Don’t piss me off
This is my dad with my four brothers.
Shortly after we got engaged, a friend of ours saw this picture, turned to my soon-to-be husband and said, “What ever you do, don’t piss her off.”
He’s done a fine job of heeding that advice.
5 Things I Learned From My Dad
My father passed away in October, so today, I’m facing my first fatherless Father’s Day. I had a hard time figuring out what to write; there is so much that I’m just not quite ready to talk about yet. I decided to come up with a list of things that I learned from my Dad.
1. Be creative. Improvise.
Dad could fix anything with duct tape, although that’s not the only thing he used. He never let the lack of the proper tool slow him down; not having the proper tool is just an excuse. Sometimes he would invent a tool on the spot to do what he needed. And come Halloween, if he didn’t have a good pumpkin, he might just go with a turnip from the garden.
2. Tell your stories.
Family stories are a gift. They help you understand what made your parents the way they are, what made you the way you are. They are the structure that defines the culture of your family. The paragraph below was excerpted from a 30 page autobiography Dad left for us before he died. It paints a picture of family life in 1950s Los Angeles, it also paints a picture of my grandfather, whom I never really got to know but was so instrumental in shaping my father into the man he was to become.
“One of my favorite memories of this time was Wednesday nights. That was payday and Dad would bring home a big load of groceries. He was a deputy for the L.A. County Sheriff and drove a blue 1948 Buick. I remember French bread and celery and we usually had spaghetti because that was Dad’s favorite dish. He would also like to have some red wine with his spaghetti. He would take his first glass and take a sip. He would screw up his face like it tasted worse than castor oil, vinegar, and turpentine all mixed together and as he unscrewed his face he’d say, “Man, that’s good!” About this time he told me he wanted me to sit on his left. He explained (kidding, of course) that it was so he could “come across with this one” making a fist. Mom sat on his right so he could pat her on the shoulder so she would know he had just said something funny and (perhaps apologizing for being so corny) it was time to laugh. It was at this age, perhaps, that I began to appreciate how much my Dad loved my Mom.”
3. Read bedtime stories to your children.
In my earliest years, Dad was a full time college student working two part time jobs. Mom would adjust our bedtime to fit his work schedule and he would come home between shifts to read us a bedtime story and tuck us in. Bed time stories were a sacred tradition in our home. My parents had five kids and we would all pile up on someone’s bed every night for the bedtime story. He didn’t just read Dr. Seuss (although there was plenty of that, and Richard Scarry, and Where the Wild Things Are). As we got older he moved on to the classics like Heidi, The Swiss Family Robinson, Kidnapped, Treasure Island… We learned to love reading and stories. I learned to read by watching him read and following his finger as it dragged across the page. And every night we had that bonding time.
4. Be Happy.
Dad used that phrase a lot. He would often sign off on his letters saying “be happy.” He taught us, and modeled for us, that happiness is a choice and not an accident of circumstance. Choose happiness. Have fun. Laugh. Joke. Be Silly.
Defrosting the freezer can be a chore (remember when we had to do that?) or it can be a blast. The choice is yours.
5. Send Letters.
It didn’t matter if it was Toledo, New Orleans, or another city in our state, whenever Dad went somewhere on a business trip he sent us postcards. Not one card for all of us; each of us got our own postcard. It wasn’t a big expense, and it didn’t take a lot of time, but the payoff for us kids feeling loved and appreciated and remembered and valued – well, you can’t put a price on that. He wrote letters too. Whenever Mom would put together a care package for one of us, Dad would pack it up and include a note. It usually wasn’t very long, a few paragraphs, but I always read the note before I looked to see what else was in the box. Don’t underestimate the value of these letters. They meant enough to me that I still have a box in which I keep all the postcards and letters from Dad. And don’t confuse letters with emails. There’s something about the handwriting that makes it more personal and more meaningful.
This is the last and most precious letter I received from my Dad right after he died.
I miss you Dad.
Happy Fathers’ Day.
This Post Has Been Brought to You by the Number Four
When my niece was nearly four I decided to put together a little book for her birthday. A book about the number 4. I went around taking pictures of things in groups of four: four bananas, four ducklings, four boats, four flowers… And then I contacted my family members and asked them to get in on the game and submit pictures of themselves posing with four of their favorite things or in some other way representing the number four.
My Dad decided to go with “Grandpa Has Four Hands.”
