Tell me about your Dad (or Dad-adjacent guy)

[greenbutton]

For those of us who have lost our fathers, this weekend is sometimes hard. But rather than just post in the (excellent) bereavement thread, I wanted to invite everyone to tell us in a paragraph or so, about their Dad. Or the Dad-person in your life, whether they are still here or not. And if you never knew that relationship, I see you, too.

My dad was tall and skinny his whole life. He was ahead of the curve in recycling, in exercise, in “white bread isn’t really food”. He adored my mother, who he met on a schoolbus when they were 14. He wrote to his brother, who was an 18 yr old soldier in Vietnam, every day until he returned safely. He was literally the smartest man in almost every room. He loved all kinds of music, but couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket or play an instrument although all his children and grandchildren did. He was frugal but not cheap. There was no mechanical object on the planet he could not fix; he was an engineer’s engineer and his staff loved him, respected him, wanted to be him. He was funny. He loved rose bushes. Raising us was scary for him, I think, but oh the grandchildren made him so so happy. He loved all his children but somehow I was his biggest delight – the last, surprise!, and a GIRL! He thought me capable and smart and amazing. He died a scary, disoriented, unfair death just three years ago next month and I still miss him every single day.

[HImom]

My dad was a wonderful man as well. We lost him at 95, as COVID started. He was very loyal to his family & friends and loved golfing. He would make a fabulous Sunday dinner weekly or at least monthly to gather all of us and our kids so that the grandkids could play together.

He made many important decisions in his time on the bench, including water rights, the right of people renting their land from large corporations to buy their land, and others. He worked very hard on the bench—ruling on tons of motions and settling untold #s of cases. It took many judges to replace all the work he did.

[kelsmom]

My dad had a difficult life. His father was lazy, often unemployed, and abusive. Dad traveled across town by bus to go to the best high school in the city, and he was the first in his family to graduate high school - but no one attended his graduation. His life was one of missed opportunities and regrets. He always felt that he should have been more. He was a good husband and father, although he sometimes struggled because he had not grown up around good role models. He loved my mom, loved us kids, was a good friend, and always took care of everyone to the extent possible. He outlived my mom by a year & a half, and he missed her so much. He had kidney cancer at 81 (diagnosed right after my mom died), and while he chose not to get chemo, he lived a good year & a half on his own terms - his high tolerance for pain allowed him to be tired but relatively pain free until he passed away in his sleep at my brother’s house ten days after he attended my niece’s wedding. We all miss him, but we know that he’s with our mom, so we are at peace.

[momofboiler1]

My dad had a tough start. Born at the beginning of WWII in Europe. His father was killed in a train explosion when he was still an infant. He was sent to live with farmers to stay safe from the bombings in his city. When he was 8 his mother remarried a man who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic and he moved the family to the US when my father was a young teen. My dad joined the USAF when he turned 18, served as a translator and dog handler. Then went on to have a long career running food services with a major airline. He loved us kids, loved to play cards, was the life of a party, and was a great cook. He adored his grandchildren and was so very proud of them. There was a lot of difficult stuff too but he’s been gone now for 6 years and I try really hard to focus on the positives. I miss him a lot.

[seal16]

My dad was a talented inventor who held many patents and continued inventing until the last year of his life. He left us far too soon.

He never got to see his granddaughter grow into the beautiful, intelligent young woman she is today, and I know he would have been incredibly proud to see her graduate from MIT.

He was a pillar of our family. Everyone turned to him for advice, and he was unwaveringly loyal to those he loved. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to regret not spending more time with him. I was busy living my own life, and somehow I took for granted that he would always be there.

One memory stays with me: after I dropped him off at his house, he would stand and watch until I drove away. Even when he was very ill, his concern was never for himself. He always wanted to make sure I was safe and happy.

I miss him every day.

[thumper1]

My dad lived in Germany before WW2. His family left there in 1938, but spent the entirety of the war in an internment camp in Shanghai. He came to the U.S. as a stateless person with nothing but a sponsorship for a job. He is a wonderful example of how you can start with nothing and build a wonderful life. He died 10 years ago, and our family misses him so much. He was quite the character.

