Tea With Dad

by Nancie Laird Young

  Upon receipt of a new roster, which occurred whenever Dad was reassigned or whenever one was revised to reflect changes in personnel, I looked to see if there was anyone I already knew from another assignment or who might have children my age—especially boys, once I was a teenager.

  The roster was indispensable when it came to meeting people for the first time. My roster studies helped me feel comfortable, as though I already knew them, and I felt less shy. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Smith, and how are your three children, Shirley (female, ten), Peg (female, nine), and John (male, three)?” It helped to know whether the officer I was speaking to reported to my father, shared the same level of rank, or was the commanding officer, though my mother assured us that we were expected to behave and treat people well and with respect no matter who they were, where they were from, or what rank they held. Mom’s view was that God gave us value while the army only assigned rank. God outranked the Army.

  “What’s distaff mean?” I once asked my father. What I really wanted to know was why that word rather than wife or family?

  “Distaff—the distaff side is the spouse, these days sometimes a husband. It’s the family side of things,” he said. When I was growing up, though I might see a female lieutenant listed she was seldom married. I do not ever remember a male appearing under the distaff column.

  I understood the separation between the military personnel and the distaff sides of the roster. But why that word? Why not “other information” or “family” instead of “distaff”?

  I learned the etymology of the word distaff during my college English classes where I found that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and others used it in the works assigned to us. It related to “women’s work,” both at home and in the community.

  They say when you marry a military person, you enlist as well, and your children are born enlisted. Though unpaid, my mother and her counterparts had jobs and expectations to meet outside the home. A military wife’s level of engagement as well as whether she met the expectations imposed on her could affect her husband’s promotion potential. Military wives served as members on committees and boards of the many community support organizations for soldiers and their families. In addition, Mom was expected to attend coffees, brunches, luncheons, and teas, as well as the “command performance” receptions, military balls, and other social events with my father.

  “Your poor mother. We had to attend the Infantry Ball when we arrived at Fort Sill,” Dad said, “and she didn’t have a ball gown. We had no money. The officers wore their dress uniforms.”

  “What did she do?” I asked, expecting that he’d gone alone and gave sick children as an explanation for her absence.

  “She told the other women,” he answered. “One of them wrote home to her sister and had her send out some dresses. Your mother wore one of those. And she was beautiful.”

  “That’s amazing”

  Dad started laughing and said, “When we moved to the furnished duplex in downtown Lawton, your mother threw a Tea. We had nothing, but her friend sold silver and let her use her samples. I’ve never seen so much silver in my life.

  “They all had to know that this wasn’t your mother’s silver, but one of them, she was a real bitch, said, ‘Oh, Suzy, can I borrow some of this for my Tea? It’s lovely.’ Before your mother could say anything, her friend who owned the silver said, ‘I’ll help you take it over, Suzy, since I have a car.’”

  Dad gave his impression of my mother’s smug smile. He loves telling me about times that Mom fared well in situations where people tried to make her feel bad or hurt her.

  “Your mother was such a sweet young woman. People were always trying to take advantage of her.” I thought about Mom and though people may have tried, the woman I knew never seemed bothered by what other people said or did to hurt her. At least she never talked about it with me.

  As we enjoyed our tea and I avoided dealing with the moving boxes still loaded in the back of car, Dad and I talked more about our time in Lawton. There were so many stories. Once my mother got up in the middle of the night and walked into the bathroom door, which never closed all the way without being forced. Someone had left it open. The gash on her forehead required stitches and Dad had to take her out to the post hospital.

  “Imagine my surprise when I saw your mother wearing my boxers under her nightgown,” he laughed, “and she’d used my lieutenant’s bars as a pin because the waist was too big. I could fit my hands around your mother’s waist she was so tiny.”

  Listening to my father’s stories and sharing mine—whether we were in the car or talking over tea—reminded me of working on a puzzle with someone else. To take in the puzzle’s big picture, you must dig through all the puzzle pieces. Sometimes the piece you need sits all alone on the table, away from the pile of other pieces and easy to see if you take the time to look. Sometimes you must sort through the pile to see what fits. At other times you must ask the other person if he’s holding the piece that fits the space you’re trying to fill. He looks at the section you’re working on and hands you a piece he thinks may work. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, even when you turn it around and try it different ways. Sometimes you can finish the puzzle in one sitting, and other times it takes a summer of sitting with it, stealing a little time here, a little time there, to fiddle with it until you get it right.

  PART III

  Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

  —ADRIENNE RICH, of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

  CHAPTER 12

  Dissension in the Ranks

  DURING OUR FIRST YEAR of living together again, Dad and I laughed a lot, not only about funny memories we shared, but about new experiences as we got to know each other again. As he always had, he tried to joke me out of taking life too seriously, especially my work.

