A Daughter's Wish

This is a column I wrote in June 2007, six months before my father died from a brain tumor. I'm still so grateful that I flew to St. Louis the day after Thanksgiving to be with him, and that I was by his side when he took his final breath. I still miss him so very much.

Along with about 20 other sons and daughters, I spent a chunk of my Sunday afternoon standing in the greeting card aisle at Walgreens in Bloomingdale perusing the selection of Father’s Day offerings.
Like always, I welled up at the sentimental Hallmark Celebration offerings and made a fool of myself laughing out loud at the company’s Shoebox cards.
The guy standing next to me looked as if he was ready to call 911 so I tried explaining to him why I was busting a gut.
I showed him the cartoon on the card. “You see there’s a father and son at the beach looking at this dead seagull and the kid asks the dad what happened to the bird. The father tells him that it died and went to heaven. And the kid looks down at the dead bird and asks his dad, ‘Did God throw him back down?’”
I burst into laughter all over again. The fellow customer just looked at me and walked away, leaving me to marvel at the subjectivity of humor. Obviously the person who wrote the greeting card and that person’s boss thought it was funny or it never would have ended up on the greeting card rack at Walgreens.
Despite the tears and guffaws, I left the store empty-handed. How can some stranger back at Hallmark headquarters in Kansas City possibly summarize my feelings about my dad?
My sister and I were talking on the phone about that very subject -- my dad -- recently. She lives in St. Louis, about a mile from my parents, and gets to see them a lot more than I do. We were discussing the fact that neither of us knew my dad as well as we would have liked to.
My father wasn’t around a whole lot when we were growing up. He was a vice president for an international insurance brokerage firm that required him to constantly travel around the world.
Frankly, my younger brother and I were convinced the whole insurance brokerage thing was a front and that our father was really spy for the CIA. After all, he was former Army Intelligence, serving during the Korean War; his biggest client was McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor based in St. Louis before merging with The Boeing Co. in 1997; and he bore a marked resemblance to Robert Wagner in the ‘60s television series, “It Takes a Thief,” in which Wagner worked for a secret government agency called the SIA.
My dad would return home from overseas trips carrying one of those black leather attaché cases with the combination locks where we were certain top-secret documents were stashed. We never got a chance to peek inside, but we did manage to snoop around in his luggage on occasion, searching for microfilm and dissecting his pens to see if they contained cyanide capsules or miniature weapons a la James Bond.
We never found anything but that’s only because the CIA undoubtedly took precautions against snoopy children of operatives. To this day, my dad has never emphatically stated one way or the other if he was a secret agent.
No, dad wasn’t around as much as other fathers in the neighborhood when we were youngsters. By the time we were old enough to engage in real conversations with him, we weren’t all that interested in hanging around the house getting to know dad better. And since my dad tended to be quiet and contemplative, downright distracted at times, starting a conversation with him was like pulling teeth.
But after my sister and I ended our phone conversation, I began looking back on our relationship through the years. No, we don’t have the kind of bond where I feel comfortable calling him out of the blue to talk about whatever’s on my mind.
However, now that I think back on it, despite all his travels, my dad was on hand for every landmark event in my life, as well as a few he’d probably rather forget but his presence made all the difference in the world to me.
Yes, he abandoned his missions to foil Brezhnev’s KGB agents’ devious plots long enough to attend my figure-skating recitals and high school graduation. I kept my promise to him and declined other dates when I turned 21 so my father could take me out for my first drink. He was front and center at my college graduation and flew to New England on the pretense of a business trip to make sure I was settled in at my first real job.
He picked me up in his arms and ran home cradling me when I was 8 after spotting me wearing one white sneaker and one red sneaker. A sharp rock had pierced the rubber sole of the red sneaker and gone straight through my foot. My blood had soaked the shoe and I was afraid to tell anyone because my mom had just bought the sneakers.
And he was there for the darkest moments of my life.
He held my hand when the doctor assembled our family in a hospital room and solemnly told us that my little brother wouldn’t live through the night.
And he rushed to Columbia, Mo., when the police called to tell him his daughter was at the university medical center, the victim of a campus serial rapist.
No offense to Hallmark or American Greetings, but the sentiments on their cards all seemed so hackneyed and indifferent when compared to what I was feeling, what I wanted to say to this man.
You see, my dad, now in his 70s, has cancer. The man who used to begin his day with a brisk 5-mile walk followed by 18 holes of golf barely has the strength these days to walk from the bedroom to the family room.
The last time I saw him, I couldn’t even give him a hug because the chemotherapy and radiation had weakened his immune system to such a point that he had to wear surgical masks around his own family.
So I walked out of Walgreens without a card and, instead, stopped by my church and offered a Father’s Day Novena for my dad. Then I made a donation to the Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in his honor.
A prayer for my dad and the hope of ending the suffering of future dads: that’s my Father’s Day gift.

