That’s my father’s birth date.
I have six siblings. Well, three surviving siblings, as all three of my brothers have left this earth. We have all had mixed feelings about our father. At times there has been nothing but hate. At other times, there has been pity. And a long, long time ago, there was love. I’ve read what one of my sisters has posted about him on social media and it isn’t at all good. She hates him. She has always hated him and has always been afraid of him. She’s younger than I am by three years. I mention her age because I think that she missed out on the best of my dad. Her memory does not go that far back. She chooses to remember only the bad. That paints only one side of him.
I have had a lot of negative feelings about him through the years. I’ve even posted some of them here on this blog in the “early years” of posting. But I have had a lot of time to think and remember and I hope I have grown more mature than I was in those “early years”. Or perhaps I’ve just made a conscious choice to remember more than the negative when it comes to my father.
What do I want to remember? I want to keep in my mind that he was fatherless all his life. He had no male role model. He left home to support his mother when he was only twelve years old, just a boy really. He married my mother when he was eighteen. He became a father when he was barely twenty and by the time he turned twenty-nine, he was a father seven times over. That’s a lot of perspective to keep in mind.
I’m old enough to remember home movies. My dad always, at least as long as I can remember, had a movie camera to take home movies of us. Black and white at first and very poor quality then later, the movies are in color and in much better quality. Some of the last ones even have sound. What’s on those movies? My family, including the part of my dad that I want to remember; the part I am thinking about today. I remember the movies and his laughing face as he played with us. I remember the smiles as he pushed my older sister and I on the swings in the playground at the San Francisco Zoo. I remember images on the screen and in my mind of walking hand in hand with him, him taking tiny and slow steps so as not to trip me up. I think I must have been about a year and a half. I remember the images of him lighting the candles on our birthday cakes each year and then quickly moving out of the way so the birthday girl or boy could blow them out.
I wish there were home movies of him dancing with me as I stood on top of his shoes and held on to his arms as he danced. That’s how I learned to dance when I was very young, probably only seven or eight. I wish there were pictures or movies of me sitting on his lap as he read the newspaper to me or as I sat with him to learn the capitals of different countries. It was a favorite thing to do with him–sit and talk and have him teach me riddles that made no sense in English but did in Spanish. I remember him teaching me a couple of still very difficult tongue twisters in Spanish. I remember going with him to watch wrestling matches at the civic auditorium because my brothers no longer wanted to go so he took my older sister and me.
Those are some of the things I choose to remember today, as he sits alone with no family on his 85th birthday. Now that’s a different story to tell, how he ended up without any of his family, but that’s not a story for today. Today is for the happier times. Today is for my father in the days I used to call him “deddy”.
Happy birthday, Deddy.
I hope I am here to read the rest of this post. You paint such a picture Corina, I feel like I am in the scene with you. Hugs my friend ox
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Thank you, Kim. There are some other “portraits” of my father which show some of the difficult times. Try this one: https://corinajoyc.wordpress.com/2007/11/06/seventeen/
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What an honest and beautiful choice you made today. You should be proud.
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Thank you, Tessa. I’ve grown out of the bitterness and the pain and have managed to let go of a lot of the past. It’s only hurting me to hang on to it and so I’ve let it go.
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Family dynamics can be such a mess, can’t they? It’s interesting how as we age we have the capacity to gain a more compassionate perspective when it comes to the people who parented us.
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Robing, I think we have to get past all of the bad or it eats away at us. Although I’ve learned how not to parent from the negative experiences, I’ve also learned a lot of positive things from some of the memories so I am trying to let go of the negative and hang on to the positive!
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[…] can read some of the posts about my dad here: Tall Tales What I Want To Remember About My Dad And a post I wrote the last time we thought he was about to leave us in […]
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I would like to hear the whole story, Corina. Feeling for you at the time of your loss.
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