Some of my strongest memories are of asking my dad how something worked. Like electricity, airplanes, centrifugal force, bicycles, or whatever. We’d sit down at the kitchen table and he’d draw diagrams to help me understand it. I always enjoyed the bonding.
In fact, we still occasionally have those times, but usually it’s over the phone, and half of the time, I’m explaining things to him.
Yeah. Someone at, I think, Montgomery Ward thought I was Dad’s grandson when I was really little. One of my brothers, who is 19½ years older than I, once told me he didn’t want to be seen with me back then because he didn’t want prospective girlfriends to think I was his.
My father was rarely ever around.
Not in the sense that he didn’t live with us, more in the sense that he worked 15 hour construction days.
I don’t remember speaking more than a few words to him from when I was five until I was twelve- that isn’t the case, I would see him on weekends and sometimes he would get laid off in the winter, but in my memory I cannot recall spending time with him.
He was quite the little alcoholic as well. I do remember him taking me to the bar in town and buying me peanuts and mountain dew while he drank and played penochle.
After he sobered up when I was sixteen we started talking to each other a bit. I had just gotten out of rehab myself and we used to attend AA meetings together.
I moved in with him for a couple of years when I was ninteen/twenty, and he paid for my school and bought me a motorcycle.
We weren’t the baseballing type of crowd- he had lettered in swimming, but because his mom was the town crazy and his dad was the town drunk, they hadn’t presented it to him at the ceremony. They called him back in the locker room and just gave it to him.
We get along well now. He loves my 6yo daughter to death, and sees her several times a year, and took her for the entire summer this year. He sends her care packages every month or two.
He tells once a year how much money I will get when he dies, and we are cordial to each other.
I won’t ever be as close with him as I am with my mom (I have a mom-heart tattoo), but I like him a lot, and he is always there for me if I need anything.
Here I thought you were gonna be all “I didn’t even know who my dad WAS until we found ourselves on the opposite sides of a rebellion!”
Nah, that’s my maternal grandfather. 
Still have no idea who he was but I’m guessing he had something to do with the institution that my grandmother was in around the time Mom was born.
My dad was a hard worker and a good provider. All the kids knew that we had to graduate from college. He had an unspeakably difficult young adulthood, as his entire family went back to Japan prior to Pearl Harbor because of difficulties due to prejudice. After Pearl Harbor he got yanked out of his Masters program at UCLA and shipped off to Manzanar (he was born in the USA) and had no contact with his family until after the war. His dad and his brother died in Japan during the war for reasons that were unclear. He took me to baseball and basketball games.
But he was an el primo nerd. I’m sure he had Asperger’s syndrome and was completely socially inept. He tossed me a few 50’s era pamphlets about sex when it was time for the talk. Fortunately, my hippy older sister left a copy of Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask* and Terry Southern’s Candy on the family bookshelf so I educated myself. Also, we had sex education in school. He told me in all seriousness that the way to meet chicks was to learn ballroom dancing and to play bridge (I graduated high school in 1975). I once asked him what a homo was and he said that Homo Sapiens was man. I’d be willing to bet that he never realized that homosexuals existed.
My mom and dad split, and my dad left when I was 5. I didn’t see him again until I was 21, and then only because a mutual friend (talk about a small town) decided that putting us back together would be a nice little Oprah moment. It wasn’t. I resented him for not being there when I was a kid, and he couldn’t stop blaming my mom for everything. He would try to get me to call his second wife mom, and be angry when I wouldn’t. He couldn’t understand that relationships aren’t so just because you want them to be, and he couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel the same way about my mother as he did. I just didn’t feel connected to him after meeting him again, and I feel guilty about that. I wanted a dad, but I didn’t feel any more of a bond with him than you might feel with an acquaintance at work. I feel pretty guilty about that, too.