When All Else Fails, Try Humor

I'm hardly the first person you'd coming running to for parenting advice.
Before my son was born, I'd never even diapered a baby.
When I found out I was pregnant, I began practicing on my pet Pekingese who was amazingly tolerant when I'd get the sticky tabs of the Pampers stuck to his fur.
After a few dozen attempts, I became pretty proficient at diapering a Pekingese. Too bad my son wasn't born with a tail.
A lot of women are born mothers. I'm not one of them. I felt inadequate more times than not. I kept waiting for someone to accuse me of being an imposter.
A few came close. Like the time I walked out of the grocery store pushing my cart filled with bags only to hear the cashier yell after me, "Hey, lady, you forgot your baby!"
Sure enough, my sleeping infant was snuggled in his carrier, which was attached to the seat of a different shopping cart.
Luckily, Ian was oblivious that time. He caught on when he was a little older, though. There was that horrifying moment my husband and I rushed from our jobs to attend his kindergarten open house. We arrived at the same time, looked at one another and realized neither of us had picked up our son from preschool. I rushed over to get him. He was waiting, hands on his hips.
"You forgot me again, didn't you?" he said, sighing. I made him promise this incident wouldn't send him into therapy when he's 30.
Of course, wise beyond his years, my son relished bolstering my sense of inadequacy. As soon as he learned to talk, way too soon as far as I was concerned, he delighted in causing me public embarrassment.
One day he threw a tantrum in the grocery store because I wouldn't buy him a toy in the toy aisle.
I explained to him that the grocery store toy aisle is simply a marketing ploy designed to torment harried mothers into buying overpriced plastic army men for spoiled children. But the decibel of my son's screams rose to ear-piercing levels, attracting tsks from elderly women who had apparently raised perfect children.
Reaching the limits of my patience, I firmly grabbed his chubby cheeks, ordered him to shape up and dragged him away from the toy aisle.
As we were standing in line waiting to check out, he announced to anyone who'd listen, "My mom is a face-hurter, and a hand-squeezer, too!"
I wasn't really surprised when Ian graduated from preschool with the dubious class title of "Most Irrepressible."
I recalled these events as I drove to the hospital to visit a friend’s newborn baby. And I pondered what advice I might offer the new parents, not that they'd ask for my advice so it'd have to be unsolicited.
First and foremost, I'd tell them to find the humor. Laugh at discovering you've been walking around all day with a glob of baby vomit on your shoulder.
Secondly, watch what you say. Although they may not seem to be listening, kids will regurgitate the most unlikely comments you make at the most embarrassing moments.
I remember cringing at the beach when my friend's 5-year-old daughter ran up to us sobbing. "I was poking a stick at a horseshoe crab and Ian told me I was going to grow up to be a serial killer."
My final suggestion is to have answers prepared when your child starts asking life's big questions, somewhere between ages 2 and 5. Keep in mind that kids don't necessarily want a technical explanation or scientific theories. They just want a simple answer they can wrap their little brains around.
Feel free to borrow my answers:
Why is the sky blue? Because God used a blue crayon.
Why did He use blue? Because He'd already used his yellow crayon for the sun and His green crayon for the grass.
Will there ever be dinosaurs again? (Trust me, they aren't interested in a theory about the Ice Age). Yes, they'll be back on Tuesday (kids this age have no concept of time).
Why do people go to war? Because they don't know how to share with their friends (that way you slip in a moral lesson at the same time).
Why do people wear clothes? (Avoid a lengthy diatribe about Adam and Eve. Kids' attention spans aren't that long.) So they don't get arrested.
Why don't dogs wear clothes? Because they want to get arrested. (OK, I didn't have time to think that one through).
What do grownups do after kids are in bed? We play with your toys.
Where was I before I was in your tummy? You were in God's tummy.
Where was I before I was in God's tummy? You were a prayer. (Spiritual explanations are always good because they can't be disproved. He won't come back when he's 17 and call you a liar.)
Why do grownups work? So they have an excuse to send their kids to school.
Is there life on other planets? Yes. There's some little alien child in the universe right now annoying his mother with endless questions.