What Children Need from Dad

My father-in-law, dead now almost 20 years, used to pride himself on being "a good provider." Ironically, this was usually said in a defensive way, as if he suspected that he wasn't. "Whatever else, at least I'm a good provider." By this, he meant that he earned a good income and his family had many nice things. He was a broken man who did not feel love and did not extend it to others. The nice things were a poor substitute.

My own dad was emotionally remote in a different way. Family overwhelmed him, and he spent long hours in the basement or his study, coming out to preside over family dinners and occasionally taking one of us hostage to serve as his helper. He was a brilliant and talented man, but he was also a mystery.

My Dad in 1943 or 1944, working his way through school as a nanny

Dad died six months ago, and I inherited most of his household, including the family photo albums, boxes of ephemera, letters written to my mother during World War II, and a big binder of his published writings from the 1930s onward. If family overwhelmed my dad emotionally, his legacy has equally overwhelmed me. It is almost too much to comprehend.

Almost. He left a treasure trove behind, and I am rediscovering him through it, one scrap at a time. Dad was a writer, and when he turned 70, he put together a huge binder of his published writings, Tappings on the Keys. Someone (he? my mom? someone hired for the task?) carefully typed out every word, a chore that boggles the mind.

Dad started writing for the school paper in junior high and wrote for his high school and college papers. When I was a teen, he had a column in our town's weekly newspaper for a couple of years. He also did free lance writing, and worked in advertising and marketing for several different companies, writing for internal publications.

After the war, he wrote advertising copy for GE at the same time and place that Kurt Vonnegut was more famously employed, the Schenectady plant that served as the inspiration for Vonnegut's 1955 story "Deer in the Works." Dad never met Vonnegut, who worked in public relations.  I used to fantasize that, had he not had so many mouths to feed so quickly, he might have made a living at writing. But his gift was in Op Ed, not in fiction.

Years ago, I saw a bibliography that cited a piece he wrote for Parents' Magazine in 1953, "What Children Need from Dad." It was a shock to come across my dad's name in that context, but when my local library didn't have an archived copy, I didn't look further. So I was glad to find it in the binder.

Many of his essays and editorials are followed by his (then) present-day thoughts, but this piece stands alone. I found it odd, presenting love for a child as a "troublesome" and difficult thing to find time for, a competition for scarce resources. He admonishes fathers to stop making excuses and man up, as painful as that will be.

I'd like to know whether he believed that. He brushed our hair and sang to us and encouraged our creative efforts. Our photo albums record trips and adventures with Dad. Among the things he saved was an early Mother's Day present he helped my older sister and brother make. I want to believe he was aiming for his audience (and for the extra bucks he made writing the piece), setting himself above those "other guys." But he was also a harsh critic of himself, so maybe he was writing out of guilt at having brushed us off once too many times.

This is the first Father's Day I haven't been searching for a card to capture my feelings without drowning them in sentiment. Dad is gone, but in some ways, he is more present than ever.

Unstuck in time

As a youth, I loved Kurt Vonnegut's books. In this later phase, I find myself "unstuck in time," seeing the connections and constellations of the events of my life. When I am with my grandchildren, I see myself as a young mother, and I see my sons both as fathers to my granddaughters and as my own babies.

I point to pictures on my wall.  "That's Daddy, when he was a little boy." It makes no sense:  Daddy is a grown man, over six feet tall, not a baby.  To me, he is a baby, a boy, a man.  I am a girl again, a new mom, a grandmother.  My granddaughter clutches at my breast and shrieks that I can't give her what she wants.  She's angry! I'm just nostalgic for the days when babies fit so perfectly into the curves of my body and nursed themselves to sleep there, when needs were simple and I knew how to fill them.

It's nostalgia!  It isn't supposed to be Truth.  Yes, I was as clueless as any other new mom.  All that falls away with the years. All that remains is the memory of the smell, the touch, the sight of those fat little thighs, and the sweaty heads, and the little fist relaxing on your ample post-partum tummy. Oh, and the post-partum tummy:  I managed to keep that, too.

