A father is as a father does

A couple of weeks ago I was in a local bake shop when a man in his sixties came in to buy cupcakes to take home to his wife and daughters.  I stood there watching him carefully select flavours with each person in mind and I found myself envisioning the return of this father bearing sweet treats for his daughters and the tears started to push at the back of my eyes.  This happens every once in a while. Some witnessed father-daughter moment brings my grief over losing my own father into sharp relief and leaves me fighting to maintain my composure.  For a long time I’ve felt two distinct kinds of grief: the loss of my father and the loss of a father.  I find myself crying, not because he is not in my life but because I don’t know what having a dad feels like.

Recently I’ve started to question this.  What defines a father? What makes that relationship unique? And what is it that I think I’m missing?  Would I feel this way if I’d had two moms and no dad? In asking these questions I’ve realized that this thing over which I feel so much loss is based on some conventional North American image of “father” that I’ve been fed through thousands of hours of television and films.  I have no way of knowing to what extent my father would have even fit within those parameters.  So what is it that I think I’m missing?  Do I think that there is some innate need for this very specific notion of fathering? No.  My mother is nothing like the conventional image of “mother”, does that mean that I don’t know what it feels like to have a mother? No, it means that I have no idea what it feels like to have that kind of mother, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

So many of our sorrows are based on the meanings we attach to things.  I find that in the absence of my own father – or any sense of having truly known him – I have constructed meaning around some abstract concept of father and attached undue meaning to it.  It is no different from the sorrow I felt at not having a constant and cohesive “gang” a la Saved By the Bell throughout high school.  As a child and a preteen I developed a particular vision of what adolescence was meant to look like, when mine came nowhere near it I felt duped and miserable.  There were a lot of real struggles in my high school years, but not having Tootie, Blair and the gang to hang out with was not one of them.

This realization only reinforces my decision to limit Mae’s exposure to TV. I know first hand how deeply a child can internalize these normalized representations of life – and how it hurts when you feel your own life doesn’t measure up.

On the weekend I was visiting my parents and my step-father and I got into one of our predictable fights.  They always start in more or less the same way and they always take the same trajectory. It’s a repeating pattern that we both recognize and yet can’t seem to cut out. In the aftermath of this particular spat – as I was crying to my mother – I had an epiphany, I shook my head and I said to her, “And I say I don’t know what it’s like to have a father.”

So maybe my relationship with him doesn’t look like any father-daughter relationship I’ve seen, but it’s not because he’s not my dad, it’s because he’s not like anyone else I’ve ever known.  Rest assured, if he were my bio-dad I would still have no idea what it’s like to have a sit-com dad, Cliff Huxtable he is not. What I do know is that he loves me deeply and cares deeply about my happiness and well-being. I know that we’ve been having what feels like the same fight for the last twenty years and yet we somehow can’t seem to stop.  I know that if I go into his office to ask a question about the weather I could easily wind up in there for two hours talking about everything from politics to depression to my daughters latest chuckle inducing antics.  I know that I can always depend on him and that he truly respects and loves me for who I am.  As far as I can tell, that’s all anyone can ask of a parent, sweater vests be damned.