For Daughter’s Gifts, Part I, click here.
Daughter’s Gifts, Part II
There is a card taped to my wall—a sheet of thick orange paper with its front hanging open, hinging away from its other half. In the center of the cover is a rectangle drawn in black marker. Just inside of it, a red marker rectangle presses up against its inner edges. The lines bleed into one another along the bottom edge and I see in the black smear that trails off to the right how she must have brushed the edge of her hand across the surface while the ink was still wet. In the center of these nested boxes are three words written in black marker and stacked atop one another:
Happy Father's Day
And below, outside the rectangles:
From: Iris.
Inside the card is the word DAD in all caps, cut from dark blue paper patterned with gold dots and thin white criss-crossing lines, pasted in large blocky format across the center and outlined with yellow marker so that each letter appears to glow. Below this centerpiece, “Happy Father’s Day” is written again, this time in green marker and bracketed by two green hearts on either end that look like quotation marks. She drew two hearts with red marker, and dipped each one into the spaces between the letters of D’A’D, where they hang like apostrophes pinned to an invisible clothesline connecting the tops of the letters to one another. The upper right and lower left corners of the card are inhabited by two small green marker drawings of trees, while two zebra stickers hold down the other two corners.
I taped it to the wall last week, after it spent most of the past year on my bedside table. As I put it up, I remembered how she never actually gave it to me. I had discovered it a week or so after Father’s Day while straightening up the living room, hiding in a small paper bag beside the couch. I was delighted to find it. Then I asked her a very leading question, hopeful she would say yes.
Iris, did you make this for me?
She used to make me all kinds of cards and pictures. Mostly pictures of rainbows. Rainbows and rainbows, and each with some version of the words I love you Daddy, or I ❤️ U, or Love, Iris. That was years ago. There are no more notes or cards or pictures. Now she hides her writing and drawings in her notebooks and when I come near, if I display interest by looking in her direction or by asking what she’s doing, she will shrink from me and move her work further from my view. Sometimes she will scowl.
The notes she leaves me now are surreptitiously left, small acts of mischief—not for me, but more for me to discover. On the edge of the blue cloth that covers my writing desk, a five-pointed star in black ink. A few inches to the right of that, five letters, each one penned separately, forming the word Daddy. Her tiny drawings and tiny words are barely visible, like minuscule graffiti. They appear in surprising places around the apartment. Stars and flowers in the margins of an unpaid parking ticket letter from the city left out on the kitchen table. Her own name tagging her brother’s pencil drawing of a cake with candles that I taped to the back door three years ago. Above the couch on the living room wall, Jiji—the name of our cat. I have told her many times over the years not to draw or write on other people’s things, but rarely do I scold her now. Now, communication comes via secret missives. I enjoy finding them. I don’t want to miss them.
No, she snapped. They made us make them in school.
Healing The Father Wound - New Online Course
This course has been over a year in the making, and I am happy to announce that after two pilot courses and many months of refinement, Healing the Father Wound is now available as an audio course on the meditation app Insight Timer. If you have or have had a difficult or painful relationship with your father or father figure, I encourage you to take a look. Click here to find out more.
Over the past day, everyone's been sharing stuff about their own dads, and I've got a belated something of that flavor in the works myself. This is the first I've read that's from the perspective of the father. I appreciate your take on how children change and how parents move with it.