Four years ago I knocked my dad off his pedestal. As painful as that sounds, it was actually pretty cathartic. I had just finished 6 months of chemo and was in need of some serious soul searching, so after checking my fear and loathing of baring my aforementioned soul at the door, I headed off to boot camp for the emotionally stunted.
It was a lovely drive up to the retreat and I actually hummed along the way, thinking ‘this isn’t going to be so bad’….a little RnR, some fresh air, some healthy living, trapped in an enclave for a week with 24 other mildly dysfunctional people….it wasn’t too late to turn back.
But I didn’t, and this is where the pedestal comes in. Like 99% of all the women I know, I worshipped the ground my father walked on. He was 20 when he had me, was devastatingly handsome and charming and his rare appearances around the domestic scene left me craving his attention. All the more tricky given that I had 5 siblings with the same agenda. We used to fight over the ‘honour’ to pull off dads Paul Smith equivalent ankle boots because what the heck, attention was attention.
As the second eldest, I used to beg my dad to drive me to school so I could have him to myself for 5 minutes while the ‘little kids’ stayed at home. It also didn’t hurt that he had the hottest car of any dad I’d ever met, and a single appearance at the school would make me instantly popular with the boys and girls in my class. I used to think that the straight A’s I got all through school were due to my hard work and brown-nosing but now I wonder if having a look alike Sean Connery for a dad didn’t have a little to do with it.
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| Born cool |
My dad was smart and strategic (before ‘strategic’ became THE business buzzword), retiring at 38 and moving the family to England so he could do some soul searching of his own. As a successful business woman with my own inherent need to succeed, I am still in awe of this achievement and continue to ask myself where I went wrong that I am only peripherally contemplating selling everything and moving to Mexico.
After retiring at 38, my dad was not one to rest on his laurels. He shifted gears and decided to study theology and become a more contemplative and outwardly compassionate and generous human being. The pedestal was pretty high before, but now it was down right daunting. On top of being successful, funny, handsome and charming, he was now hell bent on being a ‘good person’. How was any guy ever going to compete with that? And therein lies the rub of being a daughter with a father like mine. No guy ever quite measures up.
My first serious boyfriend was 21 to my 16. He was dangerous and distracting in that young Mickey Rourke kind of way, and had me convinced that intimacy and true love meant sex 24/7. After following him to Ft. St. John for a year I realized the dead end I was in and packed my U-Haul to go in search of my self-respect.
My first husband (there was only officially one as the others would go under the category of ‘living in sin’) was a sweet man who worshipped the ground I walked on, something I obviously needed at the tender age of 21. Five years later it became apparent that adoration was not enough to keep the home fires burning and I moved on to #2 (or #3 if you count the cradle robber).
Now here was a guy who had my dad in spades. Wildly handsome, massively charming, fun-loving, successful in business, in love with his two small children even though he only had them every other weekend, and in love with me! Worked pretty well for 17 years until he decided he actually wasn’t in love with me anymore and would I mind if he just packed a suitcase and moved to Texas. There seemed to be a pattern developing here.
Meantime, my parents had amicably agreed to divorce; there were no drama queens or histrionics in THIS family, which apparently is an issue because a healthy expression of anger is a good thing – apparently. My father lost a good chunk of his fortune in an ill-timed business deal, remarried a woman who breathed some life back into him, and came out the other side a wiser, simpler, more emotionally available man. Oh, and he got a dog. And started to phone me on a pretty regular basis to tell me he loved me. This pedestal was now a monument.
So here we are, back at the ‘camp’ and I, along with my 23 other walking wounded, have been handed a large plastic bat with which to bash our symbolic fathers off their pedestals. Earlier in the week we had respectfully honoured our parents and tucked them away in a safe place so we could continue on with our much-needed therapy, so as to bash away guilt-free.
I had woken to this day with a great feeling of dread and wondered how I was ever going to commit this act of treason. But these were smart folks. They knew exactly how to get us to tap into the hidden feelings and tucked away hurts, and I beat down that pedestal (okay it was a pillow) until there was nothing but tears and feathers flying around the room.
What a release! What a sense of personal power! What a strange and peaceful feeling I now had! It wasn’t my dad in that pile of feathers, it was my unattainable, perfect, non-human image of my dad. And in that safe little room I was left with an overwhelming sense of the love my dad had for me and came to understand how perfectly flawed he was.
Fast forward to 2011 and I am now 5 years cancer free – having sent it packing with the bat – in love with a man who is handsome, creative, charming, compassionate, loving and wise, and also perfectly flawed – just like me. My dad and I are more friends now than we are father/daughter, whatever that means. To me, it means he has a huge respect for the decisions I make, even if they don’t always align with his own choices. He asks me for advice which is pretty cool and he gives it only when asked. He phones just to chat, is a great golf partner and continues to inspire me every day with his ability to take life as it comes and enjoy every minute of it.
Oh, and he still looks like Sean Connery which makes me laugh when, with a pretty big twinkle in her eye, the Asian grandmother at his local corner grocery calls him Double Oh Seven. Some things never change.