But to answer your question, my mom was the one who taught me many of the things dads do, like shaving. She taught me the old fashioned way, with a mug and brush and safety razor. And the birds and bees talk was cryptic and incredibly awkward, at least for her. I had no idea what she was going on about until years later. She taught me a love for baseball and for books, for swing music and bluegrass. She taught me that love speaks loudest in actions. She taught me to respect women. A lot of the rest I had to learn for myself, partly because I am hard-headed (mom taught me that, too) but as Merle Haggard said, “Momma tried”.
I guess I’ve lucked out (i.e. been truly blessed). I see my Dad through the same eyes as when I was four. He’s still wise, loving, honest, hard working etc. If I can even approximate his life’s journey, I’ll die happy and content. Oh, except that I’d dump psycoMom and hook up with someone else. 
Geez, I read about all these absentee or incompetent dads here, and it makes me sad.
My dad was a great guy. Worked for Boeing for 37 years, loved all us kids, was a good husband to my mom. Helped me rebuild three old cars–god, he was a worker! And when he retired, he built an enormous model railroad layout; he had soooo much fun planning it and building every bit of it, and it just grew and grew until it filled half the basement.
Taught us kids to be honest, taught us the value of knowledge and a college degree. Two of us are engineers, and the other is a doctor, so we turned out okay.
He died way too early of prostate cancer. Every now and then I accomplish something and wish I could call him up to tell him about it.
Taught me how to construct/de-construct a (frame) house.
Took me to one balgame (I think).
Then his mother died.
Did I mention he was a mama’s boy? Big time?
Crawled into a bottle, became violent and vicious.
His kids were the only ones present at the (way too late) funeral. Not a tear was shed.
Somebody shoud have shot him dead circa 1957, He lasted until 1989. WAY too long.
(yes, I loathe and despise his memory)
Hmmm. Mine never taught me to shave, but I never asked, either. I don’t remember shaving until I was maybe a sophomore in college; not that I didn’t need to, just that I didn’t.
And my father didn’t make me. Of course, at the time he had a beard as well. Maybe that says something about his politics or attitude.
He did teach me to tie a tie. I think he tried to show me a lot of things, but he didn’t always have the patience, and neither did I. In some respects we were strangers, and in some respects we were very close.
He died in 1999, leaving me with lots of questions that I should have asked long before that, and didn’t.
I find a lot of my father in myself. Some things are different, of course. He was tone deaf, and I’m musical, but he always honored that. He wasn’t much into any kind of sports, and I am, but he was a big healthy guy for most of his life and certainly capable of doing sports.
In short, I see many more similarities than differences. We were both interested in our religion/culture (Judaism), we were both intellectuals, we both loved to read, we both loved music and art and comedy and sports, we both loved fishing and photography and building things and history.
Were we distant some times? Yes. Were we close sometimes? Yes. We weren’t perfect; instead, we had something interesting. Worth writing about. He was a complex man, hard to define just from his intelligence or background or life experiences, with secrets he always kept inside. And so am I. My mother never knew quite what to make of him, and my younger brothers either disliked him or didn’t know him.
I loved him and knew him pretty well.
Glad you asked.
My father didn’t do shit for me. My earliest memory of him is when I was about 4. He was a big, strong man and was tossing me high into the air and catching me. It was fun, I was enjoying it… right up until the time he missed me and I hit the ground. It hurt, I cried. Then I got the ‘men don’t cry’ speech, told I was weak and then he walked off. Remember, I was 4.
It never got much better. He was an alcoholic and you can guess how much fun that was. I was raised to respect your parents which I did. Of course that respect (in my father’s eyes) related to weakness. In my teens he frequently called me a “pussy”. So I tried another angle. I decided not to take anything from anyone. It is no surprise that that lead to fighting. The first time I came home with a black eye my mom cried. For making my mom cry I got a beating…
He never taught me anything. God, I could go on. He sucked at being a father.
But - Am I bitter? No. I learned that just because someone spawned you doesn’t give them executive privilege. I have had a great life. My uncle and grandfather stepped in where my real father failed.
