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"Who do you love more? Mommy or Daddy?"
"Mommy and Daddy!" I always answered.
In 1994, my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, a fact that impresses me all the more when I consider today's divorce statistics. As I read about the effects of divorce on a family, I hate to even contemplate how much poorer my life would be today were it not for the presence of my father.
Where the mother cares for the child indoors, and loves and accepts the child unconditionally, the father introduces the child to the world outside the home, and raises the bar by challenging the child to do and be more. Between them, the parents motivate the child to always try for better, yet still feel valued during the inevitable slumps.
As a little girl, I admired men in general because "they are braver and do hard things," and I had a special place in my heart for my father. When I went to the hospital for a week at age 6 to have my tonsils out, it was my father I missed, and as I heard the story of the Titanic for the first time, what broke my heart more than anything else was the thought of all those daddies left behind on the sinking ship.
My father was orphaned at age five; growing up in an orphanage left him with scanty memories of what family life is supposed to be, yet he could still impress on me what kind and considerate treatment felt like. Today I would never settle for anything less from a boyfriend.
Much of what I know comes from books and from people who read plenty of them. In contrast, my father didn't finish high school, and all I ever saw him read was newspapers and westerns.
My friends, many themselves mothers today, are discovering just how much childish mischief and unspoken thoughts had been known to their own mothers all along. "How did she know that?" they are marveling.
One ordinary walk my father took me on, just us two, after supper one Sunday when I was very young is one that I remember to this day. After climbing a hill behind our house, I was thrilled to see our neighbourhood from an entirely new angle. From that day to this, I have never again seen the sky so blue. Suddenly my father said he had just seen a mouse moving through the grass, and to me it sounded like he had just seen a fairy. Though they were everywhere, mice never just came out and let anyone see them.
Our family albums hold many photos of the birthday parties thrown for me each July. Shortly after I turned seven, I was sharing the spotlight with a new baby sister. At my next birthday party, I suddenly noticed neither my father nor my sister were there; he had taken her out for the afternoon so that I wouldn't feel too upstaged too soon. Given his background, how did he know that I needed to be eased into this? (Even if it was my mother's idea originally, he could have simply shrugged off her concerns and told her not to worry. But he didn't.)
Never a particularly physical child, I had trouble learning to ride the bike he bought me. Coaching me, he walked along holding onto the bike, up and down the driveway, saying, "Keep pedaling, keep pedaling." I was convinced that the second he let go of the seat I would fall over. When his encouragement finally grew silent, I looked around until I spotted him, halfway across the yard, not holding on to me, but still holding me up just the same. How did he know that I could ride a bike before I knew it myself?
When I entered my teens, the 70s wave of feminism was just beginning. After reading up on it, I put my longsuffering father through what every succeeding generation has had to endure from its children. I rattled off theories of feminism as fast as I read them, to his endless amusement. I believed that just this once, I finally knew something that he didn't, that men had had it easy all along, and just as I had when my sister arrived, now refused to share the spotlight.
I was delighted when Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the tennis match "Battle of the Sexes" back in 1973, but my father insisted that there was more to it than met the eye. It didn't ease my frustrated bewilderment that he couldn't quite put his finger on it. What else, I demanded, is there to it? If we both read the same newspapers and watched the same newscasts, where was he getting this additional information?
After Bobby Riggs died in 1995, I finally got the other side of the story. For the first time I read that he wasn't a grotesque woman hater, he just enjoyed pushing people's hot buttons. In fact, he was later glad that the big match had brought women's tennis more public attention.
My father is one of those people who believe almost nothing, and if you say everything's phony, you will sooner or later catch some genuine (so to speak) phonies. But that doesn't stop the little girl in me from wondering, "How did he know that?"
Today I can only talk to my father by long distance, as I have moved to another province. And I am now taking a long hard second look at feminism, talking it over with people who share my language of abstractions and theories. After reading up on the men's movement and talking with those involved in it, I finally see that nothing was ever as simple as I once thought.
The sole provider for his family, my father worked long hours for bosses who sometimes knew less about the job than he did, after which he walked home uphill day after day because our part of town didn't yet have bus service. Though my father's generation considered child care solely women's work, when my mother was sick, he would put in an additional evening of housework. Whenever I needed it, he would help me with my math homework, often as the television showed something that he had wanted to watch. A carpenter by trade, he had built our house on weekends over a span of two years, having at that point in his working life only Christmas Day and Good Friday for holidays.
My father dismissed the 70s feminists as soon as words like "privileged" and "oppressed" came out of their mouths. After all this time, I can finally understand how he figured out this one.
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