{"id":6933,"date":"2010-01-04T05:49:20","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T10:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/?p=6933"},"modified":"2012-05-17T19:09:27","modified_gmt":"2012-05-17T23:09:27","slug":"happy-birthday-daddy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/happy-birthday-daddy\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to Work and Happy Birthday Daddy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Daddy and Sabby the ocelot<\/p><\/div>\n

January 4, 2010.\u00a0 On this date last year, I wrote Today Is Our Father’s Birthday<\/a>.\u00a0 January 4th, for me, has always signalled the end of the holidays, more so than the day after New Year’s.\u00a0 It signalled for me the end of any forced smiles and required card giving since it was Daddy’s birthday.\u00a0 I’ve never been a fan of conventional commercial holidays where you were expected to exchange gifts and cards.\u00a0 I saw so much thoughtless giving and insincere Hallmark sentiments early on that I’d had enough.\u00a0 As soon as I was able to escape that routine, I did.<\/p>\n

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That’s the thing about growing up around other kids.\u00a0 If you heard the cool kids in school saying they hated their parents then heck, you did, too.\u00a0 If they talked back to them, you’d go home and do the same.\u00a0 Except at home it wasn’t cool, it was simply disrespectful and hurtful.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Without knowing it, we took what they said was the gospel of How It All Was.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Because our (collective) movie was that we were trapped by oppressors, without rights but plenty of duties.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The best of both worlds.\u00a0 But not everyone could do that.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

This would be the point where I say that’s what happened to me but I led a pretty easy life.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I treated her as she treated me.\u00a0 Daddy treated me as I treated him.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 We drove his bi-polar self to drink and then mocked his drunkedness as weakness.\u00a0 Typical kids.\u00a0 No big deal.\u00a0 Psychologically and emotionally crush the ones who provide for you without a second thought about it. <\/em>No biggie. That’s what we tell ourselves.<\/p>\n

But then we wake up to reality and realize our part in that past scenario.\u00a0 Had I not been such a smart ass, how would he have treated me differently? <\/em>We can only imagine. <\/em>I mean, if he’s still around you can ask before it’s too late.\u00a0 Don’t carry something like that unasked for the rest of your life.\u00a0 You could be giving him a chance to say something he hasn’t been able to say before now.<\/p>\n

By now I’ve done plenty of daddy forgiveness work and feel free of what I let bind me.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

He was born in 1925 and died in 1987.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I never cared for math and found it difficult and only took the required basic classes.\u00a0 This was pre-computer and pre-calculator math we’re talking about, back in the 60’s. Last millenium.<\/p>\n

As a carpenter, he was always drawing up designs and measuring them.\u00a0 He could build anything he could draw, and he could draw anything.\u00a0 Sometimes I’d draw something, a panda shaped chair or similar, and want him to show me how to make it into a blueprint.\u00a0 After he measured it and was figuring the scale, I could see he was not subtracting when doing the math.\u00a0 He was adding.\u00a0 I knew this because he always did the math out loud.\u00a0 Somehow it always worked out.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday, Daddy.<\/p>\n

Free at last.<\/p>\n

\"Add<\/a><\/p>\n

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