Happy FATHER'S Day
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I’m still called ‘‘Bub’’ at 24 years old. He keeps an ear out for when I come barrelling down the driveway on rare trips home to Te Kuiti. The lawns are freshly mowed and he’s already opened the metal gates.
‘‘Here she is,’’ Dad trumpets from the back door.
He’s waiting before I climb out of the car. A hug is squeezed and he kisses my head before rescuing me with a glass of red. It’s always good to see the old fella again.
My father Howard took on the role of sole parent when I was 11 years old.
A breakdown in my relationship with my mum forced me to make a conscious decision at that age that Dad was who I wanted to live with.
He was 56, on a low wage, working fulltime as a labourer. But I couldn’t have felt more comfortable and secure.
He’d put down the shovel and stick a thermometer in my mouth when I was sick. Trips off with the boys were flagged so he could afford to pay for my netball costs. His stiff, skin-torn hands gently held my face when I couldn’t stop crying.
The scent of his damp oilskin jacket still calms me even now.
He successfully navigated through the treacherous territory of raising a teenage daughter and we very quickly valued one another’s trust and respect. For a long time it was just him and me against the world.
I asked him how he felt when he took on the solo-dad role permanently, especially at his age.
‘‘I was pleased you wanted to move home; if anything it was a relief. I had no fears or anything like that.’’
Really? Were you bothered about what you had to sacrifice?
‘‘Making sacrifices never worried me at all. I always thought if it was for the good of you then nothing bothered me at all.’’
His selflessness put me through boarding school in Hamilton where I made life-long friendships. His constant encouragement to do well but, most importantly, to be happy, saw me the first to graduate in both families.
And when I officially moved out of home for my first journalism job in Tauranga, his tired face clenched, holding back tears.
We had become a team and he tried his hardest to deliver everything he never had.
Isuppose it’s considered a rarity to come across a dad as a sole parent. There’s almost always a traumatic experience with the mother that demands fathers take sole parenting. Parent protection, detention, a mother’s mental health, serious relationship breakdowns and the death of a mother can leave the dad as sole standing parent, whether they want to be or not.
In 2013, the 144,400 Kiwi sole parents with dependent children included 22,284 solo dads, according to Statistics NZ.
But obviously Dad couldn’t deliver on lessons a mother usually brings to a household. I didn’t know how to cook or bake anything outside of the minimal until I started flatting.
Often his patience easily wore thin, especially after a hard day of shovelling dirt in the sun, and fed-up tension manifested itself in front of me.
Understandably, financial woes took a strain on Dad more often than not. For me, shopping with the girls was a oneoff luxury, not a necessity. ‘‘There were times I didn’t do a good job,’’ Dad admits.
Like how? ‘‘We lacked in cooking and I felt sorry I couldn’t help make things easier when you started to grow into a woman.’’
But by God did I know how to tune an amp or wire a home sound system. And who needs culinary skills when you know how to paint a house? Driving lessons were done in a 480 BHP Nissan Skyline and he blessed me with a deep appreciation of Pink Floyd’s live album Pulse.
Dad coached me through dark spaces in my mind and showed how inner peace and self-worth can pick you up from the floor.
Now in his late 60s, he’s long been one of my best friends.
I ask Dad if he valued himself differently after being a sole parent.
‘‘Helping a human being grow up to become a good person was a life fulfilment. You don’t think about yourself anymore because you have someone who’s a lot more important than you. Nothing was a sacrifice to me and I’d do it again because that’s what you do for your kids.’’