[Leigh22]

My dad is one of my favorite people in the world. He had a very tough childhood as 1 of 9 kids who lived in poverty in Philadelphia. His father died when he was 7, his mother when he was early twenties. He battled alcoholism and dabbled in drugs for years ( got sober at 36). He didn’t graduate high school. He was a tough guy. He was married to my mom at age 19 when she became pregnant. The odds were stacked against him, but he persevered. He had every menial job you can imagine and some you definitely can’t! But he is a wonderful father. It’s something he has always excelled at. When I was diagnosed with the cancer he was the one I needed to see and hug. My parents lived in Florida when I was diagnosed - he was moved back to my area within 5 months. I spend as much time with him as possible. Football season he’s here for every Eagles game, staying the night if it’s a late game.

My oldest son has always been very quiet, but with my dad he is so open - he still lights up when he is here.

He wasn’t perfect, but he did the best he could and it was always more than enough IMO. All of his siblings have passed and I see it saddens him. My brother hasn’t spoken to him in almost a decade and it diminishes him. But the world is a better place for me because he’s in it. I make sure he knows it​

[abasket]

My dad was 15 years older than my mom and died at age 76 - I was just thinking yesterday how he died when I was 37 - the age of my oldest now.

Dad didn’t have the easiest life. He was quite the athlete - known to be a boxer, bowler who held records in his town for decades and a darn good football player. He was suppose to go to college on a football scholarship (the only way he was going to be able to afford to go) but when he was 17 his father died and he took on the role of provider for his mom and two younger sisters. He never had an educated career - he did construction and was a driver for a beverage (beer!) delivery company that his friend owned. When I was about 5 he left our family for a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to go to Vietnam for about 18 months to help rebuild after the war. My foreign mom left home in a country she didn’t know well to take care of 3 small children!

Dad loved to garden (positive!) and had a temper (negative!) He was never physical but swearing was common when he was mad! He was strict with us as kids but also loving. He loved summer, his garden, the water (he also was in the Navy for some time) and family. He adored my mom and adopted her big family as his own.

He struggled physically as he got older - war wounds of a very physical life. But he could also be sort of a gentle giant - a big man who led and provided a good life with what he had.

[Hoggirl]

This is not the thread for me…

[JustaMom]

Why I call him ‘Dad’

His official title is “Father-in-law” but I call him ‘Dad’. The second or third time I met him, I knew I would forever call him Dad.

It was two or three weeks after I’d met and started dating my love (early 1997), I went down to Irvine from my place (Redondo Beach) to spend the weekend at their house. I desperately needed tires, so Friday night, while sitting at the dining room table, I casually asked my love, “do you have FedCo down here?” FedCo was a discount membership store (somewhat like Costco) and always had the best prices for everything. He assured me they did, and My Love’s Father asked what I was looking for. We chatted a little about tires, and he asked me if I knew what size mine were. I didn’t. It was a simple conversation.

On Saturday morning I woke up and saw the front door to the house was open. I was going to close it when I saw My Love’s Father walking across the street in his blue terrycloth robe. I didn’t close the door and instead went to the bathroom, and back to bed.

A little while later I got up and made my way to the kitchen for coffee, My Love’s Father was sitting at the table with the newspaper spread out all around him. He had a slip of paper with writing on it, and had circled all sorts of pictures and ads from the newspaper. When I sat down he told me he’d gone and looked at my tires and wrote down their size, and had circled all the best deals for tires in the area, including FedCo, which it turned out, had the best prices.

I never had a father, so my images of what one would be like were pretty distorted, like Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy, Ward Cleaver, from Leave it to Beaver, and Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch. These were heroes in my mind. Fathers who played with their kids, helped with homework, or took an active role in helping solve dilemmas, and most important, they lived at the same place their kids did! Suffice it to say that My Love’s Father, doing what might be considered a “thoughtful” act, was to me, the very definition of what a Dad would be and do for their kid. Immediately I knew I would call this man ‘Dad’ and consider him a fine role model of a father. He’s gone now, but this memory is indelible.

