IF

Father's Day sucks.  Frankly, every day sucks when you are still missing your dad after 46 years.  I've lived with the loss of him for all these years and I don't sit shiva or wear a black armband, but damn, every so often I just shuffle the "IF" deck.

The "IF" deck:  I borrow the term from one of my favorite writers who is basically forgotten nowadays, Adela Rodgers St. Johns.  Raised by her brilliant criminal defense attorney father, William Rodgers, she became William Randolph Hearst's star girl reporter in a time when they just didn't exist.  If it happened in the period from the turn of the 20th century until her death in 1988, she was there with her notebook at the ready, distinctive voice calling out questions.

But back to the "IF" deck:  she coined the term after her younger brother and her adored son were both killed during World War II.  Don't shuffle the "IF" deck; don't play with coulda, woulda, shoulda, just take it on the chin and try to put one foot in front of the other to keep moving.  Spunky little thing that she was, she kept doggedly marching onward.

Me?  I can't say I've doggedly marched onward; if you were to chart my path through life after my dad's death on a piece of paper, there would be tremendous peaks, periods of total confusion, and long visits to the slough of despair.  I've had many people who know even a sliver of my life story urge me to write a manuscript for publication, but I laughingly tell them nobody'd buy it because it would seem too far-fetched.

I recall my mother standing toe-to-toe with me after Daddy was gone, her grip on reality shattered forever, and her demanding, "Tell me that you think I should have died instead of your father."  I was a kid, an adolescent, trying to comprehend the new realities of life.  I also carried a burden placed on me by well-meaning people who would whisper in my ear that I had to be the rock in the household now; I had to take care of my  mother and be strong for her.

So I would attempt to face my grieving, raging, shattered emotional shell of a mother in one of her states and LIE - "No, mama, we're okay.  I'm glad you're here," when all the time my heart was screaming for my level-headed, emotionally competent father who had basically become her father-figure and alone could control her mood swings.

One day I was so done with her - stick a fork in me, I'm done - that when the perpetual question came up, I told the truth.  My first major gamble with that "IF" deck.  "Yes, mama, I wish Daddy was here instead of you."  She blindsided me with a roundhouse slap to the side of my head, pushing me almost off my feet.  Oops - wrong answer from me!  So I learned to stuff it inside, to keep it in, to go to school and run my mother's errands and if a question came up about the bruises I often carried, I did what a respectable family member did back then - I lied.

I can sit here now almost a half a century later and view that part of my life with the perspective and distance of hindsight.  I used to feel that I had been abandoned.  Daddy died suddenly one day, my sister and I who were never close became even more distant, my mother was an exposed nerve totally enraptured in her own narcissism, as I said, I knew there would be hell to pay if I opened my mouth to an outsider other than my best friend.

But I wasn't abandoned; God opened different doors.  Granted, they may not have been the ones of my choosing, but how He directed me - when I sought Him - or how I ran willy-nilly around them shaped who and what I am today.  If my dad had survived, I would never have made a jailbreak marriage at 18, had a child at 19 and been divorced by 26.  I've learned that good and bad came come from every situation we face.  Without that jailbreak marriage, I wouldn't have an absolutely fabulous 16 year-old granddaughter today.  Neither would I be married to the love of my life for the last 33 years and become a part of his family, including his children and grandchildren from a prior marriage of his own.

That's why, even on Father's Day and Christmas and other days when I long for my dad's presence and wish I had had the opportunity to interact with him more as an adult, I put the "IF" deck away and smell the roses of what I've got.  My grandchildren would be his major project now, and he would be encouraging them to stretch and look hard at things and think it through for themselves as he did for me.  He always said that once the grandchildren were old enough - and he died before there were any - he would just pull into the driveway of whichever daughter's home and honk the horn and yell, "Send out the kid."  But he left my sister and me both with the desire to push and challenge our children and grandchildren.  I love to see it bear fruit, which is what I need to focus on this Father's Day.  

You'd love 'em all, Daddy.  Every member of each new generation that has come after you.  I feel sorry for them that they never got to know you.  I'm very happy I did, even for a few years.  You live on in each of them, and us.  Thanks.