Daddy Dearest.

When a single mom goes out on a date with somebody new
It always winds up feeling more like a job interview
My momma used to wonder if she'd ever meet someone
Who wouldn't find out about me and then turn around and run 

– “He Didn’t Have to Be”

“Daddy would like this song.”

Looking at her in the backseat, surrounded by fluffy friends and related accoutrements necessary for a night of mommy-and-me time, I wonder if she understands the lyrics she is listening to. The woman inside me knows that she does, and I am caught between wishing she didn’t and welcoming the wisdom that is beyond her years.

In the nearly four years that I have navigated the murky waters that widowhood ignominiously landed me in, I have learned much about the annual calendar. I have learned that milestones, holidays and nondescript days all carry equal weight on the scale of pain.

In the first year each day seared, some white hot and others blue flame. Each milestone and holiday a test of endurance and resolve. But the days in between, when the air felt like a moment in time past or familiar musculature crossed my line of sight in passing, were as painful for their anger and loneliness as the unwelcomeness of the holidays that shone a spotlight on our void. As time passed, the pain dulled and each holiday simply became unwelcome. But the Hallmark-ed weeks of anticipation ensure that the ones most jarring are prolonged. And for an entire week I have been subjected to questions, conversations, dreams and dreads of paternal importance.

What he looked like. Was it burritos or nachos? The sound of his voice. His favorite color. The games he played. Did he like football or hockey best? Where we met and where we got married. Did he ever get mad, or was he always laughing?

When will we have a new Daddy?

Listening to the words of the song, she does not know that years ago we listened to the same lyrics. And in a moment of thoughtfulness, we wondered how hard it would be to enter a family that you did not start. To embrace children not yours as your own. For children to embrace a father that was not theirs as their own. And in that moment we promised that if it ever came to pass, we would honor the other by accepting no less than someone who would love us as if we had always been theirs.

And it came to pass, and Father’s Day became as much a day of remembering as it has become a day of wondering. It is equal part tears and dreams, a day of wishing for what was and what could be.

“Mom, I made a wish in the fountain but it can’t come true. So I wish you can find us another Daddy that is the perfect one for us instead.”

“Any chance you saw a frog near that fountain?”

Faded Pictures.

I just miss Daddy so much. I don’t remember being with him. I don’t remember him at all!

My childhood memories are fractured and incomplete like the faded images of a broken film reel. I remember that we lived off a rural road, a beautiful white house with black shutters standing gracefully in the midst of acres of undulating grass. I remember the gravel pathways meandering between flowerbeds rioting in color and the buttery sunshine in my bedroom, the lifeless eyes of the stuffed game in my father’s den and the jar of orphaned buttons in my mother’s craft room. Toadstools in the wet morning grass, a child’s proof that this beautiful, fragile, earthy world stretched beyond what we saw to be real.

In this magical playground my father and I would look for fairy wings, left behind after they danced on the toadstools in the moonlight. In my memories I hear his voice and he is the towering safe haven that every child sees in the man that protects them, nurtures them and guides them. As the years passed we left that magical place behind and I came to know and understand the man that was larger than life as who he had always been. My father.

I often wonder what my children will remember of theirs. Not from the stories told through the years until they are as real as if they happened yesterday. Not the face painstakingly memorized from pictures. Not from the mementos of his life saved in dusty boxes. Not from the traces he left behind in handwritten notes and scattered recordings. 

I wonder what their film reels will hold.  

Will they remember the deep timbre of his laugh and the smile that teased the corner of his lips and erupted in a passion for life that made his death that much more senseless? Will they remember his strength and his love? Will they remember racing to the door when he returned from a long bike ride? Will she remember the messy, lopsided ponytails and Sunday morning snuggles? Will he remember racing around the couch with a football and washable tattoos? Will they remember the tickle of his chin on their necks? Will they remember that last Father’s Day? Will they remember the father he was and that he will always be?

Or will they remember a stone in the grass and balloons in the air?

Squatter's Rights.

It’s June.

We’re dusting off our bikinis and wishing we had spent just a few more minutes in the gym over the past six months. The start of monsoon season brings impressive rainstorms, along with visible proof that anyone living in a sunshine state should never consider relocating to a place where clouds might actually form even if that’s where you came from in the first place. Halfway through the year, temporary Halloween stores will start popping up any day now followed shortly by Christmas trees and ornament displays. Summer vacation’s “glow” is starting to wear and parents and offspring are not-so-secretly counting the days until school is back in session. And after sitting patiently through Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Grandparents Day and Administrative Assistant’s Day, it’s finally time for men to collect their due.

I hereby stake my claim to Father’s Day.

I realize that is a little presumptuous of me considering that my best attributes include breasts, not biceps. And, yes, I recognize that both can co-exist beautifully in the same body. My point is this – if my husband was here we would celebrate his fatherhood. But he is not here. I am.

I’m lacing up hockey skates, learning about protective cups and why they need to be placed just so. I am fitting football helmets and taping sticks. I am changing bike tires and buying car tires. I am studying up on when boys need deodorant and vanquishing scorpions. I am guiding my son through his first crush, taking our beloved and long-suffering dog for one last visit to the vet, and injecting a little estrogen into school’s Donuts with Dad day. I am replacing projection bulbs in the gigantic TV that he wanted in order to watch the games that I am now sitting through with our son, and testing outlets that have suddenly stopped offering electrical current.

It’s not that women can’t and don’t do all of these things. It’s that I am doing everything that he would be doing if he was still here. I am mom and dad.

So, while the rest of you men will be celebrating fatherhood with bad ties, expensive luncheons, handmade cards and free time to take out the garbage before Monday’s trash pickup, I’ll be celebrating the way any woman who does it all should.

Admiring the gunmetal gray of my freshly painted toes.