My cat died on Father’s Day, so I wasn’t able to get my dad a gift. To make up for it, I am writing this piece as a show of love – Happy late Father’s Day, Dad!
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Picture this: It is late one evening in July, almost midnight. I am sprawled across the couch, feet on the coffee table, playing The Sims on the PC that my dad has set up on the coffee table as a makeshift gaming station.
The man himself sits in the recliner on the other side of the living room, guitar in hand, as he does every night. Most of the time, I hear him strumming as I’m in bed, on the cusp of sleep. But on nights like this one, where I stay up late and remain downstairs until my eyes are heavy, he carries on with his playing anyway. Except, he chooses my favorite songs on these nights. He’ll play “Crash into Me,” my favorite song (Spotify Wrapped 2021 said I listened to it 311 times that year alone) and “Landslide”, even though he hates Fleetwood Mac.
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The other day, I asked my dad outright (via text) if fatherhood had changed him, and if so, how? He wrote back that he would start by dividing it up into three sections: his liver, his sleep, and his wallet.
My dad packed my lunch every single day from Pre-K to graduation. He, like so many other dads I’ve heard about, was the type to pack a food I said I liked once every day for years (hummus still appears in the fridge when I come home from school). Once, back in high school, I asked if he wanted me to start doing it instead. He grumbled about it, saying something about how he liked packing my lunch, so I left it at that.
“Dad love,” is what I joke about when my dad engages in a random act of caring, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s why I don’t feel guilty when he tries to Venmo me after a hair appointment, Doordashes a COVID test to my door at school, or sets up my computer when I come home. There is no stopping my dad from his little ways of saying “I love you.”
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The other day, I asked my dad outright (via text) if fatherhood had changed him, and if so, how? He wrote back that he would start by dividing it up into three sections: his liver, his sleep, and his wallet.
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A musician at a festival my mom and dad went to announced to the crowd that “being a parent wasn’t fun.” I think my dad took personal offense to that – he just kept repeating that he can’t believe anyone would say something like that. “After all,” he said, “who else can you wrestle and lightsaber fight without risk of major injury (until the floor falcon), then eat some tasty nugs with?”
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I am lucky to have had a father who was the maximum level of involved in everything I wanted to do.
My dad and I had battles with plastic lightsabers almost every weekend, starting when I was around 6 years old and ending when I was 8. They probably would not have stopped either, except when those battles turned into wrestling matches, there comes a point when your growing kid weighs too much to jump on you. Sometimes my mom would join forces with him; other times, she picked a safe chair to observe from as we stampeded through the house—up and down the stairs, into our rooms, the dining room, and used the den couch as higher ground for leverage. The “floor falcon” was my signature move. I would tower over my dad, who lay on the floor in defeat, jump up, and throw my whole body weight onto him. I’m sure he would have taken all of the floor falcons in the world if it meant I would have stayed that age forever.
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I am lucky to have had a father who was the maximum level of involved in everything I wanted to do. For 12 years I did ballet, with the annual show of The Nutcracker ruling our lives every October through December. Mother Ginger, a role where a large skirt contraption is traditionally used to let young dancers emerge onto the stage from under, is also a role traditionally played by a man. My dad stuffed a bra and suited up in that 90+ lb skirt for 3 years in a row.
When we switched from the normal version of The Nutcracker to “Nutcracker Swing” — AKA the WWII-inspired brainchild of my dance teacher — my dad stepped up to be a parent in the 30-minute party scene, and learned to swing dance. By the time I was a senior, he claimed he was “retired” from the actual dancing, but still worked in the box every performance on the sound system. He said the view was better than anything you could get from the audience.
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“The hardest thing to do is letting go,” he says when he finally gets back to me on his thoughts about fatherhood. I believe him. I knew that my leaving for college would be difficult for my mom, who cried the whole way home after dropping me off in Charlottesville, but I did not expect for my dad to take it as hard as he did. The text I received one night, a couple weeks into first-year, is etched into my brain. “Miss ya, Lindz. I keep thinking you’re just going to roll into the driveway from a late shift at Whippy (my first job at an ice cream shop that I held for 4 summers), but you don’t.”
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Sorry, Dad. I know you’re reading this, feeling appreciative but mildly uncomfortable with the level of emotion involved in this piece. Love and miss ya. Be ready to bust out those swing moves at Parent’s Formal.
