Can you speak up- my wife is hard of hearing: A Father's Day Story

Dad and me on my wedding day

I am my father’s daughter. He was an engineer at Raytheon, and before that an auto mechanic, and my mind works the way his did, like it or not. I analyze everything to a fault, and, based on my conclusions, am stubborn to that same fault. Just like my father.

It is funny how where you are today is the sum total of your experiences. Your parents, and their parents, built the beginning of the road you are traveling on. You can try to build a better or completely different road if you don’t like the scenery that came before you, but most of the time you end up with a road that runs parallel to the original one- or at best perpendicular. That original road is always the touchpoint.

So here I sit on this gloomy Father’s Day, missing my dad and thinking how his life- more than his words- shaped me. Trust and helpfulness were a huge part of him, and I grew up thinking everyone was like that. It has created in me a blind spot of naivete.

He possessed a wicked sense of humor as well, or was possessed by it, more likely. He and his brother brought my mother out to dinner for her birthday one year, and privately informed the waitress that she was hard of hearing but loathe to admit it, and the waitress would need to speak loudly and clearly to her. By the end of the evening, both the waitress and my mother were shouting at each other- the waitress to be understood, and my mother in vain denial of her deafness. Happy 50th, Mom!

Then there are those days that time is frozen in your mind. I remember when my mother called me up and asked me what multiple myeloma was- the doctor had called her and told her on the phone that a blood test indicated that that my father had that condition. I remember sitting on the stairs in my old house after looking it up and calling her back, in essence opening up the envelope to read to her my father’s death sentence. He was sick from both the chemotherapy and the pain of the cancer the entire last year of his life, and the man who spent his life finding ways to help others finally learned that life is about accepting help when you need it, too. I don’t think the equation came close to being balanced in sum, but that’s the way you want the scales to look at the end of the day, I think.

When he died, I was three months pregnant with my second daughter, now 19. A lot of water has passed under that bridge, but I still remember the feeling that the safety net was gone and here I was- on the tightrope of adulthood, or maybe off the tightrope and learning to be that safety net for my own children as the elder for a new generation.

So, Dad, thank you. Thank you for expecting the best from people. Thank you for exposing me to an unswerving expectation of personal responsibility. Thank you especially for that sense of humor- it comes in pretty handy.  And thank you for the gift of realizing that with great depth of joy in relationships inevitably comes equally deep sorrow unless you are very lucky- and that’s okay and you can live through it.

And thank you to all of the fathers out there who are setting that same example for their children.

Real estate or social media questions? Find me
...On Facebook where you can access a home search
...All of my online links
...On LinkedIn
...Email me at diane@realtyman.com
...or call 978-840-4014