Daddy and Sabby the ocelot

January 4, 2010.  On this date last year, I wrote Today Is Our Father’s Birthday.  January 4th, for me, has always signalled the end of the holidays, more so than the day after New Year’s.  It signalled for me the end of any forced smiles and required card giving since it was Daddy’s birthday.  I’ve never been a fan of conventional commercial holidays where you were expected to exchange gifts and cards.  I saw so much thoughtless giving and insincere Hallmark sentiments early on that I’d had enough.  As soon as I was able to escape that routine, I did.

That’s the thing about growing up around other kids.  If you heard the cool kids in school saying they hated their parents then heck, you did, too.  If they talked back to them, you’d go home and do the same.  Except at home it wasn’t cool, it was simply disrespectful and hurtful.  We’d get this movie running in our head about how oppressed we were (as kids) and how unfair the parents were, all based on what we heard other kids talk about at school.  Without knowing it, we took what they said was the gospel of How It All Was.

Then we’d return home from school with our new teenage attitudes, lost in our own movie no matter what was playing out at home.   We’d get mad when the parents would try their best to engage us in family doings – because that would take us out of our movie.  Because our (collective) movie was that we were trapped by oppressors, without rights but plenty of duties.

Some kids learned to separate the two movies, the two personality aspects of themselves: they could play the rebellious teen at school, while at home be the model child.  The best of both worlds.  But not everyone could do that.  Some would get so lost in their own movie that they stayed in character so long they began believing it, and only brought more hardship down upon themselves.

This would be the point where I say that’s what happened to me but I led a pretty easy life.  I mean, I got bratty and smart mouthy when I thought that was the cool thing to do, but I got used to being restricted to the yard or my room, or no phone privileges.  My mom would always let me sneak on the phone when Dad wasn’t around but of course I wasn’t smart mouthy to her.  I treated her as she treated me.  Daddy treated me as I treated him.

I recognized years later that he had a hard life, he worked hard labor to keep us kids fed and we smarted off to him and taunted him, then whined when we got smacked for it.  We drove his bi-polar self to drink and then mocked his drunkedness as weakness.  Typical kids.  No big deal.  Psychologically and emotionally crush the ones who provide for you without a second thought about it. No biggie. That’s what we tell ourselves.

But then we wake up to reality and realize our part in that past scenario.  Had I not been such a smart ass, how would he have treated me differently? We can only imagine. I mean, if he’s still around you can ask before it’s too late.  Don’t carry something like that unasked for the rest of your life.  You could be giving him a chance to say something he hasn’t been able to say before now.

By now I’ve done plenty of daddy forgiveness work and feel free of what I let bind me.  And I think of that again each year on Daddy’s birthday, which for me is the official end of the holiday season and marks going back to “work.”

He was born in 1925 and died in 1987.  As I was doing the math to figure how old he would have been today (85), I realized that it was he who taught me how to subtract by adding.  I never cared for math and found it difficult and only took the required basic classes.  This was pre-computer and pre-calculator math we’re talking about, back in the 60’s. Last millenium.

As a carpenter, he was always drawing up designs and measuring them.  He could build anything he could draw, and he could draw anything.  Sometimes I’d draw something, a panda shaped chair or similar, and want him to show me how to make it into a blueprint.  After he measured it and was figuring the scale, I could see he was not subtracting when doing the math.  He was adding.  I knew this because he always did the math out loud.  Somehow it always worked out.

Happy birthday, Daddy.

Free at last.

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