Non-traditional Fathers' Day

The happy bit

Having had time to digest my mixed feelings about father's day cards (see below if you want to read on all the way) I actually had a positive memory of my father yesterday! That is the one I wanted to share with you, as well as the more difficult explanation.

...When my father was present at our house in Dublin, he was sometimes asked to help with bath duty. Three of us had baths together: Kate, Ben and me (my older sister, Tanya, who is a blipper was already at boarding school), and my father would dry us by making a sling out of the bath towel, and jerking us backwards and forwards in it, simultaneously teaching us to count to four in various languages.

Hindi: eck, doh, teen, cha !
Another language from the Indian Subcontinent (maybe Urdu?) Ecki, do-i, teen-i, sa-ri!
Spanish: uno, dos, tres, cuatro!
Irish: Hain, do, tree, cahair!

Those were the most popular languages. One of the towel manoeuvres was called Ziggy-Zaggy.
(I do apologise for the phonetic spelling of the numbers) this was a good way to get dry, very vigorous, totally eccentric, and, above all, fun. Not the way that any other relative would have dried us!

I wish now that the counting had gone beyond four to, say, ten. It is from our father that I get my love of languages and language per se. He had grown up in British India. Mexico came later in his life. I was brought up in Ireland, then Scotland. I studied Spanish and Linguistics at the university of Edinburgh, and have spent time in Spain and Mexico, the latter at an orphanage for street children. The nearest I've been to India is Sri Lanka, last Christmas (Steve really wants to go back) or making a collage of the Indian Subcontinent, which I'm sort-of doing, now. You can sort-of see it on the edge of this image. I haven't got very far as yet. Busy writing and running card stalls!



The background (the sad bit)


I was feeling somewhat agitated about Fathers' Day last weekend. In nursery we have been making packages of sweets with the children, and FD cards, asking the children what they like about being with, or sharing activities with, their dads, and then writing it out for them. I am always aware that not every child has a father they are in regular contact with, and not all of the live-in Dads are hands-on. I also thought I might be asked to run a fathers' day card making workshop for tennagers. In the end, this didn't happen, so my worrying was for nothing.

My own father left for good when I was ten, but really he left long, long before that. Once, when we lived in Dublin, we took him to the port of Dun Laoghaire, from where he set sail to Holyhead, in Wales. I remember the cry of the gulls, the Blue Peter flag being hoisted, signalling that the ship was about to sail, and my hands waving goodbye as his ship receded into the bigger blue. He had said he was going to Cardiff for ten days. He was gone for two years.

TWO years! In that time, my mother had another baby;
my sister had her foot trampled on by a horse;
my mother broke her Achilles tendon and spent six months in plaster and couldn't breastfeed her new baby because she was in hospital.
I started and finished at my first convent day school.
My mother left us in the care of some not-very caring Basque sisters, and spent eight weeks travelling the length of Mexico trying to track down my father. I think I might have been very unhappy in that period, save for the listening ear of my head teacher, Sr Helen Mc Loughlin, and Selva, the Mauritian boyfriend of one of the Basque girls, who encouraged them to take us to the theatre in Dublin; go for walks at Dun Laoghaire; eat fish and chips from the packet; and go to bed at 3 am! Thrilling liberties when you are eight years old.
I remember we all threw up a lot in that dreadful eight-week absence. We seemed to take it in turns to catch the sick-bug, and vomit copiously, and the Basque girls threw talcum powder over it rather than clean it up! MY talcum powder, I might add.

That was just one of my father's lengthy absences. In truth, I don't believe he wasn't mentally stable enough for marrriage and children, and his parents may have suspected that. Eventually my mother got a civil divorce and a Catholic Anullment, as advised by the Catholic bishop of Argyll and the Isles. Those of you who follow my blips will know that my mother remarried last year at the grand old age of 78. The bishop who presided over that wedding took as his theme "The best - is yet - to COME!" We found this rather odd, but in retrospect he may have meant that 'The years of depression and despair are behind you" . Both my mother and her new husband have serious health concerns and neither are young, so he definitely wasn't alluding to dancing, nor to painting Fort William red.

Last weekend, in an effort to deal with the father's day cards problem, I made some cards that might work if I had to run a workshop (see last Saturday's blip) then a strange one of my own , suitably punk and distressed, linking all the times that Our Father, which art in Mexico, wasn't there for us. Birthday, Christmas, First Communion, Confirmation, and Graduation were on the list. I never got married, so there wasn't a wedding (Our mother 'gave away' my youngest sister at her wedding).

I haven't been to my Father's funeral: we suspect he is dead, but don't know for sure. If alive, he would be eighty-five, but in the one time in my adult life I've seen him, he seemed to be in poor health, and that was nineteen years ago.