My Dad had mild to moderate dementia, and he sought refuge in the past. He had lost executive function, that ability to analyze a situation and then take action.  His short-term memory was shot, so he couldn't remember whether he had ordered in a restaurant, but he could describe in great detail the Jewish deli in New York where he first ate a knish, more than 60 years ago. ("Ya never had one before? Well, don't start today!" the guy behind the counter said, which Dad accepted as a challenge.)

The past was colorful and he was the hero.  The present was confusing and painful.  Who wouldn't pick the past?

The past is appealing to those of us without dementia, too.  The older we get, the more we reach back to examine.  How have we changed over time? Remember the day we bought that lamp? Did I ever tell you about when...?

I was talking with my sister today about waving a white handkerchief to signal surrender, and I said, "Remember how Dad always had a handkerchief?" "He should have carried two," she replied. "He was always giving one up to wipe our snotty noses in church."

That's what parents do. They carry a handkerchief not for themselves, but for the runny noses and bleeding knees and teary eyes of their children. They give up their jackets when their children need them, even if their children are 30 and should really know better.  Parents care for their children.

My middle child brought his family home to me for a week last month.  He and his daughter were both sick with colds.  It gives a mama equal pain to hear her child hacking with a cough whether that child is 1 or 33.

I heard my son coughing in the bedroom below me, and I remembered the night when my parents brought me a bowl of ice cream to soothe my throat. (Dairy is possibly not the best home remedy where mucous is involved, but it would have been ungracious to turn it down.)

I read somewhere that kindergarten children don't know what a handkerchief is, because no one carries them anymore.

I do. I collect them, and use them as a decorative window covering.  I have a special set for Christmas. I keep two in the purse I carry to church, one for me and one for a friend.

The day I got married, my dad had a handkerchief ready to catch my tears, a tender moment that brought me to tears this morning.  Lucky for me, he had a handkerchief handy.

Let me tell you something

My dad thought ahead.  When he bought something big and expensive, he might say, "You kids will fight over this when I'm gone."  (Sometimes, I thought:  what you don't realize is we will fight over who has to take it.)  When Patrick was born, he didn't ooh and aah over his beautiful first grandson.  He started calculating how much of Patrick's life he would likely get to see.

For years, I've known there were envelopes "to be opened after I die," with letters from my dad.  Having spent years carefully prying tape off of Christmas packages to check out the contents beforehand, I found it difficult to wait. What did my letter say?

Dad died December 1.  I was with him as he faded from life, the light going out of his eyes.  He lost his ability to speak or move and drifted along the borderline between sleep and coma. I said goodbye, and I took my letter. Halfway home, I got a call that he was gone.

What did the letter say?

We've had our times, my dad and I.  Mostly good times, but some monumentally bad ones, too.  Dad rarely hesitated to deliver advice, and he wasn't entirely clear on the concept of "opinion," being pretty sure that he was right about all things. He was given to the grand gesture, like pulling the phone out of the wall when I was not quick enough to end a conversation.  (Back in the day, the phone--and there was only one per floor--was hardwired into the wall.  And you probably shared a party line with some cranky old lady.)

He clearly loved me.  Just as clearly, he saw room for improvement.  He was more forthcoming with advice than with love. Stand up straighter, lose some weight, get my hair out of my eyes, tuck in my shirt, get my elbows off the table.  Study harder, revise that college essay, practice the clarinet.  Save more money, hire someone to do that, and for god's sake, don't get married before you graduate from college.

He was a great one for the object lesson, and I was a great one for rebelling against the object lesson.  He favored the surprise attack. It is a kindness to both the living and the dead to leave that area unexplored.