Pic taken 2 months after the event above - 29 years ago

[anotheroboemom]

@Hoggirl

This is not the thread for me…

Same here. But it helps me remember how grateful I am to have met and married a man not like my father. Or like my FIL for that matter.

Thank you DH!

[busdriver11]

So many people here with fathers who had difficult lives, but managed to persevere anyways.

My dad was brought up in poverty, like so many others. But he had such a need for knowledge, all of his life until he got dementia. He would go to sleep studying a math book just so when he woke up, he could embrace the feeling that he’d learned something.

Eccentric, a socialist, so many mental issues we can’t even figure out what disorders he had, but extremely loving and caring of his family. An obsessive hiker who put his kids in dangerous situations (watching the movie Captain Fantastic traumatized me and my sister, because that was Dad). But he really was right, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, was his mantra. We grew up knowing that we could do anything, if we had to.

Though he and my mother were Boeing engineers, we lived as if we were in poverty, because, “Life is about the struggle”. Looking back, I see the unnecessary insanity of our lives, but it’s how we grew up, so we didn’t know any different.

I miss you, Dad. Your crazy made life interesting, there is nobody in the world like you, and you really did make us stronger.

[oldmom4896]

My dad was born to a crime family–his father was a loan shark and there were bookies, crooked union officers, etc. He met my mom, a Hitler refugee, at a dance hall in Manhattan where she was with her family. It was a very good match.

He went to Aviation High School (Queens, NYC) and got a job with Pan American as a mechanic when he graduated. He worked for them until he got a buyout just before they went under in the 1970s or 80s. He loved my mom’s family and taught everyone how to drive (most on manual transmissions in Manhattan!). He also loved his own family and made sure all the maiden aunts were taken care of when they got old.

He had a terrible temper. My mother learned to ignore it–after an outburst, it blew over and it was like it never happened. That was hard for my brothers and me, but I must say that he paid for a lot of therapy for me and drug rehab for one brother.

He love, love, loved his grandchildren, especially my daughter who was the only one who lived nearby. He took amazing care of my mother during her seven-year decline after a brain tumor, and of my stepmother through various illnesses and then dementia.

My relationship with him was complicated but I was glad that said therapy enabled me to sit with him and hold his hand on the last day of his life in 2014 when he was 91.

[abasket]

And maybe, led you to also train to help others through therapy!

[Bromfield2]

My Dad was a great father (loving and caring) but probably the most frugal man alive. He never had a credit card (he loved to say credit cards weren’t created for his benefit). My Dad paid cash for anything that he could and rarely wrote checks. I don’t think he ever paid interest for anything other than a first mortgage.

Over time, my Dad eventually saved enough to own several multi-family properties, which he thought were great deals. You could always live in one of the apartments and the rent you received from the others basically paid your mortgage. He let his sister-in-law live rent free in one of the apartments when she became a widow at 50. She lived there for almost 15 years until she remarried and moved out. My father couldn’t believe she got remarried. “Why would she give up free rent!!!” he said.

While my Dad was frugal, he was generous when it came to family. He sent money to his much younger brothers (in Croatia). One became a lawyer and the other a teacher. Dad paid college tuition for my brother and me. He and my mother would drive 60 miles every day to babysit my brother’s son, so my brother and his wife didn’t have to pay for childcare.

[shawbridge]

