Dad; a story of sock puppet props, Rupert Bear trousers and 83 years of compassion.

If I tell people that as a child I once hid in a wardrobe from my shouting father, they might understandably believe that he was a brute of fictional horror quality and be ready to reach out a hand of sympathy to me.  However they would be mistaken, very much mistaken.  Throughout my childhood my dad was the continental quilt on a cold winter’s day; he was familiarity of candy floss on the tongue at a travelling funfair; he was the favourite Enid Blyton book, helping me to disappear into a fantasy world.

My dad worked hard, very hard and very long hours, as did my mum.  Household chores were divided among the family often with unspoken inner resistance from my sister and me but we would always rush to complete them in the half hour before mum arrived home from work.  During the winter months, dad left in the dark and arrived home in the dark and was always the last one to return.

Bedtimes and weekends were his time with us.  As I lay cemented between my favourite cuddly toys, tucked in within an inch of my life, dad would select the bedtime story and prepare himself for his nightly performance.  He would ready his sock props which would be rolled up and arranged to take on the character role that they’d been allocated that evening.  Most parents know that the rule is to calm your children down at bedtime; dad would have us gasping for oxygen with laughter and the end of each story would culminate with all the sock characters being thrown at us.  We still slept, however, any worries of the day buried under a mountain of giggles.

As a woman in my late 40s, regularly absorbing the stories of others, it’s only recently that I’ve become aware and acknowledged how lucky I was to have the solid, caring father that I did.  I therefore have a pang of guilt recalling the intermittent disdain that I demonstrated to him during my teenage turmoil; the time he dared to have a flat tyre near to school and was wearing trousers that would have looked at home on Rupert Bear; his regular attempts to engage in conversation with me during those silent, sulky, angry years when my hormones were screaming at him to shut up; the habitual killer looks I shot across the room if he said something vaguely embarrassing.  Dad definitely didn’t deserve to be the bull’s-eye target to my hormone soaked arrow but he took each shot with warmth and dignity.

I have gained an unrelenting, childish excitement of the cinematic experience because of dad; I can play a mean hand of cribbage because his love of card games was infectious; I will obsessively lay out the side and corner pieces on a jigsaw before I excitedly start to reduce the gaping hole without realising that the experience is incredibly mindful and therapeutic because of the times that dad and I would silently attempt to match the pieces to the picture on the box.  The gift that I am most grateful for however was the role modelling of empathy that he unknowingly shared with me.  Dad’s emotion is contained in his eyes and though he tries to disguise it, I noticed on many occasions when he was silently gulping as a result of something he was watching, he had read or had heard.

Dad has never felt the need to cling to any masculine stereotype; he was just him, in his own skin, the partner in life to my mum, the father to my sister and I and now the granddad to my daughter.  She is now the one who rushes to play card games with him, to be mischievous with him, to compete with him for Alexa’s attention.

Back to that day, back to that wardrobe; the timid child who was hiding briefly amongst the clothes did so because she mistook her dad’s shout for anger when it was a brief yelp of impatience after a stressful day at work, accompanied by a grade B swearword.  I had rushed to assist dad on a rainy, windy, soulless day with the mountain of paperwork he was carrying from the car to complete that night and I had managed to tip the whole box upside down onto the rain soaked ground.  He shouted, I ran, I hid.   I ran from an unfamiliar anger.   Had I remained I would have seen my dad rapidly gather the papers, retrieving his good humour amongst them.

Dad isn’t without his faults, he lacks patience at times, he inadvertently introduced me to swearing at a young age, he passed the clumsy gene down to me, but he’s human and he’s also my wonderful dad who, through his own actions, taught me how to navigate this world with great compassion.

So to my dad, who celebrated his 83rd birthday in December 2019, this is your belated birthday blog to say thank you for being you.