  At that time, I worked as a program director for a company that runs a State Department-sanctioned cultural exchange program. About three or four times a year, I was “on call” for a week at a time in case of emergencies. This amused my father who has, for my entire adult life, asked me, “What is it you do again?” It seemed to me that he could only picture me as a secretary, a teacher, a nurse, or a wife—any position outside of those roles was either not worth remembering or difficult to wrap his brain around.

  During one monthly visit to Sam’s Club, the answering service contacted me with an emergency just as we were rolling our full basket to the checkout lane. Since Dad always insists on unloading the basket by himself, because I’m obviously unable to lift a head of lettuce without assistance, I walked away and found an empty aisle so I could take the call. By the time I got back, Dad was paying the cashier and she turned to look at me.

  “Thank you for all you do,” she said smiling.

  Dad was smiling, too, so I figured something was up. I’ve learned to just play along.

  “Uh … why thank you. Same to you,” I responded humbly.

  As we moved away Dad smiled. Then he began to laugh.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  He explained that the cashier asked him if he did all the shopping by himself.

  “I told her no. I said you picked everything out and I pushed the cart.” He said. “Then she asked me where you were. “I told her you had to take an important call because you are the person on duty this weekend. She asked me if you were a doctor.” Dad described how he leaned in and said in a whisper, “No. State Department. She had to take an important call. She’s the person on duty this weekend.”

  When she asked Dad if the call was important, he told her, “You know the State Department. Embassies. Wars. Who knows what it is this time?”

  “Dad,” I said, horrified, “I do not w
ork for the State Department. I work for a company that runs a sanctioned program.”

  He dismissed me. “I know that, but she doesn’t.”

  “I think it’s illegal to represent yourself as working for the State Department when you don’t.”

  “Oh, it may be illegal for you to do it, but I’m in my eighties. I can say whatever I want. No one takes me seriously. I’ll tell them I don’t know any better. Or that I don’t remember saying anything like that.”

  “Okay, Dad. I see.”

  “Come on,” he said. “It made her day. And mine.”

  “That’s right. That’s what I’m here for. Make fun of me. I can take it. But I wonder where my real father is.”

  “I’m right here, babe. Right here,” he said.

  A sense of humor is a wonderful thing, but if it were a martial art, my family members and I would have black belts. We wield humor like a weapon—sharp-edged when angry, self-deprecating when embarrassed or vulnerable, and as a diversion to ward off strong emotions or tears, whether our own or someone else’s. It is also a useful tool for avoiding or postponing tough conversations, so despite our easy back-and-forth most of the time, when I ran into obstacles in this new territory I lived in, I still found it hard to talk to him about things that bothered me as they happened.

  Some days I wondered what he was thinking. On others I knew exactly what ran through his mind but saw a familiar look in his eyes and set of his jaw, which I took to mean that discussion was not going to take place. He would keep those thoughts to himself. So I’d wait for him to say, “Listen, I want to talk to you.”

  My mother never hid what she was thinking. If she was upset (the only word that can describe a panoply of emotions exhibited by my mother when she was unhappy), everyone knew it. She might give everyone the silent treatment for a day or two. She might get angry and bang things around as though to make sure we noticed. There were times she screamed at us and said hurtful things. One day she’d been silent first, then began to slam the cabinet doors in the kitchen and rattle the pots on the stove. I hid in my room.

  Later she told me she had been counting on something that didn’t happen and when it didn’t, she was angry and disappointed.

  “I thought you were mad at me,” I said.

  “Why would you think that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Just because,” I replied.

  “Did it occur to you to ask me? You might have asked if I was upset about something.”

  I wondered why she just didn’t tell me. I would never ask. I was always afraid of her answer. I know now that I was not afraid of her anger at me. I was afraid that if she told me she was sad, unhappy, disappointed, or angry that I couldn’t make it better. I might make even make things worse.

  When I was an adult, my mother and I were sitting at the table in my kitchen while my daughters ran in and out of the room.

  “Nancie,” she said, “when you were growing up and I was in a bad mood or sad, why didn’t you ask me what was wrong? You’d come in from school, look at me, and leave the room. Your brother always asked, ‘What’s wrong, Mom?’ You ignored me.”

  I thought back to that time. I was a senior in high school. Dad had gone off to Nebraska as a bootstrapper to finish his degree. He’d only been home from Vietnam a year. As a grown woman, with children of my own, one of whom was a teenager, I had a much better sense of what she went through then—left alone again in a new place with three kids, with another move on the horizon. At the time I was just hoping and praying to finish out my senior year in the same high school.

  “Mom, I don’t remember it that way.”

  “Oh? The memory is crystal clear to me, Nancie. You would walk in, say hello, and immediately leave the room. Your brother would say, ‘What’s wrong, Mom?’ He was sensitive.”

  I started to laugh. “Mom, when I walked in, I always knew if you were upset. So you’re right. I’d say hello, and then look around to see if there was something I could do to help, like clean the kitchen or fix dinner, clean up my room….”

