It is Monday, February 8, 2016 – my father’s birthday. He would be 110 years old today. Even though I was a daddy’s girl being the youngest of his eight children, youngest of three daughters, I don’t think about him much except on his birthday. Not because there is nothing to remember, or that I have bad memories. I was 25 when he died, and I had many more years with my mother with whom I had a tumultuous relationship growing up. I was a spoiled teenager, she was an older mom, and, after eight kids, I think she was really tired. Fortunately, I was given more years with her. I had to have children of my own to understand her, and I came to cherish her.

 

But my father. He kind of rolled with my narcissistic ways. He was a master craftsman, an upholsterer. His shop behind our house was my sanctuary, and I was banished to it frequently by my mother who did not like that I was not like my sisters who knew how to do many of the domestic arts. I can still hear her frustrated voice saying, “When your sisters were your age, they were cooking meals!” “When your sisters were your age, they were sewing their own clothes!” I didn’t do well in the art of being a girl. I was six when my mother laughed at my question “when will I turn into a boy?” One of those kid questions that make adults laugh. It didn’t occur to me that I had two older sisters who never did. I came after five brothers and thought somehow one was born a girl and, at some point, became a boy. It was a blow when she said I would always be a girl. I envied my brothers who didn’t seem to be saddled with such expectations of domesticity. I was a complete tomboy. Do we still use that word today? Don’t even know if it is politically correct, but it fits what I was. In an era when girls were required to wear dresses to school, were encouraged not to be too smart lest they scare away boys and forever be doomed to spinsterhood, it was difficult for me to keep up with the finer essence of femininity. Girls had to take Home Ec while boys took Shop. Being banished to my father’s shop where I could create things with wood scraps and upholstery fabric remnants and help clean up tacks on the floor with his magnet was a respite from the demand of a woman’s work in the house. So when I asked the principal if I could take Shop instead of Home Ec, he laughed and told me I had a great sense of humor, and I was right back with Mrs. Haddock (who is a story for another day!). To make matters worse, we girls had to bake cookies and serve them to the boys in shop. Even though I didn’t have the courage to act, don’t think for a minute I didn’t have an idea how to add a little extra something to the cookies. While my brothers came home with handcrafted wood shelves, boxes, and other wonders that required dangerous tools, I got to come home with the satisfaction that I fed the boys in shop.

 

But, I digress. My father. He was a pacifist by religious belief. He didn’t believe in violence. He didn’t even spank me when my mother insisted he “take care of this girl” when I committed one of my infractions of the girl rules. He would take off his belt and whip the heck out of the door frame of the closet where I hid or the blankets under which I took refuge. But never did that belt touch me. Of course, I screamed, and that made my mother think he had taken care of me. When I got into my first physical fight involving Becky and her gang in sixth grade and knocked her to the ground, it was my father’s shop a block away where I ran to safety. I sat on his big cutting table that was high enough to allow me to swing my legs and told him what had happened. He listened with his mouth full of tacks and a steady pounding of his hammer fastening fabric to a wood couch frame. Then, when I finished my tale, he simply said that he had always preferred using words to avoid trouble before using violence. I figured he really didn’t know Becky and her gang and how they made my life miserable, and that was why he thought words would have worked. After that thought, which filled the short silence between his thoughts, he said, “But sometimes if words don’t work, you have to do what you have to do. Did you win?” When I told him how I had sorta won, he just handed me his stick magnet for me to clean up the tacks on the floor.

 

I did learn to use words. Not always wisely, and for sure, not always harmlessly. I learned to be a girl, and I wouldn’t change being a woman for any amount of money. I thought my father was the strongest man in the world. I thought my mother was weak. I thought I would never be able to live without my father, and I would pray at night that if God had to take one of them, take my mother because she could never exist without him and neither could I. Well, I was very wrong about that. I am grateful that I had years to learn to appreciate the incredible strength of my mother. But on this day, my father’s birthday, I am going to let myself be daddy’s girl and remember.

 

Would love to hear about memories from others.