Sunday is father's day.
More significantly, it's the first father's day since my dad passed away in November. So, of course I am thinking of him this week-thinking of the father's days of the past (homemade cards with Dadoo or Me-Pops scrawled across the top, usually accompanied by something chocolate). I remember different father's days-ones where he hugged me in person after receiving his card, ones where he said a few, a few words over the phone when I was in college (it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk on the phone) and years when he could not stop talking even though his post-stroke expressive aphasia language made perfect sense to him, and very little to the rest of us. I remember mixed CDs I made him and that makes me remember record players, classic rock and jamming out to Joan Jett's I Love Rock n' Roll (my favorite song).
But what now? What now becomes of fathers day without a father? Like so many days in the time after his stroke, father's day or a day with my father makes me think about daughters and daughter's day. It makes me think about my mom and it makes me think about a caretaker day. It makes me think about the role of womyn in families. Scenes of family gatherings flash in my head and I see my mother-overcome with grief frantically digging in the fridge to feed the people who had come to her house after she buried her 32 year old son. I see my partner and I trying to get her to sit down-my grandmother also quiet, reserved, devastated but still doing the dishes-I see myself...balancing a plate of food for my dead brother's sons, 4 and 9 years old, in one hand, while holding a plate for my father in the other. I try to open his tray with my foot-uncles and cousins watching-I set his food down and he rattles of a series of disjointed syllables, half words, sounds. I say to him "relax, I'll get your water in a minute" An uncle, a cousin maybe even an aunt giggle "How on earth can you understand him?"
How on earth could I understand him?
How could my mother understand him
I understand him as a daughter understands her father. Especially when she is the only daughter. I understand him even as I am split in half with sadness. I understand him because I am paying attention. I understand that this is my role, this is my destiny, that my mother and I will always be the one to understand him. Because we are womyn. Because that is what is expected of us. Because if we don't, who will? I understand that I can do anything in this world, I can challenge and fight and rage and scream and educate and activate and protest...but I will still be some one's daughter. That whether or not I choose to accept it, it is expected that I will take care, I will pay attention, I will know what to do. It is expected that I know where my mom keeps her important documents, that I know the fastest route to get to the hospital, how to clean out and pack up my brother's belongings, how even though I could not have anticipated it, it would be my mother and I holding my father as his heart stopped beating.
How can I understand him?
How can I reconcile the parts of my father I did not like with the parts that I love?
How can I understand who he was and why he was and what he was to me
How can I understand myself as a radical feminist being so undone by the loss of a brother and a father and realizing that I don't fully understand, don't fully know, the womyn in my family?
i understood my father because I was his daughter. I celebrate that I am able to understand, to care for, to deal, to organize to figure out BECAUSE I am a woman
But I wonder...
when will others understand what this means?
I've had men in my family who have stepped up to help, but i think that this is viewed as a...bonus in their character-something noble out of the ordinary-it's not viewed as an expectation
The expectation that the daughter will help him to the bathroom, that even though he promised to quit smoking and never did, that his wife will take care of him if something happens-the expectation that we will know what to do, we will understand, we will fix it
I miss my dad. I miss my brother. I do not yet know what Sister, what Daughter means now. What does it mean to my younger brother, to my mother?
How was I ever able to understand him? I was able to understand him because I felt like that was my job.
And that is something that I will be kicking around my radical lesbian feminist brain for a long time to come.
3 comments:
Hi, Callie... Good for you, for blogging. I think that, the more one cultivates a CHOSEN family of affinity, the more clear it becomes where the boundaries need to be with family of birth. We love them, because a child's brain produces bonding chemicals that affect the synaptic routing. It's a survival thing. Sometimes a child's affinity to family of birth is just part of abuse. As an adult we have a responsibility to reprogram ourselves so that our thinking works in our best interests. That's from the Sisterhood of the Sacred Synapse!!!
i love this post. i'm also a radical feminist, and i also lost my dad, on december 1st. i took care of him for the last 12 days of his life, in his home (2,000 miles away from my home). there are 2 things making me miss him especially now--the nearness of father's day, and also, this oil spill. i am very sad not to be able to discuss it with him.
Beautiful, Callie. I miss my dad, too. i have different questions about my relationship to him and to my mom and brother, of course, 'cause my story's different...but the same, in a way, on account of being the only daughter, a surviving sibling of an unknown son (who died before I was born, but was always present in our lives). I am A LOT like my dad. So much as I miss him, I can see him in the mirror every day. a gift. He didn't understand me, but I, like you with your father, understood him.
Thank you.
Post a Comment