Parents are just other humans on the planet. Nothing more - nothing less.
One of the most quoted lines in my family and among my father’s few surviving friends regards his philosophy of children: “I’ll address them when they’re of communicative stature and able to converse on a subject worth talking about. Til such time they remain their mother’s provenance.”
He was a grandiloquent man, very formal, extremely intellectual, with an incredible memory (he could quote The Raven in its entirety verbatim). He had a very strange upbringing: he was born in a tin roofed dogtrot cabin in Alabama (picture- colorization mine obviously) to a cotton farmer father and a mother who was a real piece of work but was much higher on the socioeconomic scale than his father (her father was a wealthy doctor and she never let anyone forget it) and was raised by his grandmother and his twin spinster aunts. I’ve read some of his correspondence with his mother from when he was in service at the tail end of WW2 (“I joined the navy in July 1945, and within the month Japan surrendered… some would say that is coincidence, but those are people who did not know me in my late teens”). His mother wrote to him in basic training- knowing he could well be going to Okinawa (this was before the atom bomb ended the war) “I’m told they sell Schaefer pens at the commissary. Get me one. I loaned you mine when you were 15 and you ruined it, this will be the best chance you have to replace it at a decent price”, and that was as loving as she got. (Me as a child with his mother and aunts; they all survived him.)
Anyway, my mother was his junior high sweetheart in a way; she was a 14 year old freshman and he was a 24 year old freshman English teacher when they met and became engaged. Today they’d be on CNN for the scandal but at the time it was pretty much “eh”.
I was born 15 years into their marriage by which time it was significantly less than happy, largely because of his decision (and my mother’s acquiescence to same) to move back to his birthplace (albeit into a modern ranch style house he built on the farm). This is how I remember him looking when “fixed up”.
I won’t say he was cruel, but he was very formal and blunt, at least with me. He would not only say things like “If I had it to do over again I’m not sure I’d have ever fathered children- I most definitely would have stopped at two”, and would honestly not understand why I (the third child) found that offensive. He wore suits and ties on his off-days (often the one he’d worn all week- personal hygiene was never a big priority to him) and never wore anything other than suit pants/dress shirt/coat-tie-duster-cowboy hat as accessories or his underwear. He was a fanatical college football fan (especially Auburn) but I don’t remember him ever playing any kind of sports or other game with me (save for an occasional round of Jeopardy [board game, Art Fleming years]) or dominoes. We just generally didn’t have a close relationship even though he drove me to school everyday in either his mustard yellow cramped Toyota or in the Cadillac whose trunk he removed so he could use it as a pick-up (he wouldn’t drive a pick-up even though he was a cattle farmer because he thought it was too redneckish).
He was amazingly strong: I saw him several times hoist hundred pound bags of cow feed as if they were 20 pounds, I once saw him take down a p.o.d. cow with huge horns (some people don’t realize that cows do indeed have horns- it’s not just bulls), and had been quite the athlete in his day, though when I knew him he was fat (though firm). He almost always had a cigar around. He was a very functional alcoholic- I saw him pass out from drinking (whiskey and Coke in a big glass) but he never missed a day of work, never drove drunk, never became abusive (well, sort of once, but that’s a long story and he was provoked). He was extremely egotistical, used to have HUGE terrifying arguments with my mother, some of which ended with her firing a pistol “in his general direction”, but strangely he adored her in his own very weird way.
In spite of his memory and his love of the classics and of American literature and being a griot of every family in the county, he had almost no imagination and didn’t see it as a virtue in others; to my knowledge he never read a novel that wasn’t required for school, only essays and poetry and non-fiction. His writing style, on those rare occasions he actually wrote something other than have my mother write it and signing his name to it, was to string together 15 different quotations with a modicum of filler. I won’t say he had no sense of humor, but it was often as not at somebody else’s expense or at least very sardonic.
