Daughters Love..Cont 4

The truth is that you don’t need to know my life story. It boils down to a few things and I was trying to make it harder than it needed to be. Dad was an alcoholic. I can’t remember him really holding down a job. I didn’t see him that much once him and mom split up until I moved in with him. He didn’t pay child support and if I wanted to see him or talk to him I had to track him down at a bar. Mom was an alcoholic. She worked to support us. We seemed to move around constantly. I seemed to spend a lot of time playing mom while she was either at work or out drinking.

The day came when I was a teenager that mom decided it was a grand idea to move up to the top of some mountain in east bofu. I decided I didn’t want to do that and I moved in with dad. This caused a huge strain on my relationship with mom that has never healed to this day. Dad was still an alcoholic but my step mom wasn’t. So, I had the drunk dad I knew and a step mom who was the responsible one. She was already taking care of dad. She didn’t have to let me move in, but she did, for that I’m always grateful. I got to know dad again. My friends got to know dad. Anyone new that came around got the standard warning of, “Just ignore him, he’s drunk.” If you said it casually enough it wasn’t a big deal. Dad could be an asshole while drinking or he could be great fun to be around. You could never be sure which way the wind would blow. One day you’d have the guy that would come dancing into your bedroom to wake you up singing, “Sometimes you feel like a nut.. Sometimes you don’t..” Other days he was the fuckenest fuckin curse machine to come live. Some days you’d wake up to the smell of the best fried potatoes ever made. Other days the stale smell of beer. Some days he’d forget what you told him the day before. Other days you couldn’t count on that when you really, really wanted him to forget.

As these things happen I grew up and moved out. Dad got sober. I got pregnant. Dad managed to not go back to drinking when I told him. Over time I got to know the new Dad. The sober Dad. He was an entirely different person. He still had the sarcasm and was funny but it wasn’t the same. There wasn’t that bit of meanness there that used to be when he would make a biting remark while he drank. We grew closer together and that pushed me and my mom further apart. I talked to Dad every day. I’d tell him dirty jokes and since his memory sucked he’d often call me and ask me what the punchline was again so he could retell it to his buddies. He tried to teach me how to play golf but gave up after a bucket and repeated attempts to teach me to not hit it like “a goddamn baseball!” and to “stop swinging the club like it’s a damn bat!”. We would go on long motorcycle rides in the warmer months. I think it was good for both of us because we got to bond like we would have bonded if he hadn’t spent the first twenty years of my life drunk.

That’s not to say that it was all perfect. We fought. Only we fought right out in the open and no holds barred. Where I might be passive aggressive or just let things pile up until I couldn’t take it anymore with someone else. Dad and I just got it all out when it happened and then moved on. There is one particular moment I remember, I had just did this ten mile walk for some charity and was sore as hell. I was laying down in bed waiting for my advil to kick in when my husband walked in and handed me the phone, “It’s your dad and he’s pissed.” Seems like the garage door was up when he got home and he thought my husband had left it up when he went over there. How dare I be so goddamn irresponsible with his belongs. He should just take the fuckin key back to his house right now! He hung up on me. I stewed for a moment and asked the hubby if he had indeed left the garage door open when he went over. He replied he hadn’t. He had went in through the front door and back out the same way. So, I stewed in my pain a moment more and hauled myself out of bed and drove the block, yes block, down to his house. I stomp/hobbled in and declared, “He didn’t leave your fuckin garage door up. You want your goddamn key you can have the fuckin thing!” gave him the key back and left. It must have been about a week or so later I was on my way to work and was driving past his house and saw the garage door up. No cars in the garage and no cars in sight. Well, wasn’t this an interesting turn of events. So, being me I called him and got the voicemail and said, “Just thought you’d like to know, your goddamn garage door is up and we didn’t do it.” Turns out one of the sensors was going bad or something like that. So it’d come almost all the way down and then roll back up. We never apologized to each other, I got my key back, we moved on. Some will wonder why he didn’t apologize to me and why I didn’t apologize to him. Truth is, it was over. He got pissed and jumped to the wrong conclusion and took it out on me. I got pissed at him and put it right back on him. Nothing that could be said would change anything that happened and since we were equally as shitty to each other we just moved on.

Now, that is the same man that when I was in labor with my first sat by my bedside for the entire time. He was in the room as much as he could be, except to eat and go get some rest. When my two labor coaches decided to take a smoke break together he was the one sitting next to me holding my hand. He was the one brushing the hair out of my face while I chanted, “I think I want my epidural now, I really think I want my epidural now.” during my contractions. He was also the one, as he lovingly tucked a strand of hair behind my ear that said, “See, I told you sex was bad for you.”

This is the same man that spoiled his grandchildren rotten when he didn’t think anyone was looking. I was all gung ho when I had my first. I wasn’t going to curse. I was going to not say, “No.” I would find other way to tell them not to do something. So, I was shocked when my oldest started walking around saying, “Damn.” He would drop a toy and say damn. He would eat his food and say damn. I gave my hubby sixteen kinds of hell for teaching him how to say damn. So, there I was, visiting with dad and I went to get a drink. I came back into the living room to find the oldest babbling in a way that only toddlers can do. Dad looked down at him and said, “I can’t understand a damn word you are saying.” He laughed, the oldest laughed, I had found the culprit.

This is the man that when I got him a puppy he acted all upset about it. When that same dog got away because his run wasn’t hooked up right dad called it every name in the book. I spent hours trolling around the neighborhood and handing out his phone number in case someone found the dog. That same man cried when someone brought his dog back.