My Heart Belongs to Daddy

It’s funny, isn’t it, how girls become women (those who do are few and far between), and their whole lives they see and interact with men, framed and determined by how they saw their own daddy. It seems to come down to this pleasing thing, doesn’t it. I know about that. I do. I loved making highballs for my dad, and sometime mom, and helping with the guest highballs for any of the variety of Croat friends and family that used to frequent our house. I knew I was American, as far as my birthplace, and friends and outside environment, but very few American types visited our house, unless it was a friend’s parent coming to pick them up (no big shock that everybody wanted to come to My house and not the other way around – was it the playroom built for inner fantasies, the many living room choices, the oversized bedroom which I pretended was an inn in the woods in some guarded, oddball fairytale, the levels of yard and hills, pond and swimming pool, trees, secret places, and woods behind a regulation tennis court? It was something). Regardless, I enjoyed being let to drink some iced down red wine with my father, and sharing in his beer when he was sweating outside, constructing one of the above reasons I (or my house) was so popular when I was still a little girl who hated talking to people, or the aforesaid making of the highball – the scotch, usually Dewar’s or Johnnie Walker, the soda, the ice, the mixing with the silverware knife. It wasn’t all about drinking, of course, but certainly these were some of the favourite rituals I had in “pleasing” my father.

Unlike these women masquerading as little adult girls (or perhaps the other way around), I wasn’t trying to get him to love me more, or differently. There was always this ease; this comfort between us, like we were confidants and friends from the start. Yes, just like everyone else, I used to reach up to him and stretch my short little toddler arms out until he picked me up. Yes, as my mother tells me, when asked how much I loved her she received a fair amount of hand to hand measurement (something like a foot long hero sandwich probably) and when asked about how much I loved my father the hands spread farther and wider than my arms could even reach at the time. All of that was true. I knew I was loved, but I was never lauded. He was very proud of me when I made good grades, and didn’t like it when I quit things – piano, dance, gymnastics (moving away was the reason for the latters, but the former I admit, I grew tired of on my own), and thought I looked like the beautiful women in his family, and like him, but I was never told I was the prettiest girl in the world, or the best, or the most important. I made my own importance, which is what he taught me without ever having to tell me. It meant I was as good as anybody and very special, and what I did with that was my doing, or undoing.

There were many car rides, right up until the end of his life, wherein he would talk about my mistakes, and I didn’t always love the way it made me feel, but he emphasized the same thing always. To learn from them and do better next time was Key. He had learned that, and not always listened to it himself, in his life. And no one – NO ONE – told him or me the way we felt about anything. Stubbornness not as much as a belief in ourselves and in the universe we made every day and with every action, thought and desire, and the strength of it- was the cause for this prime mover in our lives. We shared that so deeply, that most others in the family didn’t quite understand. Their motivations were not the same, simply put. I guess that’s why I don’t need to pretend to be anyone else to any man I’ve ever known since. It was never presented to me as an option, and the more I see of the state of it at the finish line or in the muddy ravine at the side of the racing road, the less it holds interest for me. Aren’t our lives short enough? Don’t they get pinned down so easily with goals, and experience, and mired in our hearts so and our cacophony of thoughts constantly at us, that why would we try to be someone else? We never thought of that, in my family, nor in the shared feelings between my father and me. He always told me to follow my dreams, and was certainly interested in the realities that might lead me there or might be too impossible to traverse logistically, and was interested in security for oneself, independence, safety, education, generosity, genuineness and, above all things, being true to yourself. I admit the degrees and schooling which left me lost to certain experience came from the part of him that wanted to see his children be educated. It did mean something to him, and it means something to me. While I am left with pieces of beautiful, stained paper tacked onto the walls of my bedroom closet, and a massive stockpile of loans which I intend never to pay back (I happen to believe education should be free, and they can wait until the sun rises in a sky of dancing bears before I pay them for the things I was taught), I still hold value to it. The same value that he held for me.

He wanted very few other specific things for me – I think he hoped that he would be healthy enough to help me build a house one day, like he had done so 4 or 5 times over. I used to tell him (during the wine nights or the car rides) how I wanted a house in England, or Ireland, because I had it in my mind that I wanted to live there. He complained about old houses, and the electrical/plumbing and heating, and how it would be expensive to re-wire something so old and such, and we’d argue, but all in all he’d have come anywhere to help me build and would have done a great job of it no matter his age or health. He was over protective, and so I was not one of those kids who got to ride the bus or train by themselves, and when the choice came to work while going to school, even though he could probably have used the financial assistance, he always told me he’d rather have me concentrate on my studies and education. I was never denied help when I needed it, and yet never was spoiled or expected to coast on through, nor have that horrible sense of “entitlement” that many have today. He wanted me to make it in film, and didn’t understand that my degree and my hard work might not be enough; that who you “knew”, and the idioms of nepotism and favorites played a bigger role than that. He wanted me to be happy, away from all those jobs I worked (and still work, for awhile) in order to be creative, be my own boss, and live out my dreams out loud and nothing less. He had a hard time thinking of me in terms of boys and men, and thankfully I only let that side of things surface towards the end of his life; he Did want someone to take care of me, but ultimately he wanted me to be independent, and not ever marry for security or anything less than the love of an equal. And not the kind of love that these women-girls went in for. Someone to listen to you co-sign on your own bullshit, a pushover to do your bidding especially in the form of possessions, gifts and dollar signs, or some asshole who ignored you, disrespected you and kept you in your place just like their mean old daddies did to them. Once more, so much time saved from our being ourselves from the get go.

He wanted me to be myself, and nothing less, always. It wasn’t just my heart that belonged to daddy. Daddy was my true friend. And he was right in that the true people you meet, love and are loyal to over your entire life could be counted on one hand, really. The rest were just fair weather (said ‘fare vedder’) friends. And daddy was right, and I hope he knows how right he was. Love without truth and shared adventure isn’t love at all and not honoring the stamp imprinted onto your soul long before you were made in its image (in his words went something like “be yourself. If they don’t like it, forget them (he wanted to say fuck them but still regarded me as his little girl so wouldn’t necessarily say so) and keep going”) wastes so much fucking time, when you could be having so much more fun with every sunrise, every new construction and challenge, every feast and every new highball made with the absolute love of a little girl who was allowed to become her own woman, and whose best friend was her daddy.

M. Lucia