That Kind of Parent
I was on Fire Island a few weeks ago with some classmates from philosophy. The day was one long eat and drink fest, a day of splashing in the ocean and napping on the sand. In the evening, sitting on couches, sipping on wine, a classmate of mine talked a little bit about his nineteen year old daughter. Their difficult relationship, the challenges, the struggle.
He asked me point blank how my father did it.
“Did what?” I asked.
“Did anything,” he replied. “The way you talk about your father…”
There was a short pause as he attempted to articulate his thoughts.
“It’s very obvious how much you love him, by how highly you speak of him. And I just…I can’t imagine my daughter ever saying things like that about me and I just…I want to know…if it’s possible…for me to be that kind of dad…”
My heart broke for him and I don’t think in the moment that I offered any sage advice. I think I said that nineteen is nineteen and when I was nineteen, I wandered into the counseling center at my university in tears, begging for help, needing to talk to someone. And when I was in the thick of that therapy and the therapy I went back into at age 23, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t speaking highly or lovingly of my parents at all, my dad included.
I told my classmate that you do the best you can and eventually, hopefully, your daughter finds the place that I found. That amazingly peaceful place where you understand your parents and the role they played and the anger and the hurts sort of just dissolve. Not because they didn’t exist. Or because they weren’t valid. But because you let them go, because they don’t matter, because you learn how to grow and define yourself without your past.
I told him that it probably doesn’t happen for everyone.
But it happened for me.
And obviously, it helped that my parents, for all their faults, have always been incredibly supportive of me. And have bent over backwards to give me my very beautiful awesome life. It also helped that my dad is a freaking ridiculous person with a freaking ridiculous Brooklyn accent and a heart the size of China. So, there’s that too.
(With hard work, both the accent and the large heart can be acquired.)
There was so much I didn’t say to my classmate. So much I didn’t know how to say. Sure, I bet I can sit down with my dad and write an instruction manual for How To Parent Like A Crazy Polack (With Guaranteed Results!). But so much of my childhood, like everyone’s, was a result of circumstance. I suppose instead, my dad and I should write a book called “The Stuff That Happened and How We Dealt With It”.
I bet that book would never end.
And I bet every chapter would conclude with my dad saying “BUT DAT STILL WASN’T AS BAD AS THE TIME I FELL DOWN AND BROKE MY HIP.”
…
I went home on Sunday to visit my dad and oddly enough, ended up spending most of my time with my mother. My sister was house sitting a beautiful house on the Long Island Sound with the most gorgeous pool in the backyard and she had asked if my mother and I could go over and let the dogs out while she hung with some friends. My mother could spend her whole life swimming and so could I so we headed over to the house and jumped in the pool.
It was just me and my mom for the first time in…I don’t know how long.
We swam and we lay in the sun in our bathing suits. I asked her lots of questions about growing up in the 60’s and 70’s. I loved hearing about riding her bike to the community pool and getting a ride home from swim team. I pictured my mom, long straight hair blowing as she rode her bicycle with her girlfriends, possibly a Jackson 5 album playing over and over in the background, like a movie.
My dad was a wonderful dad because he had my mom as a partner. My mother encouraged and allowed him to be the silly, goofy, brainiac dad that he was if only because she stepped in and did everything he couldn’t. She was more aware of the day to day aspects of our lives, our feelings, our decisions, our schoolwork, our friends. My mom took control and created things my father was not capable of creating on his own. She noticed things he did not notice because as fantastic as he is, he can be a little bit of an absent-minded professor sometimes.
There was an aspect to my childhood that my philosophy classmate’s daughter did not have - a team of loving parents who did things together. So much of what makes my parents work is their ability to balance each other out. They made their family a priority but they put their marriage first. I always respected that bond and knew that ultimately, no matter what, my mom and dad had each other’s backs.
After a few hours, we hauled ourselves out of the pool and back home to ready the house for a barbecue. My mom was having kids from her youth group over for dinner and a meeting and she needed help cleaning up. I did the dishes and the laundry, helped my dad get around, cleaned the bathroom, got chairs up from the basement for the kids to sit on.
When the teens arrived, I settled into the background. I ate dinner and chatted but mostly just watched them interact and laugh with my mom. Burgers and hot dogs in the backyard, a breezy Long Island evening. Tipped my head back against my chair, hair still smelling of chlorine, skin dry from the pool. Summer.
The teens and adults sat in the family room later eating smores and discussing a restructuring of the youth group. I silently rinsed off plates, put leftover food in Tupperware, tried to tiptoe around the house so as not to disturb. I started laughing to myself when I realized how I felt eleven years old again. Growing up, once a week, my father taught my older brother’s religion class and for an hour, the kids would come over and sit in the family room and I had to be quiet.
It was such a specific memory and it came flooding back with such force as I wiped down the counters. I could hear my dad’s voice teaching my brother and his friends (AND WHAT DO YA THINK GAWD WAS TELLIN’ US IN DAT BIBLE VERSE?), could remember carefully writing out a homework assignment and then looking up to stare out the front windows and watch the cars pull into the cul-de-sac in front of our house, one by one, headlights lined up waiting for their kids.
Growing up with my parents.
My life was like that.
A lot of God, a lot of love, laughter as my dad cracked a joke, other people and their children constantly coming over to spend time, spaghetti sauce on the stove, four siblings cleaning up after dinner, loading the dishwasher, smacking each other with the sponge.
I got an e-mail from my dad yesterday.
“Just wanted to thank you for helping your mom clean up for the barbecue. It meant a lot to us.”
And a phone call from my mom today.
“Thank you so much for your help cleaning, Laura. It really was so great to spend that time with you.”
Two people letting me know how much I meant to them. It doesn’t happen every time. Just…most of the time. Thanking me for cleaning up, something I did gladly, without thinking about it. Because that’s how they raised me to be - helpful, supportive, contributing. No need to thank me at all. But they do.
And I just want to know if it’s possible…to be that kind of dad…
It is possible to be that kind of dad.
And it is possible to be that kind of mom.
And sometimes when the stars align in such a way, that kind of dad and that kind of mom happen upon each other and create a family.
And through the job loss and the financial stress and the breaking of hips, there are summer afternoons at the pool and the laughter of teenagers in the freshly painted family room and gooey marshmallow smores for dessert.
I think that’s what it’s about.
No.
I don’t think.
I know.
(c) sprocket87














































