D-Day

Some weird accident of cosmic symmetry has my wife's family near perfectly aligned with my own. Her brother and I have birthdays a day apart. My wife and sister a week a part. My mother and mother-in-law, at the beginning and end of the same month, and our fathers on the very same day. It is known as D-Day. Two gifts send different directions on the same day. Different styles of paternal care, different expressions of love. That day is coming up. Its time to start considering how to gift and thank people who have done so much, even when they may not fully understand what it is they've done.

Understanding is based on experience and context, and I started my life with lots of experience in fatherhood. Everyone had a chance to do it, and after taking a brief turn, they seemed to disappear. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but when men pop up and disappear in your life just when you're trying to figure how to be like them, you have to observe quickly. So D-Day is kind of an unofficial father's day to me... to all the guys who took a turn in line, for better or worse, they've framed my experience of what it is and isn't to be a man.

My genetic donor, whom my mother originally married and divorced was a sore spot for years. He just disappeared. Gave up his rights to me, and I never saw or heard from him again. He's recently reappeared now, but at the time, I felt disposable, useless. It was a burden to care for kids as a single parent, and while I didn't understand that, I did understand that I was a burden. Its not what my mother meant, its just how it came off. She was dealing with a lot: two kids, a new business, and an emerging neurologial disease no one would diagnose for years. I blamed the guy who was missing for the problems that arose in his absence. Angrily, I referred to him as my mistake, my Faux Pa.

The next guy was a rebound marriage who frankly couldn't manage his temper, especially around me. I remember the beatings more than anything else in that part of my life, and for the arbitrary things that caused them. Taking the last piece of bacon, using too much toilet paper, dropping rocks from an overpass... ok so I had that one coming to me. They were a blur of anger, from the lashes many whippings. They seemed to never end. Until finally they did. And I came home from school one day with my mother to see that our home was completely devoid of possessions. Everything was gone. The furniture, the silverware, the TV and stereo... the checkbook. It was all gone. I thought we were robbed. He was just moving on.

And then the sickess set in. My mother got more and more weak, light headed, dizzy. She started seeing doctors who started telling her she had diabetes, hyperglycemia, and a million other things. It turns out she had multiple sclerosis. I remember moving in with my grandparents for a while after she had vertigo for a few weeks. My sister and I were in elementary school and were trying to do things for ourselves. Must have been laughable. We all lived under the stable roof of my grandfather while things sorted out. As horrible as it probably seemed to onlookers, it was a great time in my life. I was surrounded by the people I loved. And my mother was sick, unable to really look around at anything for fear of worsening the spins, but we'd sit and talk, or read stories to her. It was great. Like a really, really long sleep-over. I'd play with legos under the pull-out bed in a fort, with blankets draped over the side while mom was above, listening to my aunt read her The Hobbit. Things were good, for me. Not for her. She continued to worsen. They told me they didn't know what was wrong. People quietly whispered things to each other there like "what will we do with them if she dies?". I was more than a little nervous.

Eventually she stabilized enough to go back to her own home and we lived in a state of care between two worlds. I was angry at all these other dads for not being there and making someone else stand in. How silly... rescue is rescue. Oh well. Eventually mom's physical therapist put her up to a blind date. It was almost quite literally a blind date, as she was in a wheelchair and had only partial vision. Some guy she knew was returned from Vietnam, and having finally finished college on the GI bill, was trying to catch up on a life others got to have while he was stuck in a jungle somewhere. What a catch... crippled blind mother of two... I can only imagine her trepidation. It was a date that changed my life.

They met and fell in love. A thing I cannot possibly imagine. I see my mother, and I love her too, but it was a big, big thing to take on. This group of floundering people. I remember trying so hard to impress him, and still being afraid of him, thinking he might have a bad temper like some of them, or just leave when he felt like it. I did a magic show for him. I was maybe 5. My sister wrote letters to him almost daily, asking him to check a box yes or no if he would like to 'spand the nite'. We wanted so much to be wanted, and knew it was a lot to ask. And oddly, unbelievably, this guy actually wanted all of that. It is a gift for which I can never offer enough thanks. He changed my life. He was there. And has been.

But oddly it got harder to be there for him as I got older. Maybe he just didn't know what the job duties were anymore. Things are oddly strained sometimes. We want an ease for which we cannot find. But my appreciation cannot be lessened. I've already sainted him.

The other D I picked up with my marriage, and what a trip that was. He was a banker and all I knew was how very serious and proper he was. Or that's my impression. When I finally came to the home to meet him and Lisa's family for the first time, I was greeted at the door by her ancient grandmother who, in her excitement, bit me in the chest. Still reeling from an energetic toothing, I was introduced to her parents seconds later as: "This is Scott... he has a tattoo!" I wanted to die. But they've been wonderful family. As a father, he's another layer of support I never imagined. Always there, and whereas my father always knew how to frame a thought (he was an editor for many years), my father in law was born with the innate knowledge of the innerworkings of things. Nothing goes unfixed in my home now when he visits. A fabulous symbiosis, since most things in my home are breaking!

I have much to be thankful for on this day, as much for the people who left the void, as for those that helped fill it. Its a world that my children will never know, except through far-away tales of loss and abandonment, where the good guy gets his girls and lives happily ever after.