Growing Into Daddy's Favorite

My mother died when I was eight.  When Daddy came to tell me, I suffered a horror I never expected:  I watched a grown man cry.  It was more heart-breaking and frightening to experience that, in a way, than to know that my mother was gone.  There was something hopeless in watching the silent tears as they coursed down his cheeks.  I stood on my knees, holding his head close to me, assuring him, "Don't worry Daddy, we'll see her in heaven one day.  Don't worry Daddy, she's in heaven and we'll see here there one day."

 He remarried quickly.  When I was older, he explained that my mother's family approached him at the funeral and assured him that if he didn't take good care of the girls, they were more than willing to take them from him.  A bereft widower, having buried his wife only hours before, he couldn't see a reasonable way that a swing shift-working state trooper could provide adequate care for seven and eight-year-old daughters.  He asked the teacher who had provided care for them during the last of his wife's illness to marry him only months later, and they were married less than six months after the death of his wife. 

He married poorly, and I'm honestly  not sure how soon he realized it.  The father who would play mousetrap with us (laying spread eagle on the floor and snatching at our ankles as we ran around him in circles), give us pony rides and play "bull" (Toro!  Toro! -- we would wave Mommy's tea towels in his face as he charged) withdrew, spending increasing time across the road in the barn, or down in the basement in his gun room.  I'd already lost my mother.  I wasn't going to lose the rest of my family, too.

I spent a lot of my late childhood and adolescence pursuing my father.  I learned to reload shells with him, to hunt, track deer, change oil, perform auto tune-ups, and polish a motorcycle until it looked showroom new.  I tried so hard to be what he wanted.  He moved out, just after Christmas my senior year, and left my sister and I behind with our step-mother.  He told us there was nowhere to take us (he spent the first few months living on someone's sofa so he could continue the house payments and keep things going), and in family counseling, months later, told us afterwards that he left us because he couldn't take our step-mother abusing us anymore.  My adolescent holier-than-thou attitude was set afire:  how dare he leave us with her if he acknowledged she mistreated us?

It created a self-destructive spiral that haunted a lot of my adult life.  Somewhere, somehow, that one thing validated a belief that I wasn't worth protecting, taking care of or believing in.  Though I graduated from high school with honors and scholarships, within a year of graduation I was drinking frequently, had been pregnant and had an abortion.  Before I was twenty-two I had been homeless for several months as a result of my self-destructive behaviors, and tried a suicide attempt that landed me in the hospital  for four days on a hyper-perfusion IV with hourly blood gas tests.  I refused to allow them to notify my family at that time, and wouldn't give them any information to be able to contact them.

My adulthood broke my father's heart.  My first marriage was with a wonderful, sweet guy who refused to work for a living.  It lasted less than a year.  The second marriage lasted for a long time.  It was to a violent man who smashed my face and threw me across the room four days after our wedding.  There was a lot of my life I didn't share with my father, but the parts I did frequently made him cry.  I didn't know that at the time.

I didn't see Daddy for several years, until J was born.  Then he began showing up at least once a year for three days at a time.  I complained at the second visit, hurt to have been avoided so long.  My father very rationally replied, "You don't change much anymore, but J changes so much, so fast.   I don't want to miss too much of it." 

In another visit, I pointed out that his third wife was a lot more distant to me than my sister.  He very candidly told me that there were many times during their marriage that my phone calls (which never went into graphic details about the worst of it) left him in tears, and she couldn't help but resent me for all the pain she believed I caused him.  I could tell by the way he shared it that he took responsibility for that pain.  He condemned himself for what he might have done to somehow teach me a better self-worth.

The second to the last good-bye he tried to sneak away and avoid it.  At the time, he didn't even know that cancer would take his life less than a year later.  He did know, though, that the ataxia had gone to a point where he would never ride a motorcycle again after that season, and that the good-byes, when our visits were so rare, were painful for both of us.  He wanted to just skip it, and not have the tears of letting go.  I caught him, though, in the very last part of the act, and we suffered the tears, just the same.

I was the daughter that spent the last Christmas with him.  Christmas was the magic time of year when he became a kid again (I'd guess about a ten-year-old, but I don't think they usually believe in Santa Claus?), and the part of the year he taught me to cherish most.  My sister called him from Houston that year, but hadn't sent him a card or gift.  In my most charitable moments, I credit her behavior to avoidance and denial.  I embraced and clung to every moment I could, she waited until the last moment, and visited him less than a month before his death. 

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to my sister in an email that I had told Dad when I was diagnosed with bipolar, and she was shocked.  She said she never would have told our father such a thing.  I added this revelation to things I've realized recently about my relationship with my father, and was amazed to realize that I was someone he treasured, and in some ways, probably the child he was closest to.  In our last year together, he remarked that I was always the clever one, and that one of his favorite memories was when I was four years old and he showed me his turkey call.  He wouldn't leave it for me to play with unsupervised, and I spent several days experimenting until I made one of my own, and then showed it to him.  He said he wasn't sure if he was more impressed that I tried it, or that I actually made one that worked. 

When my father died, I was devastated.  Not just at his loss, but that I never became what I believed I could be, so I could prove it to him before he was gone.  My first novel was only half-written, and he never heard a single paragraph of it.  I can remember sobbing to his widow that I had failed him. 

In the past few weeks, though, I've realized that I was special to him, and that I never failed him.  As his daughter, I was always a work in progress.  He would be happy now at what I continue to achieve, and to see that the dreams I've held most precious have never died.  There is something new in my heart, though.  In my most secret of treasures, there is a slightly mischievous thought that glistens and glimmers at me, winking at me like Daddy used to when he sat beside me at the family dinner table:

I was Daddy's favorite.