Just listen

I have a complicated history with Father’s Day.

My parents divorced when I was still an infant and my father was generally absent for most of my life.

I’d get the occasional card or phone call, but I only met him twice, the last time when I was 14.

I’m 50 now, and he’s long dead — something I didn’t know about until years after it happened. I’m actually older now than he was when he died.

My mom — the family genealogist — told me about his death some years ago, delivering the news almost secondhand during one of her rambling phone calls.

At first, the news didn’t hit that hard. After all, this man was a stranger to me. Later, I spent some time ruminating on what it actually meant.

I didn’t come to any earth-shattering conclusions. In truth, I still don’t know how I feel about it. What I do know is that, thanks to my mother and her parents, I never felt the lack.

As a single mother with an infant, my mother made the decision to move back in with her parents and my grandfather became the dominant male role model for me. I think he enjoyed it, or at least appreciated the change after raising two girls.

As a result, for most of my life, Father’s Day was really Grandfather’s Day, a day we spent grilling, making things out of wood and watching what many folks would describe as “guy movies.”

His loss, I felt deeply.

This year, as Father’s Day approaches, I find myself reflecting on my own girls — stepdaughters really, but they’re mine and young women now — and the last Father’s Day I got to spend with my oldest girl.

It was 2017 and I hadn’t seen her in over a year, not since the memorial service for her mother, my wife, my love and a good portion of my life.

During her visit, she was a constant reminder of her mother, both in appearance and attitude.

Once my goofy, gorgeous little brat, she was a teenager then and looked more like her mother every day.

They shared the same hair color and eyes (and toes, although her little sister got most of the dexterity that earned my late wife the “Monkey Toes” moniker).

They also shared the same smile, the same laugh, the same satisfaction in creating little works of art on random scraps of paper, along with that evil grin when they think they have the upper hand and a propensity to cackle with glee at my goofy antics, endeavors in which, I must admit, I mostly engaged to hear that joyful sound.

For those reasons, I thought her visit would be painful. And it was, at first. Wonderfully so.

In the months since her mother died so unexpectedly, she made it her mission to remind me of everything her mother liked, disliked, hated, loved, laughed at or ran away from.

It was her way of remembering, perhaps healing.

Hearing her talk about these things on the phone or over the internet is one thing, but having her there in person, seeing her face mirror her mother’s with remembered humor, sadness, anger — that was what the poets call “exquisite pain.”

She stayed for a week before her aunt, my sister-in-law, showed up to claim her for a few days and take her north to St. Louis to see her cousins, grandmother and great-grandmother.

That little break gave me time to think, to remember, to realize that, as much as it pained me, she needed to tell these stories. And, in the end, I needed to be there to listen.

After all, that’s what my wife taught me. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how badly you want to fix what’s broken, no matter what the problem is, sometimes all you can do is listen.

So I did. I listened to each and every little story. I relived the time a raccoon took up residence in my wife’s car, chasing fireflies at a summer barbecue with family friends, trips to the grocery store that sparked arguments over ice cream flavors.

I also relived the darker times, times I remembered perhaps a little differently, viewed as they were through the eyes of an adult rather than those of a child.

I hate to see my loved ones in pain — whether emotional or physical — and I want to do what I can to make things better, but now I have that little voice in my head that says, “Just listen.”

So I listened. To every story my daughter wanted to tell. To every remembered detail, large, small, painful, funny, or sweet.

After a time, I started sharing my own memories, things she left out or didn’t notice at the time, taking joy in every laugh, every smile, every embarrassed cry of “Daddy!” Sweet sounds that I hadn’t heard in so long.

Eventually, it was time to leave and go back to her biological father’s house.

“My summer is ending,” she said. “I don’t want it to.”

Me neither, kid. Me neither.

Happy Father’s Day.

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Robert Cox is associate editor for Carroll County Newspapers. His email is RCox@cherryroad.com.