Let me start out by saying that I did indeed have a dad. He was tall, strong enough to throw a softball over the shop when we played serious games with all three homemade bases drawn into the gravel, sweet enough to melt and be wrapped around my finger, proud enough to share his childhood stories with us at bedtime, and I, I’m often told I’m a spitting image of him. It’s hapless that our time together was cut short and that that man, in all of his dad wonder, passed away in 2007, just shy of my 12th birthday. And as a result, my sister and I went from weekdays and every other weekend to a full 24/7 with our mom, our official single parent.
That transition was trying for all of us, each of us wrestling with a different kind of loss and learning how to move on and support each other in new ways. For me, it was a series of multiple emotions then coupled with no emotions at all. I remember being grief stricken and inconsolable but also angry and full of questions. Why did he have to go? Why did my sister and I and our half brothers have to grow up without a dad? Why did we have to miss out on those memories, those opportunities, those holidays, those moments? I look back on myself, to that questioning younger me, the more selfish me, and it’s with time and reason that I can now answer all of those questions, at least to some degree. Holidays, more specifically Father’s Day, weren’t necessarily celebrated but they weren’t neglected, either. For my sister and I it meant a lot of reflection, long drives on gravel roads back to his house, nostalgia, old family photos, and a few expressive posts on social media now and then. For my mom, it meant that both of her shoulders were open extra hours to be cried on, her open ears heard few things aside from talk of our doting dad, and her open heart poured out extra love to help us feel less alone, although I imagine she also experienced many difficult, helpless moments herself just by doing everything she could to support us.
Father’s Day still belonged to him in those years between then and now and to some extent it always will. But, along the way, the more she put into us, the more it became her day, and even a bit of my stepdad's day, too; and as I grew and graduated high school and went off to college, I began asking new questions. How did my mom do it all? How did she pay the rent and put food on the table and always say yes to every activity ever that my sister and I asked to participate in? How did she function when she went to bed late after doing laundry and woke up early to make us toast and drive us to school when we inevitably missed the bus? When did she learn to fix the toys, the vacuum, and my heart, when they broke? When did she learn to be two parents? I’m still a little stuck on most of those questions, so mom if you’re reading this, how about you tell me how you learned to save our little world over dinner when I get home.
Until then, here’s to you. Thank you for being my mom, my friend, my chef, my delivery woman, my cheerleader, my everything. Happy Father’s Day to you and to single moms everywhere.