My older sister and brother absorbed a lot of my dad's self-improvement energies, and that led to a lot of fireworks, especially with my brother.  Dad said to me once that, while they had pushed back, I just used humor as a weapon until I got my parents into shape, and then I eased up on them.

And every once in a while, when I really, really needed it, my dad came through for me in an unconditionally supportive way. The letter he left was one of those times.

I wanted to be alone when I read it, but I also wanted to be in a safe place.  I drove to church and read it in the empty sanctuary.  I knew I could draw on a circle of support there.

So what did the letter say?

He wrote about the joy I had brought him, about the love and respect he had for me.  He said he could never repay me for what I had brought to his life. He said he hoped when I looked back at my children, they brought me as much joy as I had brought him.

I burst into tears.

Dad wrote that letter in 1979, 34 years ago, and felt no need to edit it as the years went by.

I did plenty of editing of my own over those years--gaining a couple of kids, losing a husband, dropping out of the professional world, learning to take care of myself, learning to ask for and accept help. Dad had touched the essence of me and of our relationship and written me a letter that crosses the decades to speak in a universal way.

What would you write in your letter? What are the things your family needs to hear from you, or you need to tell them?

My children will surely find mine in snippets on my computer, in version after version, as unfinished as my Christmas letters from 2009 to 2012.

Or maybe they will just know that, yeah, they do bring me as much joy as I brought him.  Yup, they surely do.

The Right Place at the Right Time

My dad died recently, so I've been thinking a lot about love and loss, and especially about my parents.  When my dad was alive, we used to tease him, saying, "THAT'S going into the skit at your funeral!"

I did not attend the memorial service, but if I had, this is what I might have said.

My father was a demanding man, driven to perfection (and generally coming pretty close).  He was hard on himself, and he could be hard on us as well.  He was the first of his generation to be born in the US, and he believed that brains and hard work would guarantee success.  We were born with the brains, and he created incentives to ensure the hard work.  I remember earning stickers for staying dry at night (which perhaps was not as early a memory as I might like to think) and quarters for good grades, an incentive program for his children that mirrored the ones he created for Fortune 500 companies.

I stayed in school for a long time, eventually earning a Ph.D.  As I neared the end of my graduate program, I bogged down, and Dad sent me an inspirational graphic.  He drew a thermometer of the sort that fund-raising campaigns favor, with Ph.D. as the final goal.  Along the way were marked progress points like “Entered Kindergarten” “Moved to Chagrin for seventh grade,” and “accepted to college.”  The thermometer was filled very nearly to the top, a reminder that I had nearly reached my goal. 

I graduated a few months later, and my parents came to my graduation.  A couple of years later, doing some career development exercises, Dad wrote that he considered my earning that Ph.D. as one of the top ten achievements of his life.  He was proud of what I had accomplished, and he also took pride in setting an expectation for success, creating the conditions necessary for achievement, and supporting me psychologically, emotionally, and financially every step of the way.

The last time I talked to my dad, we talked about my son Jefferson’s upcoming graduation from his nurse anesthesia program.  He sighed.  “Boy, I wish I could be there,” and we both knew that he wouldn’t.

My children were lucky to live only an hour from their grandparents throughout their school years, and Grandma Janie and Grandpa Tak attended every concert, school play, and graduation--just as they had attended all of mine.  But Dad was too frail to make this trip. He died a week after that conversation.

Today is Jefferson’s graduation.  He’s graduating from the #1 nurse anesthesia program in the country. It’s been a long slog:  six years and his second master’s degree in nursing.  Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to offer the same kind of support to him that my dad offered to me.  Today, his success is his own, but I share in the joy it brings.

Team Jefferson, with scrub caps in VCU black and gold

Addie is not too sure about this.

Horribly out-of-focus pic of Jeff's newest scrub cap.  

When my first child was born, Dad said to me, “If I am lucky, I will live to see this child graduate from high school.”  Patrick is 35 now, and my parents attended his graduations from high school, undergraduate school, and his Ph.D. program. He would have enjoyed Jefferson’s graduation, and I know he would not have wanted me to miss it.

