What I've Learned From My Parents

One thing you might not know about me is that I'm quite close with my dad. I've written quite a bit about the women in my family before, but recently I realized that surprisingly, I haven't really shared too much about my dad.

My dad is basically Max Weber's Protestant ethic in human form, crossed with George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life. (Coincidentally, that's his favorite movie. Sorry for the tiny political theory bomb.) He's the master of the corny pun and really likes going to Disneyland and Pixar movies with his family.

iPhone 4 front cameras were garbage.

My dad is the type of person that corrects cashiers if they give him extra change. Honesty is very important to him, you see. He's also the type of person that still uses cash and pays bills online. Fun fact: he only learned to send a text within the last year or so. He won an iPad a few years back and it sat in the box for at least eighteen months.

This is the very first text he ever sent. All who know him agree that it's Peak Him. 

My dad also has a very unique dancing style, and my mom always says it's one of the things she really loves about him.

Exhibit A.

Photo by Marble Rye Photography

Apparently it's a heritable trait.

Photo by Marble Rye Photography

Yep, definitely heritable.

Photo by Marble Rye Photography

Whenever I'm visiting my family in New York, I spend weekdays waiting semi-patiently for him to get home from work, at which point I'll usually follow him around the house, standing outside the bedroom door chattering away as he gets into his inside-the-house clothes. I got my love of cars from him, and when I still lived in New York, we used to go to the annual NY auto show religiously. We've spent countless hours going out for drives on the back roads, taking exercise walks around our town, and losing at family poker to my aunts and uncles.

If I'm sad or upset, my dad is one of the people I know will always be able to help. Even though I know what he'll say in 95% of those cases (1. 'keep it in perspective;' 2. 'do you have friends' *yes* 'then you aren't a failure;' and so on), it's so much more effective when I hear it from him. He often jokes when I call him during the workday that he's nervous when he sees my number on the caller ID, since there's about a 50-50 chance that he'll answer and just hear indecipherable wailing. (I have a lot of feelings, you know!)

Even though he's far, far WASP-ier than my mother and her siblings, he's never had trouble telling Ronnie and me how much we mean to him. I cherish that knowledge every day.

Photo taken by Marble Rye Photography when my dad first saw me all ready for my wedding.

Ever since I found out that I was pregnant, I've seen my parents in a new light. This is 100% the most obvious epiphany to have, but whatever, this is my blog and I can share this totally mundane realization if I want. That space in my brain that was mostly taken up by Game of Thrones spoilers, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars trivia, and dresses is temporarily on loan to the Department of Baby Obsession. I've been thinking about parenting so much.

I've appreciated my dad's company and admired his character for as long as I can remember, and one of my most reliable Happy Thoughts right now is thinking about how our daughter will feel the same way about Jeff.

But in dwelling in that particular happy thought, I've actually come to appreciate something about my mom. It's something I didn't ever notice for the longest time. (I guess this is gonna be a post about both my parents. Sorry, Dad. You'll get your very own post someday!)

For as long as I can remember, my mother has never failed to tell us what she loves, values, and respects about my father. When I was very young and only saw my dad for a few minutes before he left for work and a little while each night after he got home, she would take great pains to explain, in age appropriate terms, why he spent so much time out of the house. She'd contextualize the hours he spent commuting and working each day as an act of love: as something he did so that we could live in a house, so I could take ballet and music lessons, so we could have things we needed.

From this, I learned so much about what's really important in a family, and what kind of person I wanted to become. And recently, I've realized how important it is that I show my own child how much I love and respect her father, and help her to understand good character through the things I love about him.

I've also realized something else. Like my mom, I'm going into this whole parenting thing with a lot more experience around children than my partner has, and this means I have an opportunity to help guide Jeff in developing his relationship with our baby.

A few years ago, my mom told me something I'd genuinely never suspected: that a lot of the things I grew up doing with my dad, like getting Burger King on the weekends when Ronnie was a baby, or taking walks and bike rides around town, actually started because she suggested it to him. She saw these ways we could spend time together and nudged my dad to see them too. These activities turned into some of my favorite things to do, and my mom ended up doing exactly what she'd set up to do: fostering an unbreakable bond between her child and her husband.

Looking at it now, I'm just amazed by this act of love. My mother has never felt herself in competition with my dad for her children's love. She's weathered the years of utter bullshit that daughters often seem to reserve especially for their mother without ever seeming to resent that my dad escaped a good deal of the storm. I guess she's always known that love within a family isn't a limited-edition resource.

Photo by Marble Rye Photography

I feel so lucky to have learned what love and family are from these two people. It's made me who I am, helped me create a life I deeply enjoy, and led me to share my life with someone who sees love as something you do. These are the things I hope I can remember and live by as Jeff and I become parents.

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