My daughter will tell you, even if you don’t ask, that she is very lucky because she has two dads. Right from the start I emphasized whenever I could with her that we were lucky. We had a daddy in heaven who loved and watched over us and even though that wasn’t always as nice as having one who lived with us, it was still pretty good. When Rob came along and we became engaged, Katy and I would talk about how lucky we were to now have two dads.  That’s not to say that there weren’t tears and sad times. There were and sometimes still are, but I was determined from the start that Katy was not going to grow up feeling as though her life has been ruined or tainted in some way by what happened to her father. I did this as much for Will as I did for her.

 

Will’s father died when he was not quite seven. His father was an alcoholic who fell asleep at the wheel after a night of drinking and drove himself off an embankment near a bridge and into the water. It was Labor Day weekend, and Will could remember the State Police coming to the door and then being sent up to his room. His mother was in her early thirties and his a dad a few years younger. Will was always sketchy on the details of what happened next, but I got the impression that was more of a reluctance rather than an inability to recall. One thing he was never in doubt about was how his mother had set out to instill in him a sense of being different from other kids and other families. Her widowhood marked them for slights and abuse in her view, and she made certain that he never forgot that their lives would have been so much better had his father not died. Once I asked him about that. Would it have been better? Whenever I asked about his father, or his early childhood, I got stories rather than answers. This time I got the story about how his father and his mother’s younger sister had given him alcohol once when his mother was away. She returned to find him quite sick and when she confronted his dad about it ….. well, he had found the whole thing funny. Getting a five year old drunk. Will went on to remark that it wasn’t until years later at a Thanksgiving dinner that his mom’s sister had drunkenly confessed to having had an affair with her brother-in-law during that time period. I guess “better” like most things is a relative term. 

 

Will never felt he was as good as his friends who had two living parents. He thought perhaps that his lack of fathering had made him less of a man. Another legacy from his mother, who constantly decried the lack of male influence in his life. He felt too that the only luck he had was bad luck. When we learned we couldn’t have children without help, he wondered aloud why bad things like this always happened to him. Of course he wasn’t always so pessimistic. He dreamed and had a vision of a future that was surprisingly optimistic, and his early influences receded more and more as we built our life together.

 

When he was in hospice, I made certain that Katy visited often and that our time was as normal as any family. We ate meals there. Me spoon feeding Will and Katy sitting at the foot of his bed eating off the tray the aides would bring for her. We played Candy Land on his bed and watched videos. All the while she thinking this was what families do and what dad’s are like and Will was  curled in a fetal position staring blindly and unknowingly into space right past us both. After he died, I made sure that we didn’t talk about his death as a negative that happened to us. People get sick sometimes, I told her, and they don’t get better. Doctors can’t fix every problem and people go to live in heaven. It makes us sad and daddy sad but we are still a family and we still love each other. 

 

I never blamed his death for anything that happened. If we didn’t have money for something it was because mama hadn’t finished her masters yet but when she did, things would be better. If we had to spend the weekend on our own, we went out and did something together. When other kids at her school had mom’s and dad’s to drop them off in the morning or pick them up at night, well, we didn’t and that was okay and maybe someday we would have a dad too.

 

When Rob came along one of the first things I needed to know was if he was okay with being a father to Katy. He had actually given that a great deal of thought before he even approached me with his feelings for me. Katy, unsurprisingly took to him right away. She’d never had a father in the active sense of the word.

 

About six weeks ago, the two of them planted a garden. Lettuce, potatoes, radishes and carrots. She was thrilled by the entire process though I think the digging and the watering are her favorites parts. Since then we have watched as things have grown and turned that once forlorn space into a garden. Last evening they “harnessed” the lettuce for our supper salad. As I took pictures it occurred to me yet again that this is what families do, and that I have done a pretty good job these last four years.