more than wishing themselves away.

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He is patient. He is wise. He is still alive. And he does not own a pair of New Balance sneakers.

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via weheartit.com

It’s been quite a while since my last conversation with Albert Einstein.

I’m guessing that has something to do with the fact that he was tremendously busy digesting theories of relativity and died thirty-five years before I was born. No matter that I’ve been to Princeton, New Jersey. Have driven past it at least on Route 1 each week for ten weeks straight.

We would get along well. After all, he shares a birthday with my best friend, a girl who in no way inherited a talent for math and physics.

She sticks to drama, the performing arts. And so, I believe, did Einstein. Einstein was a thespian. I am sticking to that.

“There are two ways to live,” he said. “You can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.”

Part of me wants to believe Albert whispered that sentiment into my father’s ear before taking one last breath in a hospital bed in Princeton. My father grew up just twenty-four miles away in a small suburban town clustered with dead end streets and cul-de-sacs rimmed with ranch houses.

The facts are there: this did not happen. But it might as well have. It is the single-most important lesson my dad’s ever taught me.

And maybe he jumbled up the words and mixed around the nouns, maybe he took a second to flip through the hefty navy blue hardcover thesaurus that sits in my bedroom to find the perfect translation for such a profound statement.

Every time I lose my head, every time it comes tumbling off my tired shoulders and rolls under my bed, he says the same word.

Balance.

“It’s all about balance, Kaleigh.”

Not balance in my sneakers but balance in my heart.

I shake my head, often on the other end of a phone line, and wait for him to elaborate.

By now, you would think I’d have his whole speech memorized like the theories for which Einstein was famous. But I don’t.

“It’s about perspective,” he’d say. “Never letting anything bring you too high up or too far down.”

My father’s hair is thinning and sticks up on occasion, but not like Einstein’s. Not in the way a man’s hair sticks up when he forgets to shower or shave or shove some soup down his throat once in a while to keep the blood flowing, the ideas raging inside his brain. My father is a passionate man, but he is level headed.

Unlike Einstein, he has found the gray sea in a black and white photograph. He knows about hues and shades and tints, about giving a little and getting a little and tweaking things until they fall into place. He is patient. He is wise. He is still alive.

We have a tendency to say things because they sound wonderful. They light up our eyes on rainy afternoons. They seduce us with a sense of calm to power through the storm.

My father’s words aren’t like that. I do not remember the last time I spoke to Einstein, but I remember the last time I spoke to my father.

I remember the words spilling out of his mouth, the careful considerations he asked me to embark on as I chose a destination for a long-awaited vacation in the middle of March.

I remember his words because when he speaks, they do not sound like unlivable phrases, like warm and fuzzy sentiments that grow cold and mushy over time. They sound like the building blocks of a human race, strung together to weather his almost fifty years on this earth.

Those words have served him well.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.