My father was brilliant and despite being a classic case of Asperger’s / high-functioning autism, he had real warmth and a big heart though he did not really have the tools to express his emotions. When I say brilliant, he apparently would read the NY Times to his sister when he was three years old and at one point, he learned that his MIT PhD advisor’s recommendation said he was the best physics grad student he had had at MIT. Several years after his death, the chairman of the MIT physics department told me that my father was one of the smartest people he had ever met. I have attended some elite institutions and was a professor at one and would concur with the dept chairman. Although he never talked about it and never complained about anything (ever), it was clear from some of his choices that his family (two immigrant parents) was poor during the Depression. At a time when NYU had a quote on Jews, they gave him a full scholarship. He was majoring in math and physics and one of his professors asked what he was going to do after college and he said he was going to be a high school math teacher because they had job security. The professor said, “Son, you are not going to be a HS math teacher.” He was at MIT during the war and people told him he had to this amazing project but they couldn’t tell him what or where. He said, “If you can’t tell me what or where, I’m not going.” So he missed the Manhattan Project but instead stayed at MIT and his group developed acoustic decoys for torpedos. He was offered a post-doc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (probably the most prestigious next step in his field) but turned it down because it was not secure and instead asked for a university position where he was guaranteed tenure in two years. He received that offer at a good but not absolutely top university. After a few years, his work was recognized and he received an offer at the best institution in in the world in his field. He was wonderful at sharing ideas and mentoring. He loved his work – his job was largely to uncover the mysteries of the universe and get paid for it – so much so that he didn’t really want to take vacations. I understood how much joy he got from his work and decided to create a career that gave me the same joy. In that regard, I modeled my life choices after his.

As I mentioned, he had a great heart – he was generous and you could tell he was warm – but he did not really know how to express feelings. Because he and I could talk math and computers – he was really early into using computing for work and numerical analysis and computation in physics and I got a job writing software in HS and have a math-y PhD, we could talk. My other three siblings did not really have the same access. Growing up around someone who was both that extraordinarily smart and somewhat distant could be a bit daunting.

He and my mother (who also had a PhD when that was rare for women) strongly believed that ensuring their kids had a good education and were positioned for success in life. They paid for undergrad and grad school (for those whose grad schools weren’t covered by RA/TA/fellowships). All of my siblings absorbed that attitude. He supported all of my siblings in getting their careers going (I don’t think I needed help).

My mother was religious and my father was not. He gamely went to synagogue every week with her (and promptly fell asleep). Perhaps not surprisingly, the females in my generation retain a lot of the religious observance and the males don’t. Although he did not oberve, when he went to Russia during the (later stages?) of the cold war, he met with dissident Jewish scientists and tried to help them and help them get out of the country. He knew he was being followed while in Russia.

I’ve been bragging about him, but he never bragged about himself (though he apparently did about his kids). He was deeply secure in his abilities. I can’t recall him ever criticizing anyone or putting anyone down. At his memorial service, one of his colleagues said that he was of the caliber with folks who received a Nobel but would have had to have been very political and jealously guard ideas and make sure he was getting credit for as much as possible. My father just didn’t care. He wanted to do work that was challenging and meaningful. He did not seem to care about recognition.

[hrh19]

I miss my dad and was blessed to be his daughter. Father’s Day and his June birthday were always special days.

Unfortunately, he passed away after an accident when I was just a junior in high school. I still tear up when I talk about him.

He loved our mom and all of us kids. He attended all of our school events and activities, flooded the empty lot next to our house for a hockey rink every winter, took us to the cabin and taught us to fish and water ski, and made sure we had everything we needed and much of what we wanted.

I wish he could have known my husband and our daughter and son. He’d have loved that our daughter played hockey and that our son played football and baseball. Those were his three favorite sports.

I’m grateful for the sixteen years I had with him.

One of my last sweet memories of my dad was from the day I took the test for my driver’s license. He left work to come out to the behind-the-wheel testing station just to let me know I’d be great. He stayed to congratulate me, tell me that he was proud, and then went back to work.

[mathmom]

My father was a diplomat and the most undiplomatic person I have ever known. His parents packed him off to Phillips Exeter Academy for his senior year of high school because they thought he was slacking off. He was mad, but took to life at Exeter making lifelong friends there. He met my mother on a blind date when she was in high school and he was a sophomore at high school. They had a shotgun wedding (though I believe she had a miscarriage as I wasn’t born until many years later!) Timeline is a bit hazy there. After graduating he decided he wouldn’t be a real man unless he spent some time in the armed forces like his brothers. He missed WW2, so he went off to Korea, but miss the fighting there too, spending all his time on Okinawa. (Leaving my Mom alone!) I think that experience may have given him the travel bug since he came back and joined the foreign service. He loved being in the foreign service, meeting new people and eventually became an ambassador.

