It has been a kind of funny time of late - much time spent in the company of my own gorgeous teenagers, chasing each other around the table tennis table and dodging a well timed thwack of the table tennis bat paddled in the direction of your rear end!
We often mourn those that we have lost and those feelings of loss are so strong in the early days and over time, the loss doesn't go away but the way we respond to it changes. Maybe because we let our minds wander to those that we have lost, we open the door again to the memories of life with them.
A good friend of mine recently lost his father, so I guess it was kind of inevitable my thoughts would turn to my own father. Interestingly there have been conversations with another friend about an upcoming event in her life which again directed my thoughts back to my father.
My mum reckons I remind her of him at times with my mannerisms. My brother on the other hand is the living image of my father, right down to the way in which he answers the telephone!
Dad grew up in fairly tough times with his father having to work on the railways to make a living, leaving his mother largely to raise the family on her own during those times his father was away. As the oldest son, I think in many ways he took on much of the responsibility for his mother and his younger siblings.
I'm sure it was his upbringing that made him the way he was, he was a pretty forthright guy...one of the things I remember most as an adult was him saying "If you want to hear me say what you want to hear, then don't ask me, because if you ask me what I think I am going to tell you what I think whether you like it or not!" Well like he said, we were warned! Many a time family members asked him his opinion, with no concept that what would come out was the honest truth as he saw it, no softly softly, no bullshit, just his thoughts laid out there on the table.
He did his stint in national service as a young man, and well all that routine and rigidity of life must have sure suited him because it sure became a way of life in our household. It wasn't a dull, scary, nasty place, quite the opposite but there was a routine and heaven help he who didn't follow the routine.
Of course as the youngest and the only daughter, I was always Daddy's Princess and he sooo loved having a daughter as father's often do. Sadly for him, his wasn't the prissy feminine thing seen sitting delicately on the seat in a sea of pink tulle and lace...nope his daughter was the jeans and T-shirt girl, tearing around the yard like a mad thing, trying to keep up with my older brother and his friends...none of that girlie stuff for this girl - what a bore!
As was the case for many fathers of his generation he was a master of the school of tough love. Not that we were really smacked that often that I can remember, although I do remember one or two summers as an up myself tween that I shot my mouth off, only to reel from the sting of a well timed thwack with the rubber thong deftly whipped off his foot and aimed across the back of my leg. Still I can honestly say I never had to wonder what it was I was being punished for, each time I wore one, I had been being a total smart mouthed pain in the arse and the pain finished up being mine just for a shortwhile til the sting went : - )
He had some classic sayings that to this day I chuckle when I think about them. Like when as kids we would hang off him with this constant whinging tirade of "Oh I wish we could have a ......." which we would then just repeat over and over again in an instinctive child knowledge of Japanese water torture (although we didn't know that is what it was at the time). He would put up with the whinging and whining for as long as he could and then smile sweetly at us and respond with "Wellll why don't you try wishing in one hand and spitting in the other and see which gets full first" LOL can you believe he used to say that to us kids?
Or the more stereotypic parental sayings like "If B wanted to jump off a cliff, would you want to do that too?" and perhaps most frightening of that little gem is the moment I first heard it come from my own mouth in discussion with my own children...arrrggghhhhh I'm turning into my own parents!!!!!