As I’ve mentioned many times, he died the first time we ever shared a bed, which was also the last time we ever shared a bed, during the worst snow storm in recorded Alabama history when the house (a farm in the middle of nowhere) was without power or running water. We had an electric pump, hence when the power went out so did the water, but there was one last flush left in each toilet, and he used the toilet just before coming to bed. My father was renowned for his gifts of oratory and impromptu eloquence (the good thing about Alabama is few people realized it was mostly plagiarized) and he was flown to several states to give Masonic rites and eulogies, sometimes for people he’d never met, yet his last words, spoken to me, were “You wanna take a dump in this before I flush it.”
I had just turned 15 when he died (he’d disowned me the year before but that’s another and strangely prophetic story) so I wasn’t really able to “converse on a subject worth talking about” for very long, but I wish I had been. My brother and sister, who are 6 and 8 years older than me respectively, remember a very different man than the one I remember; of course they were both valedictorians while I was always in danger of flunking out of school, and he actually thought I was retarded for some while.
Anyway, I understand him a lot better now than I ever did when he was alive, or at least who I think he was. I think in some ways he was as brilliant as his reputation or even as insightful and intelligent as he thought he was (which is saying a lot) but I also understand why my mother had such a love-hate with him. (My brother and sister don’t understand “how in hell he put up with Mama” but I for the life of me don’t understand how or why they don’t ask the same question of “how the hell did she put up with Daddy”, a man who for their 25th anniversary gave her a hamburger maker he bought at a drug store on the way home when the pharmacist reminded him it was his anniversary, or a man who had her write his master’s thesis then mocked her for her relative lack of education, and other such marital crimes and misdemeanors.)
Anyway, I was, not a shock to anybody who’s read my autobio rants, a Mama’s boy. My father may have had oceans of affection and acceptance and paternal qualities down deep but I never felt like drilling for them, while my mother’s were on the surface. There was a time I’d have given him an F as a father but that’s before I learned about true horror cases (incest, physical abuse, etc.), and in light of things I know now I’d give him a C-/D+.
My entire life I always heard how much I look like my mother, but as I age my resemblance to the old man is almost frightening. (Merger of our photos.) I also have his walk, and I far more resemble him in personality than I do my mother. When my mother was dying my brother, BY FAR his favorite child (he didn’t mind saying it), mentioned “All my life I adored my father and when I grew up I became my mother” and for me in many ways it was the reverse, though I honestly think I’m a much nicer, more considerate person- and I don’t drink- but there’s definitely some of him still floating around in me.
My father is 85 years old, has a few minor health problems and is sharp as a tack. Every day he reads the paper front to back, including things like MLB box scores and obituaries. He is a lifelong yellow dog Democrat (I’d rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican!"), curses like there’s no tomorrow and is one of the funniest folks I know. He was a paratrooper in the Pacific during WWII…or as he says, “I wasn’t a paratrooper, I was a god-damned paratrooper!”
One of his best friends was his brother-in-law, Tony. When McGovern ran for president, Tony voted for Nixon. My father told him “You vote for a pig, you’re a pig.” They never spoke again. Dad was a Nixon hater back to the Hiss days. The first time I saw dad cry was when Adlai Stevenson died in 1965. “The best president we never had,” he’d say.
When I was a kid he loved it when one of my friends came over who was wearing a hat. My dad would say, “You ought to have two hats like that…” When my friend would ask why, dad would say, “So you could shit in one and wipe your ass with the other.”
A few years ago I was looking through some things of his, looking for something he needed. I came across four bronze stars. I asked who they belonged to, and he said they were his. When I asked what he did to get them, he said, “It doesn’t matter, I was just doing my job.” End of story.
He’s a good guy…though ornery as heck. Like he says, “Ornery will get you places.”