Family dinners were often argumentative as he was happy to debate anything and often would be deliberately provocative. While he kept his politics quiet because of his position, during the Vietnam protests he’d go to the local jails and bail out kids who would come and sleep in our basement. My uncle and his family were visiting during one of the last big weekend marches and he dragged all of them to it.

He had a lifelong love of learning joining the Fortnightly Club in Lexington, VA delivering or listening to discourses on a variety of topics. Despite Alzheimer’s he kept reading the newspaper even though he couldn’t remember anything he read.

Just before I took off on a one year road trip having only been licensed to drive a few months, he gave me one last piece of advice, “Don’t drive too slow!” That was the way he lived his life, and I have tried to follow in his footsteps. The world is out there for exploring and life is short.

[Knowsstuff]

So since it was suggested not everyone’s experience is all roses.

My parents were divorced when I was 5. We moved from Chicago to Detroit to start over due to my mother basically having a nervous breakdown from the divorce. She was emotionally abused at least.

My father would visit us once a year and bring us “Silver Dollars “a couple each and we thought that was amazing all while my mother struggled buying us winter boots or shoes since alimony wasn’t coming. I lived a life of “he said - she said”. My mother was on public aid and food stamps for at least like 8 year’s raising us four. She sorta cried and apologized “every “time she “had “ to use food stamps. She was embarrassed to say the least. She worked 15 hours a day including some Sunday’s getting paid for while under the table but not the whole time. I learned my work ethic from her and how to sell. Lol.

My father never saw me wrestle in 4 year’s of high school and came to one softball game. I used to spend some summers with him for a few week’s but he worked and I got together with my cousins which was fine since I had a crush on one of her friends. Funny thing is I have seen her here and there since we both live in Chicago now and yes,she’s still super cute with freckles. .

At some point my sister and I went to Chicago to “The friend of the court “to get the divorce decree. Not sure how we were able to but it solved the he said - she said debate. My mother had to take him to court to pay for my sister’s much needed braces. She tools him again and again for this and that. He kept lowering what he was making to lower his responsibility. He was a pharmacist and trained during the Korean war and didn’t make a large sum but still. I grew up with no male influence with 3 older sister’s and my mother. I just got a call a few days ago from my best friend growing up and he told me how hard it was on me. He told me things that I never realized.

My father didn’t know how to be a father. It’s pretty plain and simple. He had friends. Went to bars with a piano player and sang with friend’s. His second ex wife was a female dog to us. But he did have a GF in Chicago which we adored. I actually hooked up with her daughter and made out. Lol ..

But that’s pretty much the memories. We came to an impass as I got older. He never made an attempt to meet my children. Even at the same family wedding event. I never said he couldn’t but I just didn’t encourage it at all. So my kids never really met their only grandfather since my wife’s father past by the time they were born. I never met my grandfather as well since he died before I was born.

I didn’t go to my father’s funeral. My mother and sister’s didn’t get it. I did. I don’t regret it.

But it made me a better father, I think. I worked part time when needed to take my kids to drum class at the community center. I was the only father there till the word got out and more came.

I got my children ready for school daily and took them. My wife slept in. The one time she came down the kids sent her back up. Lol. Yes, the fun parent I guess.

I was the dad coach for tee ball, travel baseball and football for my son. I took my daughter to dance, singing, acting lessons

I sat with her for 6 hours when she auditioned for America got talent when they were in Chicago..

I took them to children’s memorial hospital at 3:00 am when they had severe ear infection and we didn’t know what the hell was going on..lol.

I hope I showed my kids how to be a parent.

My daughter at 13 said to me “OK. We get it. But it’s time for you to find some friend’s. We are good “

So yeah, Happy Father’s day to all.

[abasket]

I appreciate your story and the idea that not all humans are able to rise to the life task they are given for whatever reason or lack of will. I read your story though and see that good did come out of it in terms of how you chose to parent yourself.

I think most of us learned - for good or bad - how to be that parental figure or human being or model for others. Finding a little light in a not so great situation is a good way to lead life.