Parenting Flaws: Looking Beyond the Flaws to Find the Hidden Gems

“You’ll find that if you really try to be a parent, your child will meet you halfway.”

-Roger Brault

Right around Father’s Day, I heard an announcer, a new father, give a couple of examples of how his own father still helps him.

“When my car check engine light is red,” the announcer said, “I can call my dad and he’ll come check it out. Or if I have stuff to take to the dump, my dad will let me borrow his truck.”

The announcer then asked listeners what our very own dad means to us as Father’s Day approaches.

And I must confess that when it comes to my dad, being available to help me with mundane tasks is not the first thing that comes to mind. For starters, we don’t even live in the same province. Plus, he’s now in a nursing home and can’t remember what he had for lunch, no matter what a red check engine light might indicate.

But even in the best of times, those kinds of everyday chores aren’t what I’d associate with my dad anyway. My dad didn’t teach me how to fish or drive or mow the lawn. My mom and brother did all of that. I was six years old when my dad moved out and my parents divorced soon after. I usually only saw him once a week for dinner.

Although the divorce was bitter, to put it mildly, my mom felt it was important that she keep us kids in the same town as our dad. My dad had just moved to Calgary from Ontario when they decided to split up. But instead of moving the kids back to Ontario, where her entire support system was, my mom made the decision to stay in Calgary as a single mom, just so we could be close to our dad.

In hindsight, I’m very glad he did.

Because one of the most important things my dad taught me was his love of words. Literature was where his heart was. He was constantly correcting my grammar and challenging me to increase my vocabulary. If you wanted to understand what the hell he was talking about, you needed a dictionary nearby to look up the words he was using.

My fondest childhood memory of my dad is that he would tell me variations of my favorite bedtime story, The Huge Egg by Oliver Butterworth, over and over again. It is about a boy who one day finds a huge egg in one of the hens’ nests. He watches him grow and grow until he becomes a dinosaur and then chaos breaks out.

My dad would tell me a made-up shortened version of the story and then at the end he would always have the baby dinosaur walk to the edge of the cliff and look down. So my dad would look at me and say, “And you know what he said, Maryanne?”

“Yes!” I would cry “He said: ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary!'”.

My dad would smile and nod and then sing the song to me:

It’s a long way to Tipperary

it’s a long way to go

It’s a long way to Tipperary

To the sweetest girl I know

bye piccadilly

Farewell to Leicester Square

It’s a long, long way to Tipperary

but my heart is there

These days, I find myself telling my friends’ kids made-up Scooby-Doo stories. Every time I see them, the 6-year-old asks to hear a new Scooby-Doo story. Everyone else groans, but for some reason, she just can’t get enough of them.

My dad also shared with me his passion for physics and poetry. My mom took me to see plays; my dad encouraged me to take a drama course. It turns out that since writing plays is the most technically challenging form of writing for me, it’s where I’ve learned and grown the most, as a writer and as a person.

And my dad taught me to think critically; how to question what they told me. Unlike my mom, who had great faith in a higher power and took me to church every Sunday, my dad is an atheist and taught me to doubt everything, and that when it comes to organized religion, I have to pay a lot more . more attention to people’s actions than to what they say their beliefs are.

I had to find my own spiritual path, of course, and it’s perhaps not surprising that the path I’m walking is more or less right in the middle: with blind faith on one side and healthy skepticism on the other.

Thanks to aging parents, I see the role faith can play as people age. My mom wasn’t afraid to die. She knew that if it was her time to leave her, she would be in good hands. My dad, on the other hand, is really struggling because without alcohol to ease the pain of losing both his memory and comprehension skills, and with no faith in a higher power or the afterlife, his old age is shaping up to be a of sadness. and frustration

Although tragic, one of the best gifts my dad inadvertently gave me was showing me the impact of alcoholism. Through his choices, he taught me that if you choose a substance to face life, that substance will become your life.

Or, put another way, when your check engine light is red and you choose to ignore the warning signs and simply drive faster, or deal with any crisis through whatever coping mechanism suits you, at some point, your engine it will stop Your heart will stop working properly… and therefore you and your life and the lives of those around you. As difficult as it is to write this, my father ended up doing me a tremendous service by showing me how not to deal with pain, loss, and hurt.

If I didn’t have the dad I had, I don’t think I’d be a writer. Because just as I have my Mother’s fierce and compassionate heart, I also have my Father’s inquisitive mind and passion for the written word. Although my parents’ marriage was not meant to last, the attributes and love they gave us children live on in everything we do.

Fatherhood in its most conventional and practical form came late to my dad. A few years after he and my mom divorced, he remarried and they had a son, my half brother. But when that boy was only 10 years old, his mother died of lung cancer. So my dad, 60 at the time, was left alone as a dad to raise him. And he raised him well, he did, because my little half brother is my dad’s primary caretaker now and he’s responsible for all the decisions on his behalf.

Whatever your relationship is, or has been, with your father or the fatherly role models in your life, I hope that you, too, will have a chance to reflect a little… on the good and the not so good. well, because there are often hidden gems in both.