Dad always (well, mostly always, he was human, not an angel) taught us how to learn. This takes a lot more time than simply telling us some knowledge or doing a skill project himself.
As I grew up, I really started to appreciate just how much that benefited me thru my entire life.
One day, long after I was all grown up, having lived decades of a great life that he helped to create, I called him up just to tell him this very thing. That very week he died in a tragic accident.
I am one lucky kid.
I am 44, and I have bad knees from 20+ years on a job that has me walking and standing on concrete floors.
I was basically a father to my brother’s kids while their Dad was busy being the mom, and it hurt every time I had to say, “I can’t today, I’m too tired”.
Even before encountering this thread, I had been thinking lately about how much harder stuff was for my dad. He spent less of his job standing, but the floors were worse if anything, and he didn’t just have bad knees. My dad had a clubbed foot, which had been surgically reconstructed when he was about 10, so that he was actually standing on the end of one of his leg bones. They had left the cast on too long, so his calf had atrophied. Each of those things contributed to one leg being a lot shorter than the other, so he stood off-center and that must have hurt his hips.
I got a sense, in my high school years, that Dad sometimes had trouble breathing. I’d carry some of his stuff in from the car because I could easily carry heavy things, and I was beginning to sense that he couldn’t. I knew he couldn’t run, that he had been medically exempt from the Phys-Ed requirement for his degree, that they’d made him take ROTC even though they couldn’t have him march.
I never realized how much pain he must have been in.
I know how much it hurts sometimes just to be standing, and I have a foot under both my ankles, while one of his sat off to the side. He cooked dinner for us, he did the dishes, he went to work. … And he never once parked in a handicapped space. “Save those for someone who really needs it.” Even though walking hurt.
I did see him use a handicapped space once. He had been retired 10 years, and had the sticker, and explained that when he had to carry his oxygen tank with him then every little bit mattered, so he wanted to park as close to the store as he could. But he walked around the grocery store while I followed him and pushed the cart, just like I always did. No little battery-operated scooter for that man. “Save those for someone who needs it,” said the club-footed, bad kneed, asthmatic, emphysemic man with terminal COPD carrying an oxygen tank in a shoulder bag.
My parents (and older siblings) love a story from my preschool years. Apparently, I would call people whatever I had heard them being called, and nobody had noticed until one day when I had been sent to the next door neighbor’s to borrow something. I knocked on their kitchen door (as we did), and when it opened there were both parents there in the kitchen, peering out to see who had been knocking.
“Hello, Mr. Orza. Hello Ann-Marie,” I began.
Not necessarily: I’ve know people with similar conditions and the only one with whom this came up found it enourmously irritating that people assumed she must be in pain. She wasn’t; she compared needing crutches to “needing glasses, only more cumbersome, and my legs have always been this way, it’s the way they’re used to being. They’re bent legs, not broken legs.”
That is rough. I feel for you.
Hello Lady reminded me, one of the reasons we moved to the house I grew up in was proximity to my dad’s work. He worked at a junior college about 2 blocks from our house. His employer was pretty amiable and he was able to work his class schedule and office hours so that he usually picked us up from school and looked after us in the afternoons. Every once in a while we had to walk home or walk to his office - essentially the same distance, and our school was about a block further on. What that meant was that we had a lot of time with dad as our supervisor and caregiver.
Summers we often had a babysitter through the day, but by 3 pm Dad was usually home. Whether he was taking a nap, or exercising, or jogging around the block, or taking us swimming at a neighbor’s pool, he was around and involved in looking after us.
Dad became my scoutmaster for my Webelos pack because I needed one. He was active and involved as an assistant scoutmaster for my Boy Scout troop.
At 73, he’s still involved in scouting, now excited to be taking my nephew (his grandson) on camping trips.
Another one that came to mind, my parents instilled in us children an appreciation for and enjoyment of reading. When we were young, we’d see them reading and we did plenty of it ourselves. It is interesting that one of the big encouragements was the subtle influence of watching the adults in your life read for enjoyment.