  I told her that my recollection was that my brother would look at her and sigh before saying, “What’s wrong now, Mom?”

  “If I had said that you would have erupted. But when he’d ask, you’d say, ‘Oh nothing.’”

  Then Mom started to laugh. I joined her and we laughed together until we cried. It was a moment of recognition. The two of us would hold on to something and gnaw on it for decades, unable to toss it out until we worked it out.

  “You’re right! Now I remember,” she said. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “Mom, it’s almost twenty-five years later. Why did you not ask me then why I seemed not to care?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I was afraid you didn’t.”

  With a little insight too late, I said, “Mom, it wasn’t just you. I didn’t ask enough questions growing up. I was afraid too.”

  My mother reached over and touched my hand. “I know,” she said, and smiled.

  Yet on this new journey with Dad, I opted as I always had with him for the more familiar path of least resistance. I avoided difficult subjects, kept those things that bothered me to myself, prayed for patience on both our parts, tried not to upset or disrupt the routine, and wished for peace. In order to navigate any minefields that might appear, I looked for ways to lighten the mood or at least not make things worse, despite awareness that unspoken thoughts and feelings seeded in unresolved issues lie like dry tinder, awaiting victims to random sparks.

  I’ve stockpiled tinder my whole life. Sometimes, probably too often, I’ve struck the spark that ignited the fires. I fear an apocalyptic firestorm and the direct and collateral damage that might occur if I can’t control it once started.

  A few days after I moved in with Dad, just before his real estate agent began to show the beach house to interested buyers, we drove back out to the beach house to look at a leaky outside faucet. It had been fixed once but after the winter it had never worked properly and continued to leak. I was concerned that if it leaked under the crawlspace that it could be an issue during a buyer’s inspection. My father thought I was overthinking, but to humor me, he went along for the ride.

  Dad looked through the opening and into the crawlspace.

  “I’m going to have to climb inside. I can’t get a good view from here.”

  “No, Dad, let’s call a plumber. You can’t crawl under the house.”

  “It’s fine,” he said as he began to crawl in headfirst. He looked like he’d get stuck. How would I get him out?

  “Dad! No. I’m calling a plumber. You’re eighty years old. What if you get stuck in there?”

  “Nancie.” He turned and looked at me. “Shut up.”

  My head snapped back. I gasped. We stared at one another for a nanosecond; I’m not sure who moved first before I turned around and walked back to the car. I thought how ridiculous I must look, like an angry fifteen-year-old admonished by her father, fists clenched and stiff-legging it back to the car. I was sixty years old. Besides, I was stuck there. The car was locked, and he had the keys.

  “No one tells me to shut up,” I muttered under my breath.

  I was enraged. I turned back and stomped toward the house arriving just as he disappeared through the crawlspace opening, I said calmly, firmly, and with all the respect I could muster despite the tightness in my chest, my racing heart, and lump beginning to form in my throat. I would not cry.

  “Don’t ever tell me to shut up, Dad. Please.” I said.

  Dad did not respond. I don’t know whether he heard me or if he ignored it, but when he crawled back out of the hole, he brushed off his pants and smiled.

  “All set! Let’s go get some lunch.”

  I didn’t ask if he’d heard me. As far as he was concerned, it was over, if he’d noticed it at all. As far as I was concerned, the matter was not closed. But I wasn’t prepared to bring it up now. If it happened again, I’d say something.

  I rationalized
as we drove to the restaurant. He didn’t mean it. It was just reflex. My brothers wouldn’t be bothered if he said that to them. Why should I care? Besides, it wasn’t the way he spoke to me all the time. In fact, hardly ever. Except in moments of anger or frustration he didn’t speak to anyone that way. Then I thought of my mother’s reaction if he ever said that to her. And … I laughed. He would never have said that to her!

  For weeks afterward I rolled the moment around in my mouth like a bitter taste and realized that it was not what he’d said that upset me. It was that I had not spoken to Dad and addressed it immediately. It could have been resolved then. I hadn’t followed through.

  I was bothered by the “why.” After all these years, why was I was afraid of his reaction? He might say, “Okay, Nancie,” and dismiss me as though my reaction was an overreaction—silly, unwarranted, over-the-top, emotional, or all the above. I explored whether I had made something out of nothing. Ruminating over this one small piece of a whole life left me emotionally drained. I left it alone for a while but began to pay attention to what he said, when he said it, and opportunities to address issues that arose in the moment if necessary.

  Within the next twelve months, Dad became ill and I was worried about him. For a week I nudged him to make an appointment with his doctor. He refused and said, “I’m fine. It’s a cold. I know when I’m really sick and when I’m not.”

  When he wasn’t better after ten days, I told him he was foolish not to at least call the doctor’s office to see what they suggested, and he responded, “Nancie. Shut up.”