Daddies

I have always been utterly fascinated by that movie "Father of the Bride."  Even as a child I'd stop whatever I was doing to stare at the television and absorb George's relationship with his daughter, Annie.  Way back in 2011 I wrote about this movie on a different blog.  This is part of what I wrote:

"Father of the Bride" is on t.v. today.  I can't help but watch it every single time I come across it.  I marvel at this movie and George's relationship with his daughter.  It takes my breath and makes me insanely jealous and horribly sad, but I can't look away.  It's like this movie is the embodiment of everything I missed--all the things I never had, but somehow knew I wanted anyway. I cry every time I watch it.

My father wasn't the kind of father George Banks is in the movie.  He wasn't there.  He missed a lot.  Even when he was there he was absent in some ways, gone off in a drug induced haze....lost somewhere I could not follow.  I have a handful of painfully poignant memories, though, memories where my father was fully present. While I am grateful for the two or three moments in my life in which my father was actually a father, in many ways these simple events somehow only make it more heartbreaking that my daddy had it in him to be a good father and somehow never managed to do it. 

But he was my daddy.  I loved him anyway.  I loved him even when he was not there to love me.  And as I write this I cry because he is not here now.  He is gone forever.  He died when I was 19, and despite all of his faults and his inability to be a daddy, he was the only daddy I had and my heart breaks when I think of him because I miss him now even more than I missed him as a child.  I miss who he was though, not what he could have been. 

Last night as I watched my husband carry our youngest daughter in from the car where she had fallen asleep, her little sleeping face resting on his shoulder, I wondered if my father had ever carried a sleeping me into a house to tuck me into my bed.  I wondered if he'd ever loved me like that. 

But then it dawned on me that maybe my daddy wasn't like the George Banks's of the world, but my husband is.  He is present. He doesn't want to miss anything. He makes an effort.  He is there in every way he can be, and when he isn't there his heart breaks a little because he wishes he was. 

My daughters get to be Annie Banks.  They get this daddy who is always their daddy.  They get memories of sitting in their socks and nightgown at the breakfast table in the morning with their father.  They get memories of playing with him in the yard and being tucked in by him at night.  They get memories of him loving them and they get lots of these memories.  I don't have those kinds of memories, but I am so very grateful my children will.  I am so glad they will be able to remember their father as the kind of father who loved them enough.  If, somehow, my missing out on those things ensured that my daughters didn't have to miss them then I would miss them all again.  My husband is the kind of father to our children that I always wanted my own father to be.  I am lucky to have him and so are our kids. 

So on this Father's Day I'd like to say Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there who step up and give their children all of the memories I missed out on.  I'd like to say Happy Father's Day to my husband who shows my girls what a man should be.  I'd like to say Happy Father's Day to my grandfather and my Uncle Richard, both of whom were there when my own father wasn't.  And I'd like to say Happy Father's Day to my daddy because, please believe me when I say this, a half-assed father is better than no father at all.  Happy Father's Day for what you could have been Daddy, and Happy Father's Day for what you were because what you were was all I had and now that you are gone I'd give anything just to have even that little bit back.