I don’t know how to relate to my father. Funny that when prompted with “what do you want people to know?” I answer in deficit. This concavity feels fitting to my subject, who I suppose is my mother in a roundabout way, also myself and the concept of daughterhood.
It is not that I have to start with my father in order to tell the narrative linearly, it is that I don’t know where he fits and so I mention him here, bulkily, so as to admit preemptively that in fact I do have a father. I just don’t know how to tell my story of daughterhood with him in it, so he comes before, in order that perhaps his absence might become a presence more naturally throughout.
He is alive but not well. He lives with my mother, they live together. This is what I was told of him growing up; or, here is a list of things I know about my father. Forgive me for floating between past and present tense. Our relationship lives somewhere liminally and I have not discovered the perfect language yet with which to capture it.
He is from the Bronx.
He has a half sibling, was married or engaged once before my mother.
He used to be a camp counselor.
He likes the Yankees, used to play basketball after work a lot wearing wrap around glasses. Was he once careful of breaking things then? Aware of his own fragility? He is fragile now, an amputee who walks teetering, sometimes unable to walk at all, always with an ailment or another but unwilling or unable (is there a difference) to change these things. He was once so able–my mother always said he was the breadwinner, he worked so we could have the life we did. He wasn’t in the house much, he was traveling, he was being a salesman, he was shmoozing, chatting, socializing. Now he is lonely even in company.
He has Collitis. A refrain I heard a lot, still faintly rings: Daddy goes to the bathroom too much. Daddy’s nervous. He’ll be a couple of minutes.
We are lost to each other, my father and I. Are we lost to each other, or just he to me? Can I make that decision on someone else’s behalf?
His favorite color is red, his middle name is Jay. When he was younger he had a pet bird that flew into hot apple sauce and died on their kitchen table.
He taught me to like the Beatles. He taught me to cook steaks and eat the whole thing, gnawing the bone.
We are stuck in time, as in: the ways I relate to him are through memory and myth. We are not current. I want to know why. Who has agency in this? Who had agency in this–like is the damage done, can I go back and re-understand myself in relation to him if I never knew him to begin with, if I don’t want to and can’t know him now? There is something I am needing in my exploration of daughterhood as an identity uncoupled from parents that can only come from trying to understand how I got untethered, from understanding who my parents were and are.
Do you know the idea that in writing, or maybe anything, you must understand a rule before you break it? I am trying to understand my father, my mother, myself in daughterhood traditionally before I can deconstruct this term. I am writing towards defining a new identity for myself, maybe for other daughters living in an in between as well.
I applaud the way you sort-of “bullet” the 3 toplines you know about your father – somewhat impersonal things that anyone who knows him, or perhaps has only heard about him know too – and then follow it up with the things only people close to him would know, followed further still with the particular experiences you yourself only know and feel and the questions and doubts that result. I grew up with father who was a non-presence, I only met him 3 times in person (at 5, 11, and 19 years of age) but it’s only after reading your preface that I’m beginning to wonder how and why it is that I’ve even never mentioned my father at all in 30 years of a life as a writer and storyteller.
I applaud the way you sort-of “bullet” the 3 toplines you know about your father – somewhat impersonal things that anyone who knows him, or perhaps has only heard about him know too – and then follow it up with the things only people close to him would know, followed further still with the particular experiences you yourself only know and feel and the questions and doubts that result. I grew up with father who was a non-presence, I only met him 3 times in person (at 5, 11, and 19 years of age) but it’s only after reading your preface that I’m beginning to wonder how and why it is that I’ve even never mentioned my father at all in 30 years of a life as a writer and storyteller.
I love the concept of redefining or maybe just plainly defining daughterhood. Your preface makes me consider whose responsibility it is to be a good daughter. Is it expectations not met by the daughter or the expectations in the first place? And what are the expectations of parents. This is great way to contextualize what is about to come.
I really enjoyed reading this preface in its serious but thoughtful tone.
I think Julian raises some interesting questions about daughterhood in relationship to responsibility of the parents. In a lot of memoirs I read, it seems like mothers get more flack while dads get a kind of pass, regardless of how present or absent they may have been. Even though it seems like your story focuses more on the relationship between you and your mother, I think this preface adds dimension to the idea of daughterhood as a concept.