Remembering dad on Father’s Day
Chicago media personality Jeanne Sparrow lost her dad to COVID-19. She’d give anything to hear his take on the unrest sweeping the nation.
One night when I was in my early 20s and on a visit home to see my parents, my father poked the side of my chest with an index finger, the way he often did when he wanted to make a special point to his children.
He was wearing the housepainter’s outfit he worked in — white shirt, white pants, paint-splotched after a day up on the ladder — and he swirled a Rembrandt, which was what his tavern buddies, in honor of his painting trade, had named his preferred libation. A Rembrandt typically consisted of Christian Brothers chablis diluted with seltzer, and he had taken to drinking it nightly, in large quantities, after he gave up hard liquor.
I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about that night — something involving women’s rights — but I do remember the finger poke when he uttered the memorable line: “Mary Theresa, you’re no women’s libber. You just think like a man.”
He meant it as a compliment. He couldn’t bear the idea that I might be one of those nutty libbers he was always hearing about on the news. But he was proud that I earned my own living, spoke my mind and competed with boys as if I were one. The irony of his remark escaped him.
I was the first of my parents’ eight children and my father, George, had assumed I’d be what firstborns were supposed to be, male. In utero, I was even given a name: Little George. Then Little George arrived. Whoops. Too late to reverse course now.
So driving around in the car, Big George routinely quizzed Little
George, age 7, in arithmetic, which in those days was widely considered the domain of boys. In all subjects, Little George was expected to make the best grades in the class and if she didn’t, Big George — who’d never made the best grades in his class — told her she wasn’t living up to her potential.
Little George was supposed to be tough and assertive, but also to master the female duties of cooking and cleaning. Since my mother, to my father’s everlasting frustration, had not mastered those activities, it fell to him to provide proper domestic training to his children, which he did in the style he had learned in the all-male Army.
In other words, my conservative, anti-feminist father raised me to be a boy, or at least to compete like one. Just don’t call it women’s liberation.
Women’s lib, as feminism of that time was known to its detractors, was just one thing on which my father and I disagreed. He was a Republican and a conservative Catholic, and by the time I was out of college I was far from either. Until his dying day, at the age of 60, he held fast to the beliefs inculcated in him as a boy in the small German-Irish town of Carroll, Iowa.
He was raised to believe that in a marriage, men worked and controlled the money while wives took care of the home and the children, which was why he vetoed my mother’s desire to work for pay even when we were flat-out broke. A man was king of his castle, even if the castle was a little, crowded rental house.
In my dad’s view, birth control was a sin. Divorce assured damnation. Laziness was tantamount to crime. I’m sure he also recognized the sin in drinking too much, and verbally abusing his wife and kids, and sometimes hitting them, but he didn’t speak of those. I’m guessing he reserved that discussion, and his shame, for the confessional.
In other words, my father was not, in the words of all those Father’s Day cards, The Best Dad Ever. He loved his family more than life itself, and we loved him back, but he was deeply flawed.
And you know what? I’m grateful for that.
My father’s flaws and failures have helped me to understand how complex people are, that we’re all a tangle of good and bad, and all shaped, though not fully determined, by the place, time and people we come from. My differences and disagreements with my father taught me to pause before assuming the worst of people who see the world differently from me.
I sometimes wonder how different my father would have been if his own father hadn’t drunk so much and died so young, when my dad was only 19. What if he’d been born later, into a world that allowed men as well as women to live outside the straitjackets of stereotype?
I occasionally wonder, too, if my siblings and I would be different if we hadn’t witnessed our father’s unhappiness and how that translated into anger and sometimes cruelty.
I have no answers. What I do know is that more than anything he wanted to be The Best Dad Ever. The fact that he wasn’t that dad hurt him, and by extension us, and still I don’t mind.
He and my mother managed to raise good kids who value kindness, fairness, work and each other. He taught me I was equal to men, in a time when that principle wasn’t universally evident. For that alone I’m grateful.
On this Father’s Day, here’s to the all dads who weren’t The Best Dad Ever, but who in their imperfections gave us things to think about, learn from, be thankful for.