When my parents divorced, my mom went back to school full time and got her MSW. With 4 kids in the house 10 and younger, and she had to do an unpaid internship in the evenings at some nonprofit, while working at another and going to school. I never once remember her studying, because I guess she waited 'til we were all asleep- spending time with us instead. We lived in a little house that didn’t have central heat and was heated with a woodburning stove. Mom would get up at 5am in the winter to start the fire and on school days would put our jeans in the dryer and our socks on the fireplace grate so they’d all be warm for us. Looking back, she must have been up half the night studying, when she wasn’t working til 10 or 11 pm as an intern and doing our laundry!
The other thing I remember is similar to what another poster said- we would call her up at work- sometimes all of us- but at least one of us, every day. We’d get into an argument and one would call in tears and the other would call right after- and she would always take the call and talk to us. Her former secretary, who is helping me plan my wedding, even remembers all the teary phone calls with us going “Mm…may I t-talk to Jocelyn please?”
I don’t know how she put up with it.
Yeah, this was a big one for me. My mother stayed home when I was little, and I’ll bet she spent a lot of time reading then, because she certainly did later. I remember seeing her reading when I was a teenager, and she would become totally engrossed. If that was my example, it’s not surprising that I took to reading so readily.
I got the love of reading from both of my parents, too. I was and adult before I realized that not every family reads constantly like mine does (the big hazard in our house was leaving your book somewhere, and someone else picking it up and starting to read it and then you had to scrap over who got to finish reading it then). I think all of my sisters are the same as I am - we all have a book started, at all times.
My father was born in 1928, the youngest child of a gambling itinerant farmer. He grew up dirt poor, and when the family moved to California during the war, he found his first library. Even though he dropped out of high school, he read everything he could get his hands on.
He has children from his first marriage, and my mom once told me that he was never late paying child support, even though he lived out of state and often out of country. So, even though it didn’t benefit me directly, I still feel a great deal of pride in him for this.
One large thing he did that I didn’t know until I was an adult: My younger brother was not planned. There were, apparently, a few tense days after Mom found out she was pregnant and she worried they were not going to be able to make the money which covered raising two kids work for three. Dad sat her down and said there was no question. They would find a way. And then he sold his boat. (I don’t know if I can explain just what a big deal this was. Some time after his childhood but before he met my mom, he discovered sailing. That was the first boat he’d ever owned, just a dinky 18’ or 20’ Catalina, and he taught himself how to sail and how to take care of a boat on the Puget Sound. He sold it without turning a hair, and he didn’t buy another boat for nearly ten years.)
Small things? Only a hundred a day growing up. He went to every school concert for all three of us. He volunteered as a band parent when my older brother started high school and ended up running the concession stand at all the football games for the percentage we got. He let me go sailing with him once or twice a week in the summer, from seventh grade through college.
In dealing with my parents, my mom was the one I took small and medium sized problems to, but my dad was the one I took the big ones to. The big hairy “I really messed up” problems, and he never let me down. Not once. When I had a panic attack at the age of 38, he came upstairs and sat beside me and held my hand, even though he was too embarrassed and uneasy to say anything.
One thing sticks with me, though. When I packed for my first semester of college, I packed all my books up to bring with me. My mom fussed at me. We were making one trip, in a small car, and the boxes took up a lot of room. My dad did something he rarely did: he shut her down. Nope, he said, phouka takes her books. After all, books are friends.
My dad has both Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, and the last time I saw him, he didn’t know who I was. That was something of a relief, because over the past several years, I had become a target for his inchoate rage and fear. Now, he’s pleasant towards me. I miss him so much sometimes, I don’t know what to do with myself. I talk about him in a mixture of past and present tense. My dad was . . . My dad is . . . and I love him more than I can say.
This thread has helped a lot. Thank you.