We forget! As daughters, we forget how much we love our fathers. It has to be that way. If we stayed in that love too long, it could be crippling. So as young women, we choose to forget so we can grow and go.
Parenting like any great love, is a love that leads towards separation.
My Dad was my everything when I was little. I remembering sitting in his lap in the big blue chair playing with the whiskers of his five o’clock shadow. I remember being carried on his shoulders at Disneyland. Where I could see the whole world. I remember being thrown up into the air in the swimming pool where he would play whale. I got to ride on top of his back; his black hair weaving in and out of the water.
My Dad had a Native American Grandmother and spent the summers in Arizona on a reservation. He rarely talked about his time there. And being a writer that made me more intrigued about the land, his Native Heritage even though most of his heritage was Swiss.
Ironically, I had received a small writing grant for people with any amount of Native Heritage to interview their elders. I thought it would be interesting to go back to that reservation with my Dad. He was approaching eighty and time was speeding up and slowing down at the same time.
Moreover, I wanted a diversion from my own life. Lately, it had gotten hard and messy. I had two kids and two jobs. I was tired and discouraged. The demands of my work life balance had hit the heavy weight. So even a long road trip though the desert seemed more relaxing than any of my weekends at home.
I was also scared. Of what? I wasn’t sure. But as much as I wanted to take this trip, I was also slightly terrified of something, some feeling that I couldn’t place or picture.
And I was sure he would say no. My Dad was in poor health: a long-term diabetic, a bad knee, and chronic pain had rendered him mostly to a small set of activities. He was tied to his rituals. His meals prepared by my mother, his daily sport games and his weekly Sunday dinners when his grandkids descended on him in a flurry of youthful energy that he both adored and abhorred.
The other reason I thought he would say no is because I would have to drive.
My Dad always drove on our family road trips. He never stopped the car. I recall our annual trips to June Lake where we passed by an inviting restaurant with white table clothes around dinnertime. My Mom always wanting to eat there but my Dad would push on. Finally after six years of whizzing by the white linen café, he agreed to stop only to find it had gone out of business.
Then there was my driving as a teenage girl. I was a horrible driver in high school. I banged up three cars in three years. My Dad never got over it. But for the last thirty years, I have remained ticket and crash free.
But my Dad wholeheartedly said yes. I think my Dad and I both knew there was something to be gained by the two of us going to a place that was once his.
I was sure there would be long gaps where we wouldn’t talk. But that never happened. There were no gaps of silence. No awkward conversation. In fact we never stopped talking.
I asked him about his life. All of it. Before me, before my Mom, before college and the conversation ran long and straight just like the road that lay before us.
On the road, even though we were father and daughter. We were also just two adults: one who was at the end of his life and one who was the middle. My Dad could laugh at the past, the mistakes he made. He face soft and saggy. I still had furled brow and was worried about the future.
When I asked my Dad what was his favorite time with me as a child he said, “from five to twelve.” You could really talk to me then. And you still wanted something from me.”
Like so many women, the distancing between my father and I happened at age thirteen: right around the time my female figure formed. Looking back, it was hard for both of us. He didn’t understand why I was so moody and lost. I didn’t understand why he was so distant and controlling. And I think the separation for fathers and daughters is even more pronounced. Somehow in puberty, when we get our blood and curves: we run to our mothers.
My Dad and I didn’t have the kind of relationship where we fought. There was just a quiet and respectful distance as I clung more tightly to my mother who could give me advice on what it meant to be a woman.
And then I was gone, left home like we all do. The day I boarded the plane for college he sobbed uncontrollably. I think not only because I was leaving home. But because he knew that I would be starting a life that would include less of him. And it did.
I never stopped loving my Dad. I just stopped talking with my Dad.
My Dad was a businessman and athlete. He escaped poverty in downtrodden town by a way of a basketball scholarship that catapulted him into University. Then he became a successful businessman, wheeling and dealing his family into the upper middle class.
I was a playwright and an artist. I survived adolescence by writing poetry, taking dance classes and finding friends who joined my fondness for metaphors and meaning.
I got married and although I loved my Dad, I had new man in my life. That is why so many fathers cry at weddings when they give their daughters away. They know they will be replaced.
But on our road trip there was no escaping each other or replacing each other. He couldn’t watch a game. I had no kids to tend to. My work life would have to wait. I didn’t even bring my computer. And my Mom wasn’t there to serve as a buffer.
We drove many miles. We stopped at local diners. He laughed with the waitresses. We noticed the agony of the desert. Finally we were back in the town that housed the reservation where he spent time as a child. It hadn’t changed much. So his familiarity was both recognizable and depressing.
He was proud of the Native Museum. He talked to the museum director, a proud and beautiful Native Woman about his Heritage. And although my Dad is mostly white, the woman welcomed him as if he were an old friend.
We then went and stood on the scared elder ground. Where the Native people honor their elders. We took pictures with sun setting in our backs. And it was there on that land, that I knew what I was really afraid of.
It had happen.
I had once again fallen in love with my Dad like I did as a little girl.
I remembered how much I loved him and how much he loved me. And how we were tied together as only a father and daughter could be. There was no one I wanted to be with more. No one who would ever love me the way he did and does.
And at the same time, I knew our days were numbered. That soon he would only be with me in my memory. And that my heart would break at not having him on this earth with me as he had always been.
A week after we returned home, everything changed. My mother broke her pelvis and needed constant care. My work had become so busy that I couldn’t leave my computer until I fell into bed. I didn’t see much of my Dad.
But when I went over to his house some weeks later, we had a new point of connection. The way you feel close to a new friend after spending a long time in the car. We talked more and hugged more. I kissed his cheek where his whiskers were now white.
I dared myself to feel all that love again. I know it will end badly. Like all great love stories, it will end with separation. When one will go on without the other.
We all have that chance to love like little children, to want our parents, to need our parents, to enjoy our parents. Some of us take the chance. Some of us don’t. And some can’t, too many things happened in our childhoods to make the crossing impossible.
I was a lucky one.
I took the chance to rediscover my Dad as an adult while getting to feel the love I had for him as a child. And that journey of the heart made the long road trip into the desert a very short trip home.
Our destination a relationship found.