Dear Dadadadad,
It’s your birthday. To celebrate, I talk to you. Happy Birthday. You would be seventy-seven today. Seventy-seven?!?!
Seventy-seven. I’m sure you’d snort at the notion and say something akin to “it doesn’t really matter how many I’ve clocked up, I still feel thirty-seven”.
This is the fifth year I cannot phone you and sing badly down the ‘phone, or email you a silly rhyme. Instead, I write you a letter and who knows if you read it. It’s the writing it that’s the most healing. You taught me that. Thank you for that.
I got the chance to tell Mom most of this on a pink-sunsetting afternoon, with The Three Little Pigs being read, and Cameron snuggled up in bed with her.
I wonder often, where you’d stop me and tell me to ‘cool my jets’. Heh. Like I was a rocket, roaring to lift off. Actually, now that I think about, you were right about the rocket analogy. I ponder sometimes how you would react to my enthusiastic re-tellings about life now, and at which points you’d say “go for it” and at which ones you’d say “consider it properly first”.
On Love.
I guess it’s the minute care in every detail. The active interest in the things that mean everything to me. The way I do not feel alone. The not-having-to-plead-to-be-myself-or-do-what-I-feel-is-right. The myriad of things that I am so blessed with now. The absolute gratitude I have for this. For it’s every single moment. The way I get to wake up and I know I am loved. The loved that you wanted for me and Cameron. The one you told me about when I did not know it existed. The one where you said I would “just know”, and my juvenile self looked at you askew, and interrogated you for more clarity. Harangued you until you popped out another analogy.
The one where you said that,
“It doesn’t matter what happens in a day. The next morning, when you wake up, that person still smells like honey to you. It’s like that with family, it’s like that with real love”.
You really loved honey, now that I think about your analogies. If you were here now, I’d make you a sandwich. I’d love to just be able to make you a sandwich again, and talk all of this wonderful stuff through. I’d love to squeeze your hand and just feel you sitting next to me and being over the moon for me. Me, who never thought this possible.
On Home.
Stored in my home, are bits and pieces of your life. Our family life. I have photographs, and things, letters, cards, reports, newspaper clippings and little pieces of paper for which us members of the Jenkin troupe appear to love peppering our lives with. Cameron sleeps, we laugh, we play, we sing, we talk, we love. I pretend to eat Cameron’s toes and yell “sweeties”. I do that just for you. Just for you. Sometimes it’s cobbled together but, Dad, I have a happy home. The one you believed in for me, before I even knew it could happen.
On being a Mom.
This is the part I wish you were here for the most. For you to see how you were right. You told me once that you didn’t fully believe in reincarnation. That, in your view, we carry on entirely through the children that come after us. I see you in my nieces and I see you in Cameron. I see you in her stubbornness. I see you in her complex thought patterns. I see you with Cameron’s love for puzzles and in how she hates to lose in card games (my siblings are laughing at this point). I see you when I look at her thinking. I see you when I see her eyes sparkle. And I hope that you are proud.
On being Cath.
I’m thirty now. Wow. It seems not so long ago that I said “Daaaad, thirty is SO old…”. You were right, it’s not. It’s just a new “decade of adventure”. I’m loving it so far. On being me? I still love the same things. I love feeling at home, and I feel that way alot now. It’s not such a rarity. I am surrounded by wonderful people, every day. People I’d have brought home to you and Mom, for dinner and a laugh. The people I’d have thrown a house party with, and they would have ended up swapping stories with you more than they did with me. Thank you for instilling in me the desire to be tenaciously and without regret, myself.
It is through being my honest self, that good things come to me. Of all the things I am grateful to you for, it’s that lesson. The lesson that I should never give up and try to conform to what someone else believes is right for me, no matter how much I loved them, or thought they loved me.
Thank you for the vibrant, often crazy, run-on-love upbringing you gave me. I know I rebuked it so much as a teenager. But now, now I celebrate it. Thank you for the crazy times, and the parts that taught me to care beyond myself. Thank you for teaching me that it’s more important to help, than it is to be helped.
Happy Birthday Dadadadad. They best pour you the Chivas in heaven tonight,
xxx
Cath-Cath.