Dad

June 17 is not only Father's Day this year, but the 16th birthday of my oldest son. In addition to this confluence of events, I watched the movie “I Can Only Imagine” before bed. Today I am thoughtful – ruminating over something to do with the space between being a daughter and a mother and the long journey from one to the other and the plethora of lessons I’ve learned in between and beyond.

I took this picture at a combined celebration of Coleman’s 16^th birthday, the new home of my oldest daughter and her husband, and Father’s Day. I love this picture. See, getting a good picture of my Dad is a gamble; he’s either got his eyes closed, looking like he just lost his best friend, or he’s gotten distracted and has looked over at something else in the room just as I snap the shutter.

This picture kills me because the first couple of pictures I took fit into the second category. I seriously spent several times goading him to smile and trying to get him to laugh for this thing. When he finally did, he leaned forward right into the lens, giving him a bit of an oversized head.

Though it appears awkward, the portrait suits him and maybe even personifies him – at least the Dad I’ve grown up with – the inconsistent, wildly generous, overly dramatic, type-A, job-consumed, slightly self-obsessed, unbelievably creative intellect, Dad.

Growing up, dad wasn’t often present. I knew he worked in advertising and occasionally he had to go away in his white uniform (Navy reserves), but that wasn’t all. In 1966 he incorporated the Enid Community Theatre where he also spent a great deal of time. Though I wasn’t old enough to really understand what went on at this magical place, I have pictures in my head of my dad making and packing up puppets for a Christmas play and a white rabbit we got because he was in one of the plays. I also remember how, every so often, he’d come in to say goodnight and narrate some fantastic tale he’d just made up on the spot to get me to go to sleep, but which would just keep me wide awake waiting for the ending.

We moved to Oklahoma City when I was 7. I’ll never forget him squeezing himself into the seat across from me on the swing set glider, telling me earnestly that everything would be okay and that I’d find new friends as I screamed and cried and carried on as all children pulled from their idyllic surroundings for territory and landscapes they can’t even fathom.

Nothing was different after the move. Dad continued to be busy - as though life had made him the on-call solver of all its various mysteries - none of which could be answered within the confines of the mundane niceties of our home. Memories of him being gone when I woke and coming in after I was asleep are numerous, as are the ones of him falling asleep on the couch after dinner, a single beer from which he’d given me a surreptitious sip still half-full on the coffee table in front of him.

It was difficult not to take these absences personally. When he was home, he was often frustrated and angry and I was often cocky and smart aleck – a frequently explosive situation. Though I was constantly fighting between first and second chair flute in middle school band when not singing in the choir or acting in one of the plays, during performance nights my eyes would furtively scan the seats looking for dad’s face, only to be disappointed.

Yet, out of the blue, the spring of my eighth-grade year, dad came to me and told me he wanted to play piano for the last year of my music festival competitions. I honestly thought he was kidding, but no, the man learned all the music and drove us to every one of my contests where he played like he was playing for the Boston Pops. I killed it that year – 4 medals – in no small way thanks to dad’s oddly inconsistent, but grandiose gesture.

The next year my parents divorced. Dad was gone constantly – like he’d just given up. I’d see him here or there or talk to him on the phone, but nothing regularly, nothing satisfying.

For my sixteenth birthday he rented a bus, catered submarine sandwiches and invited all my friends to drive around the metro to the new teen-age-disco hot spots. It was every teen-agers dream. It was talked about for weeks at school – HIGH SCHOOL. It put me on the map in some circles and made me stuck up in others, but I didn’t care. It was awesome.

The next week, he gave me a yellow Camaro. I was in heaven. I promptly wrecked it driving on the ice I was told not to drive on the next weekend. He towed it, he fixed it, he gave it back. I – more than likely – said nothing. In fact, I remember being impatient it wasn’t coming home fast enough because, well, I needed it. I deserved it. I worked. I paid for its gas, but I never remember paying insurance or being required to pay for the damage I inflicted for my stupidity.

After graduation I begged to go to work for him. He let me. He let me navigate the world of advertising with absolutely zero college (I refused to go) patiently - and sometimes not so patiently - plying me with odd jobs and errands.

At the end of year one, I had begun to expand into bigger aspects of the business. He didn’t always like my copy, or production choices – and I heard about those – but I kept learning and he kept me around six more years. Though he was a pretty hands-off manager, I grew a lot. It’s funny, but in retrospect, though I frequently accused him of a lack of guidance in my head, it’s all too clear it was there. It had to have been. I knew too much at the end.

And the end came too fast. The Penn Square financing fiasco of the 1980’s, hurt our business badly. Most of our clients were banks and banks were cutting their advertising budgets right and left just to keep solvent. The business was slowly going out of business. As was my marriage. And so it happened, that in ‘88, I left my marriage, the business and dad. Years of unresolved issues had finally hit the fan. Dad was stressed, I was stressed, he was angry, I was angry he was angry, he was done.

I navigated my late-in-life college years without dad in any aspect of my life. It was weird. After years of togetherness, we were not together. Though I love my mother dearly, dad and I are peas in a pod. We’re gregarious, we’ve never met a stranger, we’re silly, we’re dramatic, we’re wild, we’re story tellers and writers, we’re emotional, we overwork, we overperform – we’re…us.

For years I was mad at him. Just mad. Mad like the kind of mad you are when someone hurts you because they’re hurt and only know how to be mad. I resented him. I mole-hilled all the things he’d ever ‘done’ to me – all the ways he’d ever hurt me – into one giant unnavigable mountain. And I stewed. Several years later dad called. Though we reconciled (I simply am unable to hold grudges – even if I wanted to), I thought about the history of our relationship frequently after that, not so much because it needed fixing, but more so out of a distinct need to analyze it well enough to make sure I understood it. I had to. Even before Dave and I had kids together, I realized I needed to know how to define my role as a parent – what I would do, what I wouldn’t do, what would be important, what wouldn’t be so important.  

And so it is that for years I’ve slowly been coming to the understanding that I can’t judge the actions of my parents from the perceptions of youth. Today, with three kids still (barely) at home, I run from one project to the next, hearing myself say, “I can’t be home tonight I have a meeting”, while simultaneously hearing a scratched recording of Cat’s in The Cradle playing in my head.

Though I chose to homeschool my kids early on in their lives and have had the joy (and trauma) of having my children with me 24/7, I still find myself looking at them and wondering what they’ll think of me when they’re older and have children of their own. Will they think of me like I thought of my father all those years ago? Am I here for them, but not here for them because I’m always on a project? Am I so unpredictable that one minute I’m the mom from hell and the next minute the best thing since sliced bread?

If so, I will desperately hope I have taught them as much as my dad has taught me – like dealing with life no matter what it hands you and doing what you need to do to navigate it and about creativity and the importance of finding something you’re good at and something you can love to do and then doing it. More than anything, I hope they realize – as I did with dad – that their mother is just a person – an imperfect person doing her best to raise them and love them the best way she knows how within the confines of her abilities, though it may not always look like it from their perspective.