Personally, I just want people to realize that not every home has the Beaver Cleaver ideal nuclear family, not to read my story and feel bad about it. God bless you if your home life was good, and I believe there is a special place in heaven for good parents, but so many of us who didn’t have a good home life felt like we were the only ones out there. The first time I met someone who told me a sadder family story than mine I was flabbergasted, because I thought I was alone. My wife, who also has an incredibly screwed up family, and a much sadder story, felt the same way. Hearing others tell their stories also counteracts all of the ignorant people who tell me I should just “get over it” and make some sort of relationship with my dad. Or the ignorant people who think my wife should “get over” her anger and shame caused by her parents physical and sexual abuse of her. Usually these people wind up taking out of context quotes from the Bible to justify their ignorance.
I haven’t gone through the whole thread yet, but this just jumped out at me. I have to ask…is this really a big deal? A make-or-break thing?
Female here, but my dad never took us (including a brother) to a ballgame, either. I just don’t see any of these things as qualifying a good or bad or indifferent parent. It strikes me as something some parents will do because they saw it on TV and started believing that these “lessons” make you a good parent.
I used to feel that way about mine. I remember times, though, when I’d get an answer I really didn’t expect. E.g. my parents called me to wish me a happy birthday and I asked them what they recall about when I was born.
One important bit to set this up…a couple years before I was born, they lost a baby. I was next.
My mom said, “Well, it was snowing and your dad was on the road, so your aunt came over to take me to the hospital. The kids were all excited. The girls wanted me to bring home a girl and the boys wanted me to bring home a boy.”
My dad said, “Ah, you know, you lose one and you have another to replace it.”
He was like that. I think because he didn’t get involved a lot, when he did he would say things that were inappropriate, clumsy, whatever. He was much better when talking about his life or upbringing.
See above. But also, wanted to mention that one day I was on the throne, looking for something to read while doing my business. I think there was a Readers Digest or something with a quiz/poll/whatever about parenting. He’d inked some answers in. “How many kids do you have?”/10. “How many do you wish you’d had?”/2.
I suspect that mom wanted lots and lots of kids and he obliged her. But when it came to actually dealing with those kids…
Right. Sometimes I could get him to talk and we’d have some nice moments, but mostly he kept to himself. After awhile I kinda moved on.
I feel your pain. I think for a lot of people, whatever you grow up with is “normal” in your mind, especially if your family is as insulated as mine was. As you get older you gradually realize how flaky some of it is. As an adult, you’re like “WTF?!”
I realize now that the issues I had with my mom (and our arguments are legendary) really arose from my father’s non-involvement with her. When the son hits puberty at the same time as the mother hits menopause, well, that’s just more fuel for the fire. Dad really needed to be around to intervene and get her some help for the raging guanoneurological disorder.
The good news is that I had some older sibs around to help me from becoming a total head case. The bad news is that there was a sharp disconnect; they didn’t understand what I was going through. The mother they knew (from calmer times) wasn’t like that and they dismissed the freak circus goings on as my imagination.
@Kalhoun: I don’t know if they’re big things or not. I never had kids, but if I had a son, I imagined these would be some of the rites of passage I would want to share with him.
And, they’re merely the tip of the iceberg. I think lots of fathers do that, minimally, and stop there. So I stated them as, “If these didn’t happen, imagine the rest.”
Sorry to respond to this one so late-- the joys of working overnights and school during the days means replies in a less-than-timely manner.
I think the primary reason I say I’d like my dad to be proud of having sired me is that I think I represent an abstract burden to him. He never got to know me as a kid, really only has memories of me as a very young baby… and thirty years later he still gets chased down by the IRS and various state/local governments for back child support. I’m simply an entity on paper, a name quoted when a state prosecutor finds him and takes a hundred dollars out of his meager paycheck. I have to imagine that there’s quite a bit of resentment, especially since he evidentally has shaped up enough to try to care for his newer wife and kids over the years. (Well, I don’t have to imagine it exactly, as that was what was conveyed in the message to my mom when she tried to get him to help with college expenses.) I also imagine there’s a bit of guilt-- he’s seen his new kids grow up, knows what they’ve dealt with, undoubtedly acted as a father to teach, help, or punish them… and he knows that way back, there’s another kid who didn’t get that.
