A Father Who Always Knew, Somehow, Just What to Say and Do

So there it is: the childhood photograph that recorded the memory I’ve been carrying around in my head all these years.

It is my third birthday, and I’m all gussied up in a bright yellow swirly dress with black patent leather shoes and a huge white hair ribbon. I’m struggling to hold a box with a dozen red roses--it’s almost as big as I am.

There’s my smiling face brimming over the large golden box. My mother is leaning over me and gently whispering, “such a lucky girl to have such a wonderful daddy.” The flowers were from my “sugariest daddy,” as I named him.

I knew what she was saying was true. I was--and am--lucky in this respect.

Writing about a parent is never easy. Our parents lie at the heart of our innermost feelings and are part of our most important inner debates. For daughters, writing about fathers, this difficulty seems to be acute.

This is risk.

There are memories shared among women--and many kinds of fathers appear: attentive, charming, loyal, gentle, shadowy, absent, tough, violent, or a quixotic mixture. Though mine is a close relationship, other women hold bittersweet or unresolved ties; others angry, painful encounters. Hatred exists as often as does love. We long to understand our fathers as much as we long to be understood.

Women have a complex desire to be free and to be loved, protected, safe. In myself, I have long been aware of a conflict between my hunger for independence and for male approval and protection.

It has been my experience that daughters who felt less love for their fathers--and some who particularly disliked them--are more independent of men than I am. They can detach themselves more easily from damaging relationships and have less need to see men as protectors.

Love, warmth, cuddles, kisses, guidance--my dad knew the sort of things a father is meant to do, but how? He had no father, nor any real role models, just a soft Mediterranean gentleness with children. And lots of love.

He was not a distant father. He cared. His attention came to us in flood waves. He owned his own business--a demanding job. But we came first. He returned home from the office each night with candies in his pockets. He bathed his babies, kicked footballs, skipped hopscotch. Above all he taught us kindness as we bolted toward him from nightmares, when we skinned our knees and made messes of our lives. He was honest and sincere.

In return for his loyalty and hard work and involvement, he wanted ours. His unspoken standards weren’t just high, they felt mountainous. My father wanted brains and accomplishments and beauty and charm and good manners and independence and imagination and originality and conventionalism and clear thinking and obedience and virtue and success and self-discipline, self-control, generosity, kindness.

Perfection.

I--and all my brothers--bought this model. I believed if I tried harder, I could manage it; such was the charm he held for me as a child, and to some extent still does.

I now understand why he was intent on our “shining” for him: the poverty and humiliation of his childhood was passed to him from his parents, fresh from the Armenian massacres of the early 20th Century. His own childhood was barren and poor, so he made us feel every finger-painting we did was a Picasso, every dance step Pavlova’s. His pride and love were to save us from the voids of his own childhood. We were more than willing to take the bows before him.

“Soft management” would be the business terminology for the way my father ran our lives. He was not an overpowering head of the house. One of the things he understood was how much children love the ordinary life adults have access to, and from which kids are barred. Marriage, cocktails, cars are as exotic as dragons to children. So he took us to R-rated movies, let us watch any television show, listen to any record, read any book. There were no restrictions.

At 12, I went to a girlfriend’s house after school. I was told that she was not allowed to play the record “Hair.” It was not even allowed in her house. This was 1969. “Well, then, you can come hear it at my house.” No, she said. That was not possible either.

My splendid father, the man who taught me so much, also taught me character. That to be respected--and have self-respect--is more important than dressing in glitter. You stare life straight in the face and be a person you’d like to love and live a life you’d like to live.

“Traditional” femininity was presented but not pushed. My father taught me to be independent.

I do not think my father ever asked awkward questions about the world, or anything much; he was of the generation before introspection and therapy were considered crusades. He sees our relationship as self-evident: Of course, fathers and daughters adore each other. Are pals. We might spar and box a bit, but which pop-and-daughter team hasn’t?

We’ve had our ups and downs, the gentleman and I. Some minor, some epic. They pretty much boil down to stubbornness--both his and mine. For we almost have the same way of looking at the world. The world I see is kinder, but then I had a loving father, and he didn’t.