And then it turned into “Dr. Evil Has Four Hands.”
Spare hands provided by my baby brother Steve.
My niece just turned six, and I still haven’t finished the book. Not that I would procrastinate or anything…
This post is my contribution to Candid Carrie’s Friday Foto Finish Fiesta.
"Enough with the lips moving and the sound coming out"
Or, what my husband said to his mother-in-law.
Before you gasp in horror (or secretly cheer) they were just joking around. It made me gasp, but for a different reason. That was just the sort of thing my dad would say. I could see him sitting there with a full on belly laugh, his feet sticking straight out in front of him (he always stuck his feet straight out when he belly laughed), if he heard my husband say that. He would have loved that line, and he would have filed it away in the back of his brain for future reference looking for a really good opportunity to whip it out and use it.
I miss my dad, but I’m struck by how similar he was to my husband.
What about you? Do you find similarities between your significant other and one of your parents?
My Mother’s Gift
In 1991 my mom brought home Matt; I was not happy. Although I had moved out, I still had a room at the homestead – a room I needed to clear of my belongings so it could go to this new kid. But that’s not the whole reason I was upset.
Taking in kids was nothing new in our home. I had four younger brothers and we had all, at one time or another, brought home friends to stay for extended periods of time. My parents took in my cousins, kids who had aged out of the foster care system, and runaways (there was always a phone call to the parents to let them know where the kids were). My parents would not turn their backs on a child in need. Eventually they decided to start taking in foster children, and Matt was the first of many special needs placements my parents welcomed into their home.
But Matt was scary. He was a 16-year-old, severely developmentally challenged kid that had been held in a motel room 24 hours a day for months because they could not find a home that would take him. After time in the foster care system, Matt had an attitude, and he was very difficult to care for because of his medical needs as well. Along with an improperly formed brain, Matt had cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus; he functioned at the level of a two year old. He was difficult to look at. His hair grew in funny little tufts around the scars from all his brain surgeries, he shuffled along all bent over, he had a vocabulary of only 50 words, and he was a head banger. By head banger I mean that whenever he was frustrated or angry or for whatever other reason he would haul off and slam his head on whatever hard surface was handy, often drawing blood.
He terrified me. I did not like the idea of this kid living in my parents house.
Why am I using this Mother’s Day post to tell you about Matt? Because Matt became a part of our family. My Mother would not give up on him. No matter how hard it was, no matter how many late nights she sat up wondering “what have I gotten myself into,” she would not be just one more foster home that sent him back to that agency. He deserved better than that. And we learned a valuable lesson about acceptance and love, because we all came to love Matt. As he became more accepted and comfortable in our home he started to blossom at school, and at church where Mom took him every Sunday. By the time he passed away in 2000, he had touched so many lives that his funeral was standing room only. An entire community had learned a lesson about acceptance and love.
Mom has always been a caretaker. It’s her calling, her gift, and she’s very good at making people feel better when they are ill. When my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October of 2006, we were all devastated, but we all knew that he was in the best hands. While the doctors may be prescribing the chemo and performing surgeries, and the nurses attending to vital stats, it was Mom that cared for him and fought for him. She was the one that kept him going, and made sure he kept his brain active, and held his hand through the emotional roller-coaster of dying.
My Dad was never a big talker, that just wasn’t his style, but Mom always made us talk on the phone together even if we didn’t think we had anything to say. Dad and I would sit there on the phone, sometimes it felt like forever, trying to think of something to say to each other. We talked a lot about baseball, we talked about mom, we talked about work – his and mine, we talked a little bit about the cancer and it’s side effects, we talked about the weather, but most importantly, we talked.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved my Dad. It’s just that both of us are introverts – and completely unskilled in the art of small-talk. The point is, I had conversations with my dad, about nothing and everything, that I hold dear in my heart, and I wouldn’t have had them if she hadn’t made us talk.
She is the glue that holds our family together, and through the most difficult time of her life, she found ways to meet each of our needs.
In the six months since my father’s death, Mom packed up and moved to Seattle. Sure part of it was to be near me. But really she’s here because she’s taken over as the primary caretaker for my 97 year old grandmother. And she’s loving every minute of it, because helping people feel better is what she does, it’s her gift.
Happy Mothers Day, Mom. Thank you, and I love you.
Happy Mothers Day to the rest of you moms out there too.
