(Akiit.com) Father’s Day can be a dilemma when you have a complicated relationship with your dad…
I’m a loiterer in the Hallmark aisle of the drugstore, trying to choose a card. This struggle is my Father’s Day tradition.
Alongside images of barbecue grills and sporting equipment, the cards are generously strewn with terms like ” always ” and ” the greatest. ” Especially in the Mahogany section, the recipients are supposed to be ” strong ” and ” solid. ”
For my dad, these words don’t fit.
It would be one thing if he’d never been in my life. Daughters in this situation have a legitimate gripe and well-deserved sympathy. Ten years ago, Whatever Happened to Daddy’s Little Girl explored the impact of ” fatherlessness ” on black daughters. These days, President Barack Obama chastises absentee fathers, diagnosing the problem in one speech at a black church: ” Too many fathers are M.I.A; too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes.” Steve Harvey spent last Father’s Day mentoring kids ” without dads. ” Readers ache for The Root’s Helena Andrews when she writes in Bitch is the New Black that she thought as a child that hers might be ”on the moon.”
But with the well-known sociological phenomenon of fatherlessness on the one hand, and the yearly celebration of really great dads on the other, it’s hard to make sense of an in-between experience. When a dad is not absent, but not always there; when he’s not gone, but not strong, either, figuring out how to feel is as hard as figuring out what card to send.
There’s a lot of gray area between dads who are AWOL and dads like my friend Danielle’s, who is the kind of man who inspires the Hallmark superlatives. When we were in law school, he remained ready to send an employee of his trucking business from Alabama to Cambridge if we needed to move anything heavier than a chair. Once, she didn’t sound quite right on the phone after a bad breakup, so he road-tripped to spend the weekend with her. The bulleted items on her résumé were talking points of pride in his daily conversations and sermons alike. To this day, when she sees previews for action movies, she says with the certainty of someone who, as an adult, still feels like someone’s little girl, ” I’ll watch that one with my dad. ”
My father actually was absent for a few years. (In a favorite family anecdote, my mom muses out loud to 7-year-old me, ” Honey, I think we’re doing pretty well, considering your father is in abstentia ,” and I reply, ”Abstentia? I thought he lived in Redding or somewhere.”) But during a longer period, I remember more clearly, he did show up at my gymnastics exhibitions and open houses (lanky, loud, bearing cameras whose pictures never got developed) and took me on field-trip-worthy Saturday excursions. We paddled boats in Golden Gate Park and drank hot chocolate on foggy ferry rides. He gave me pennies to drop in front of the silver-painted man who stood on a box at the pier. When his living situation allowed, he let me host friends for weekends and birthday sleepovers.
Collecting me from my mom’s house, he’d be late and usually in a different used car. Often, we went to an apartment I hadn’t seen before. Sometimes he sang along to R&B songs on the radio in a goofy baritone meant to make me giggle. Always, while we crossed the San Francisco Bay as the sun set on Sunday evening return trips, he gave fantasy sales pitches on his current projects and forthcoming fortunes. There was a bed and breakfast yacht, a motivational speaking career and multilevel marketing distribution of ” miracle ” vitamins. He was going to get into modular housing. I could have my own ”unit” if I wanted. Eventually, I stopped believing but kept pretending. I’d listen until my eyes drooped and I fell asleep against the car window.
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