This Good Man - Happy Father's Day
Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy
Even after all these years, Father's Day is hard for me on social media platforms. All these homages to great dads. I did not have the most attentive father. That's about the kindest thing I can say about the man who abandoned and erased me from his life. I have an essay I wrote about that years ago, which I often post this time of year.
But today, I wanted to be more positive. My father's been gone for nearly three decades and so many good things have happened in my life in those ensuing years. So here is a different essay about fathers - this one about the man I chose to be the father of my children.
Maybe that's a little self congratulatory -- but sharing my appreciation for Nate Pincus feels a whole lot more satisfying than lamenting the shortcomings of Bill Rosenzweig. I wrote this on the eve of my daughter's wedding.
Let me know what you think!
On the eve of my daughter’s wedding, an image comes to my mind. It’s a self portrait of sorts, a negative, a bride in reverse. Instead of white, she is wearing black. The dress is strapless and beaded, with a sweetheart neck, a corseted waist and layers of crinoline flowing to the floor. She’s a doyenne, with red lips and kohl lined eyes, her black hair rolled and folded tightly into place with pearls. She is la mere, la madre, ema, and she stands before her daughter in this mirror of time and sees who once was herself.
My daughter is getting married in less than ten days. Even after writing these words, they still feel like fiction, or a fairy tale. Several friends of mine have been warning me to prepare myself for what I will feel at this wedding.
“Be prepared,” one friend warned, moving in close to me as if revealing a deep dark secret. “You’re going to be jealous of your daughter at her wedding.”
“I will?” I asked genuinely surprised.
“All mothers are,” she said conspiratorially. “It’s so hard for us. Here we are growing old, losing our looks, and there’s our daughter. Looking so young, so beautiful with her whole life in front of her, the man of her dreams, there waiting for her, like the handsome prince.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “But I don’t feel that way about Ali at all.”
Still that conversation stayed with me, as other women told me similar things about the way the felt at their daughters’ weddings. I thought too about the hidden meaning of so many fairy tales. Could it be that I too harbored a deep resentment of my daughter’s youth and beauty like the wicked step mothers in those fairy tales? Bruno Bettleheim had written that those “step mothers” were really surrogates for the actual mother and that the stories themselves were teaching young women how to deal with the natural jealously felt by their mothers towards them.
I spent the past several weeks interrogating myself, looking for my own blind spots, searching for the jealously and coming up blank. Perhaps I was in denial, I thought, remembering those twinges of envy I’d felt when Ali and I would go clothes shopping and she could fit into a perfect size 0 or when her skin was flawless and her hair flowed perfectly over her creamy white shoulders.
But that was about it, I thought. We’d weathered the terrible years of teenage tantrums that accompany the power struggle and we’d actually become friends – fierce admirers of the other’s accomplishments, and a deep appreciation for the other’s kind and empathetic qualities and strong ethical stance. She had long ago stopped protesting when someone said, “You’re just like your mother.” In fact, now, she sometimes even demurs and says, “Thank you.”
So I was really taken aback when my husband sent me that email last week – the one that contained the link to the song he was going to use for the Daddy-Daughter dance at the wedding. Within seconds of opening the link and listening to the song, I found myself weeping.
My father was not at my wedding. We had already become estranged, an estrangement that was to last until the end of his life. I was walked down the aisle, sandwiched between my mother and her second husband, a prideful and volatile man who didn’t like me very much, but insisted on making his presence felt at my wedding. My mother, always one to “keep the peace” did not protest.
And as I listened to this song, sung by a man on his daughter’s wedding day, telling her beautiful she is, how he’s always loved her, how even though he prepared for this day, he still can’t believe that it’s finally come, that his little girl is no someone’s wife and how he’ll love her forever – I found inside of me the jealousy I hadn’t known was there.
At my daughter’s wedding next week, the doyenne in the black dress will be there, the matron in the mirror of time, the mother or the bride this time.
On that night, I will stand on the sidelines and watch my daughter dance with my husband.
And instead of feeling jealousy, I will experience a secret sense of pride and triumphant joy, because I will know that I gave her something I never had.
I picked THIS good man to be her daddy
.