You would’ve loved my father. You weren’t his child.
He was Father never Dad or (heaven forbid) Daddy, which sounds formal and pretentious on paper, but was actually meant as a facetious send-up of formality and pretension.
His full name was Big Fat Father (BFF), which seemed hilarious in the 1960s and 70s, because while he had a pot belly, he was hardly what anyone would call “fat,” even then.
He was a charmer who had problems with authority, rich people and anyone who said “irregardless.”
He wasn’t a rule breaker exactly, more like a rule bender. Between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am, for example, STOP signs were “suggestions” not mandates. He signed gas-station credit-card receipts “I. Will Phartalot.” He convinced my dear childhood friend Jennie that you could bore a hole in a watermelon, stick a hot dog inside, plug it up, leave it for a time, and the two would meld into a delicacy called a “water dog.”
Famously he got expelled from Quaker boarding school mere weeks before graduation for conducting an experiment in the chemistry lab that exploded in a larger way than perhaps he had anticipated. My big sister claims it wasn’t a bomb, exactly. The Quakers were not amused.
An inventor, he left a steady paycheck with Lockheed (c.f., problems with authority) to launch his own machine shop. Among the things his shop manufactured: EZ Go Go-carts, a peanut-skinner for M&M/Mars, Masterbend mufflers.
Those were the good old days.
In the same spirit of irony that led him to call himself Father, he bought a Jaguar XJ6, then another. “If you want to drive a compact car, why not drive a Jaguar?” he liked to say with a mock hoity-toity accent. Nevermind the ivy growing inside the house between the cracks in the bricks or the unreliability of flushing toilets.
Alas, the center did not hold. Things fell apart.
I was (mercifully) too young to be roped into the family business, so I was (mercifully) unaware of the extent of the rule-bending, but even I could see his shop go from 100+ employees to eventually just two: himself and his secretary, soon to be his second wife.
When I was 16, my mother left the marriage and the house, taking me with her. The next decade saw business go from bad to worse, ultimately resulting in a sale of family land and a heated dispute over the distribution of proceeds. Lines in the sand were drawn; relationships fractured. It’s the oldest story in the family-business playbook, but that didn’t make it any less unpleasant to live through.
The next and last time I saw my father was at my wedding, a decade later, which was strained and awkward.
Because he never trusted doctors or dentists (authority!), his health suffered in predictable ways. When he was 67, I got the call that he’d suffered a massive stroke and wouldn’t recover.
No father is perfect (or mother, for that matter). I know that. No husband is either. (If you’re married to one; I got surprise-divorced 10 years ago.)
Humans don’t exist on a good/bad binary. Relationships are messy. Even the best fathers and husbands are going to fall short sometimes, as the Unitarian Universalist minister Lyn Cox wrote in a prayer for a “Complicated Father’s Day.” Even the least-great fathers and husbands are going to have their “shining moments.” Probably most of them are going to fall somewhere in the middle, as most of us do.
So yeah, Father’s Day … it’s complicated …
Non-irregardless, as Father would’ve said, I must’ve absorbed something of his rule-bending spirit to have made it to this point: running marathons and raising a daughter, not to mention writing an entire column about a father who didn’t run for Another Mother Runner!
I hope your Father’s Day (and weekend) is more full of joy than it is complications. But if yours is less than perfect, know you’re not alone.
Nicely said.
Your writing is so poignant and beautiful. ❤️
Thanks for this- it really resonates with me! This makes me remember all the cards I looked through as Father’s Day approached each year, looking for one that was pleasant but not too effusive, since everything was so complicated. I’m so glad I read it.
Lovely, honest writing. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you Tish ❤️❤️
Nice cars while the house (and family) is falling apart reminds me of my ex-husband. Ugh. Thanks for writing.
A good reminder of how complicated people and families are. And then we put a holiday on top of it .
GREAT writing! Thank you for sharing!
Wow, this really hit home with me as I’ve had a complicated relationship with my dad since my late teens. Father’s Day always brings up mixed feelings, it’s nice to know I’m not alone. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Tish for sharing this part of yourself with us!❤️
Thank you for this. My relationship with my father is/was similarly complicated; your story really resonated.
Your writing is so beautifully evocative. Thank you for sharing this piece and these parts of your experience.
Hi y’all, I just want to say how appreciative I am of your kind words. I was pretty nervous about this one! First off, didn’t want to come off whiny. But also…. a non-running father? For AMR? I love this tribe! [heart emoji]
Loved what you had to say Tish. To a greater or lesser degree, none of us is perfect and relationships are so much easier to navigate once you make peace with it. Wish so much that I was less judgmental of my dad when I was a young adult, but trying to use my hard learning curve to teach my kids to appreciate their own (pretty great but definitely not perfect) dad. Thanks for being so honest and putting it out there.
My relationship with my father is so off from “as seen on TV”. Sometimes it drives me nuts and other times I’m reminded that no one and no relationship is perfect. I honestly have been so focused on celebrating my husband this weekend (I often tell me sister we married the great men we did because we have the father we have), I forgot about “celebrating” my father. It’s hard to remember he doesn’t live up to all the cards I search through at that store. The most I’ll do is send a text or make a call and leave a message. I am who I am in part because of what he did and did not give me.
What an amazing piece. We all have a hallmark vision of our relationships and our fathers — I certainly do even as I am struggling with the changes in him over the past few years. We are barely holding things together — my sister is not speaking to him and I’m challenged in doing so — and he is oblivious to it. Fathers and daughters are so much more complex than we all realize.
Wonderful piece on the honest reality of complicated family relationships. Thank you for sharing your personal story and being vulnerable with the Tribe. Very relatable for many!
Love the honesty here. We tend to paint the storybook picture of our families. I don’t think I’ve ever been this frank about my father, even with my sister. Thank you