One of the hardest parts about growing up with a broken family is seeing your parents date. Now even though I was practically still in diapers when my parents divorced, (so I don’t really have any room to talk about remembering them together,) I’ve never seen my mother be devoted to anything but her two daughters and her horses. I barely got to see my mother growing up; not because she didn’t love me or want to spend time with me, but because she worked practically double shifts trying to make ends meet with raising my big sister and me all by herself. There was no time for foolishness because there was always work to be done, and if you complained, you learned very quickly to suck it up and keep going. I’ve never seen her stop and do anything for herself. That was until she came home from work one day with a guy named Rick.
Now you gotta keep in mind that we lived on a farm up on a hill in the middle of the boondocks where your horses could be mistaken for deer if you didn’t have a bright enough colored blanket on them! This Rick guy pulls up in his black Civic wearing a sport coat and loafers lugging a briefcase up the driveway. Little 7-year-old Lauren was terrified. He was friendly with us and was a little nervous about “meeting the family,” but since he won Mom over, why not the kids? It didn’t take too long for him to win me over after learning that he lived off of PB&J’s and watches Shrek and Monsters Inc. just like me. I thought it was going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.
Months later, I started getting involved in band and cheerleading. As the performances were coming around the bend, I kept getting phone call after phone call from by my father saying he couldn’t make it to my performance. It got to the point that I gave up on telling him when things were because I knew in the back of my mind he would never show. I remember my first basketball game that I cheered; I was on the sidelines getting ready to perform for halftime and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tall, silver-haired guy in a sport coat and loafers cheering me on in the crowd of farmers and country folks. It was Rick. The fact that he barely knew me and still showed up to support me meant more than the world. To this day, he has not missed a single concert, musical, recital, or halftime show. That was when I saw Rick as more than just some guy my mom was dating. I saw him as a supporter, a teacher, a coach, a therapist, a comic, a leader, and a dad.
As the years went on, I saw Rick trade in his Civic for a John Deere, his Dockers for a pair of Carhartt’s, and pretty much trade in his city life for green acres. The following Christmas after we all moved in together, my sister and I gave our mom away to one of the greatest men I’ve ever known.
Unfortunately, my biological father missed out on a lot of my childhood and adolescence, for whatever reason, and if I told you that it didn’t faze me, I’d be lying. What I can say though is that it takes any guy to be a father but it takes an extraordinary man to be a dad. I am sure that there are a lot of deserving dads out there in perfect families but I truly believe that the best dads are the ones that don’t have to be. Rick could have decided that dating a single mom was too much for him, but he loves my mom as if they were first loves, and he loves my sister and me as if we were his own. On top of that, I got to see my mom a lot more often, and a lot more happy. If that doesn’t describe what a Dad should be, then I don’t know what will.