I don't actually recall this one happening but knowing what a total bitch I was as a tween, I have no doubt about its truth. One Saturday morning having collected me from gymnastics, Dad wanted to stop off at the shop to pick up a few things and get us some tasties for lunch from the bakery. Well of course I didn't go into the shops with him, are you kidding??? How embarrassing being seen in the company of your olds at the shop! Nope, not I!!! Having returned to the car to deposit the shopping, he enquired sweetly through my passenger side window as to what I might like (for lunch). It would appear that at some point in the morning he had managed to rearrange his pants and socks in such a way as to have his trouser leg tucked into his sock! So in response to his loving question about the possible cullinary delights I might like, the poor bugger got a mouthful....allegedly that went something like this "What I'd like is for you to take your pants of our your sock and stop looking like a dickhead!" What a complete and utter bitch, but you know as a tween there is nothing more sacred than not appearing like a total tool in front of your peers and well, what if someone had seen him dressed like that and recognised him as my father? Lordy, lordy I'd have to have hibernated for months to avoid the embarrassment of that one! I have no idea how I managed to escape his wrath for that little outburst, perhaps he too remembered those teen angst years and cut me some slack...as I now do for son number 2 when I speed up if I see anyone he knows in the distance so by the time they walk by us, I am several metres in front and number 2 son is clearly not "out with the olds".
Mind you my Dad wasn't always serious, far from it! He had a prized gi-normous wooden spoon hanging on the wall that said "World's Greatest Stirrer" given him to by work colleagues because he was most assuredly a shit stirrer with a very cutting, very witty sense of humour - see you can see that my father and I are nothing alike really...not!!
I remember my Dad giving son number 1 a big box wrapped up as a gift for his birthday. Beloved son had asked for a soccer ball and so expected to find that when he unwrapped his gift - you can imagine his surprise when he opened the box and it contained a roll of toilet paper! Of course my Dad thought he was just hilarious. So that became the standing gift between son and grandfather for several years, a version of the wrapped up roll of toilet paper given for birthdays or Christmas!
Sadly for my kids along with some of his parenting sayings I too have a decidedly immature sense of humour - yep there have been times when they have asked me one time too many what is for tea and I can't help myself but the words "pooh on toast" roll off my tongue with consumate ease!
I'm not sure why it is but karate and my Dad seemed to have been an intertwining story in my life. I signed up my oldest son and myself for karate mid week when one of those door to door folk appeared offering a package if 2 people signed up together. I spoke to my father a day or so later and told him I was planning on doing karate with my oldest - what could he say really? All those years of raising a tomboy, I'm not sure anything surprised him. Whilst he had been ill for sometime and we knew his time was limited, the suddeness of his death took us all by surprise, it was the early hours of a Wednesday morning. It was the Sunday of that week that son and mother were to partake of their first karate lesson. In an attempt to both keep a sense of normality to their lives and to not disappoint my son, off we went to that karate lesson. What a complete godsend that was! All the angst, turmoil and sadness left me for the duration of my time in the dojo. There was so much to learn, so much to absorb, all my energy and focus were directed at what was going on in front of me. I thought I was doing a pretty good job, til the clown in front said "now we will move forwards and backwards doing that"...hahaha pretty funny joke eh? Only he wasn't joking! I wonder whether it was that beautiful sense of calm, of invigoration of my spirit that I experienced that day, that has melded me to the practice of karate from that day forth.
Many years later, my brown belt grading was approaching, the biggie, the biggest one apart from the black belt shodan grading, so everyone said. I was the picture of calm and tranquility at that grading (most unusual for the nerve bucket I usually am pre-grading). However for this grading I was completely calm because I believed no matter what happened I was going to grade that day. Why? Because it was meant to be. The date of my brown belt grading fell on my father's birthdate.
This week precedes another big grading, in many ways the biggest yet. Where the shodan was the undergrad, the nidan becomes the post grad. The journey as much about me and what I have learnt and how I use what I know to help out others, as it is about learning specific moves or stances. And yet I still I find myself thinking of him and writing a blog to honour him - again the alignment is there in my life, that link that continues.
Memories are so good to have of those we love and when it comes to lost parents, I think we don't really appreciate them or who they really are until we become adults in the first instance and then more tellingly as parents ourselves in the second instance. We sure forgive our parents a multitude of "sins" when we take to the daunting task of parenting ourselves. We discover only too soon that kids don't come with instruction manuals and you just have to make the best decision you can at the time, sometimes it is the right one, sometimes it is the wrong one....but the decision was always made with love and with the best intentions!