Close encounters of the school kind

After our day in Agra, we had one day in Delhi before coming back to Kochi.  Our first stop was the Deepalaya School.

These school/service visits are included in almost every SAS trip.  In China we went to a school for children whose parents are in prison.  In Burma, we went to a school for blind children and another for girls who have no better educational opportunities.  In India, it was underprivileged children whose parents have come to Delhi seeking work. 

(It’s not clear to me why these children don’t go to public school, which is free.  The government provides uniforms and school supplies when necessary.  Perhaps it’s the transient status of the parents. Our guide told us they come from families who do not have a history of education.)

I feel like a curmudgeon for not liking these trips.  I have heard people describe them as the highlight of their visit.  To me, they seem more like zoos for children.  We make a donation to the school and it purchases a little performance from the children.  They seem good natured and obedient, but not particularly interested in the parade of Western faces coming through their school.  It doesn't look like they have any say in the matter.

My discomfort here is a variation of my general discomfort at being a tourist.  For this trip, I grabbed a skinny book from the "take one, leave one" shelf in the library.  It was Jamaica Kinkaid's A Small Place, a memoir of Antigua.  The basic message: tourists are horrid people who think they own us for the time we are here, but they have no idea how much we hate them. (So that's the translation when the waiters, or tour guides, or vendors speak to each other?  Thanks, we were wondering.)  We make this kind of deal with the adults--this is how you make your living here--but it seems unfair to enlist children, trading on their big eyes to shake loose a few bucks.

I felt most comfortable in the blind school, where the gawking occurred unobserved by the children.  We watched them stream out of morning worship, sort their shoes out of the piles of shoes at the door, and zip off to the next thing.  They know their way around the school and you'd better not be in their path!

At this school, we were invited into a kindergarten class, where the children were coloring worksheets.  The worksheets said they were an exam, and each question had a point value.  The front asked them to identify examples of air, land, and sea transport and to identify creatures of the sea (including a garden snail).  On the back, they were to match the parent and offspring of dog, cat, chicken, and owl.  As far as I could tell, however, they were simply coloring.  They couldn’t read, they hadn’t written their names on their papers, and they weren’t labeling any of the pictures.

The coloring was painstaking work.  Each child was carefully pulling one crayon at a time out from their box, then putting it back when done.  Most of them slid a cover onto the box and put the whole box into their schoolbags each time.  There was no squirming, no talking, no distractions.  These children were here to work!

They were carefully copying each other’s work.  At several tables, there was a clear “alpha” child, and one or more children copying the alpha’s color choices.  That self-censorship seemed very sad to me.  What kind of pressure is exerted to make a four or five year old unwilling to risk using the wrong color crayon?  The motto of the school is "Enabling self reliance" --they have a long way to go!

The children sang for us, and then we sang “Itsy bitsy spider” for them.  The teacher declined to translate.  They are, in theory, taught in English, although the children I spoke to did not respond to anything I said, beyond confirming their names which I read off their papers.  The kids gamely imitated our hand motions, but I don’t think they understood the words.  We also sang “If you’re happy and you know it” with the same results.

Evidence of aliens among us

In another room, one of our students made balloon animals for the children.  One balloon artist, 30 children.  Jessica was racing to try to make one for each child, and was working from right to left.  The children on the have-not side were straining to see and clearly envious.  The children on the have side seemed perplexed.  I wondered what would happen when the 30 became haves in a school of 470 have-nots. 

George came to the school with us, and one of our students found a Curious George book in a pile of children’s books.  I wondered how that would play over the dinnertime bowl of rice. 

A monkey from a book came to our school today.  And he was wearing a t-shirt that said “F*** swag.  I’m gangnam style.”   

Education is learning the ways of the world.  Sometimes, the world doesn't make a whole lot of sense.