I think it’d be nice if he got to find out that I’m a human being, not an abstract entity wielded by people who want to take his money. And, overall, I’m a human being who would have been worth supporting… and maybe he could feel a little less guilty if he could see that I grew up okay after all.
My parents separated when I was six, and divorced when I was 9. He stayed in Bahrain while we moved back to England (when I was six) so I didn’t see him that much.
From the ages of about 8-12, he was basically a weekend dad. I thought it was great - he had a Porsche, lived in London (wayyyy more interesting than Somerset), and we did “fun stuff” instead of me having to go to school, etc.
When I got older I realized, 1) My parents separated because he was cheating on my mother, and 2) When it came down to it, my mum was the one who was genuinely there for me - not that my dad necessarily wasn’t, just that he never had to be.
I taught myself how to ride a bike. My brother (10 years older) taught me how to tie my shoelaces, tie a tie, all that man-stuff. In a lot of ways, he was more of a father than my dad. Of course, he hated having to do all this stuff for the most part - I was a cool little brother, since I was into cars and video games and model building and rugby and all the stuff he was, but I was an annoying little shit at times too.
My Dad was an alcoholic who kept to himself, but occasionally was combative with strangers, sometimes physically. He was also merciless in correcting my use of language and my spelling (he never tired of saying “like what?” each and every time a gratuitous “like” crept into my conversation). When he played games with us, he played to win, never letting us win unearned victories. He publicly disdained our many pets and did not participate in their care. He was often distant and took a lot of criticism from my Mom for not being more involved with us kids.
But we didn’t know he was an alcoholic when we were growing up – the parents did a great job of keeping it from affecting us. We moved around a lot, but I thought he was seeking opportunity, not getting fired from jobs.
I grew up to have pretty good communication skills.
I used to resent how hard it was to play against my Dad but I learned that overcoming a real challenge is more satisfying than unearned praise. I also learned to win games – not just to want to win, but how to do so, within the rules. I’m a ruthless competitor in a wide variety of games, almost always the man to beat in any party game situation; but I’m able to relax socially, not rub it in, and keep my friends afterwards. Even when I lose.
Many times over the years I observed my Dad being kind to the pets when he thought no one was looking – his public dislike of them was an affectation. He carried my escaped pet mouse up two flights of stairs to return him to his cage – only to see my mouse staring back from behind the glass; Dad was holding a wild mouse. He told me about it later with gruffness, but admitted under questioning that he’d released the wild mouse outside rather than kill it. He loved coming up with oddball names for pets (our duck, Quagmire, was one of his best picks). I remember three occasions when he drove like a maniac – he was otherwise a careful driver – to rush a bleeding or convulsing dog to the emergency vet.
And that was his greatest strength. A failure at many jobs, an indifferent husband, an inconsistent father, he was the man to have in a crisis. Injuries, accidents, bleeding, deadlines, lost in the wilderness, mistakes, even embarrassment, my dad always knew what to do, often when nobody else did. For a man who made a point of letting us learn the hard way normally, he was always there for me in my own worst failures – when I desperately needed money, when I first had to go to traffic court, when I was too embarrassed to admit I was failing at something, when my heart got broken, I could call him and he’d show up and quietly set about fixing things.
This man, who had plenty of failure in his own life and was often criticized for it, never judged me for any of my mistakes, never said “I told you so” when I was down.
Whether he was searching the woods for a driver thrown out of a car in a horrific head-on collision – limping on his own crushed ankle in the darkness – or packing my stuff into the truck after my live-in girlfriend defaulted on the rent after breaking up with me, or pulling a fishhook out of my backside, or any of a thousand other emergencies, I can see, thinking back now, the thing at the core of him that had also been there when he was only twenty years old, the day he won a Bronze Star fighting the Nazis.
I don’t know what that part of him was, or why he had it, but I hope to God I have a little bit of it in me when those times come again.
Sailboat
