A Father's Day Reflection from the Daughter You Chose

For Ralph, who chose to become a husband to my mother and Dad to me and my brother.

I attended my first wedding in March of 1977, dressed in my best Kmart dress and white patent-leather shoes holding a bouquet of daisies. In the photos my smile is broad, my eyes are squinting in the bright Florida sun, and my heart is full of hope and joy because today Ralph is becoming my Dad.

Ralph entered our small family’s life sometime in 1975 when I was five and my brother either three or four. I remember standing at the screen door with my Mom and brother waiting for a stranger to appear to take my Mom out on a date for the first time. I remember being in my pyjamas, kicking him in the leg, and telling him that I hated him and that he was not allowed to take my Mom away from me and my brother when the door opened and he greeted us. I remember my Mom hushing me, apologising to him, and the babysitter gently ushering me away from the door with promises of colouring and reading books to me until my Mom came back. I remember telling him to go away and never come back.

I have no idea about what happened on the date, but what I do know is that rather than turning away from this family with a rabid little girl shouting that she hated him and never wanted him to come back, that Ralph was patient, kind, and understood that what I was feeling was not anger as much as fear. In the weeks and months that followed, Ralph showed up not just for dates alone with my Mom, but for family days. Each weekend he would take all three of us out to parks, to the beach, to our first visit to IHOP never once questioning my choice of chocolate chip pancakes smothered in blueberry syrup.

His consistency in word and action demonstrated to my younger self that he was someone that I could trust, someone that really cared for me and my brother. Looking back now with adult eyes, it is clear that Ralph not only loved my mother, but us too, and at some point he decided that he wanted to be part of this quirky, government-assisted, divorce-ravaged family. He showed up to fix things around the house armed with the exact tools required for whatever job needed doing performing the repairs to an exacting standard. He called us from his apartment after his workday to ask my brother and I how are days had gone and what we had learned in school. He installed the basketball hoop and spent hours teaching me how to throw the ball to get it through the hoop at each angle when we played horse.

I would not know until nearly 20 years later that Ralph would turn out to be not my second father, but my third, and that my biological father was not the same as my younger brother’s biological father, who sometime between getting married to my Mother and them divorcing when I was three and my brother one, had adopted me. But to me, Ralph was, is, and always will be my Dad. He was the one that worked double shifts to help move our family off of government assistance, to purchase our home from the owner rather than renting it, to get me and my brother into Catholic schools so we would have a better education and the opportunities it afforded. He was the one that despite being exhausted after a double shift sat down with me when I was struggling with algebra to help me reframe it as a puzzle to be solved, he was the one that always put us first, cheered loudest for us, and quietly in so many ways showed my brother and me that we were worthy and loved.

A few months before he died from the congestive heart failure that had limited him to spending a much of his days in bed, I asked my Dad why he had not just walked away that first day after he encountered me as a pint-sized terror at my Mom’s door. Surely, I said, he could have dated and fallen in love with someone who was far more easy to live with than my Mom and who did not have two small children in tow.

He took a few minutes to respond, which was typical as he was a man who spoke with both thought and purpose. After propping himself up in the bed, he told me to look directly in his eyes and said that he knew that he was meant to be our Dad, that it was both his purpose and his privilege. While he could not have children himself due to a childhood stick-ball accident that resulted in the hard apple they were using as a ball hitting him so hard in his testicles that they caused permanent fertility damage, he had always had faith that he would have a family and children to call his own, and we were the family and children he chose. As he saw it, his desire to be a Dad was a perfect match for the two tow-headed children he met who deserved and needed a father and some sense of stability in their lives. He said he was so incredibly proud of the people we both had turned out to be, who unlike him and my Mom had both graduated from college and were out in the world making our ways on our own. As it became a bit harder to breathe and he said he needed to have a nap, he said the thing that has stuck with me nearly three decades years later. Holding my hand and still looking at me directly in the eye, he shared that he was grateful that he had been given the chance to be our Dad, and that he was at peace about dying because he knew that we would be OK without him, and that he had done his job well.

A few month later, in the September I was twenty-five and my brother twenty-three, Ralph died, and I have seen and felt his absence every day. I see it in his four grandchildren that he never got to know, the places I have travelled that he never got to see, in every DIY project I undertake, and in the mobile phone camera that would have come to replace his bulky camcorder and cameras. I feel it when I hear Dad jokes, see Dad’s pushing their kids on the swings as I walk through parks or holding their hands as they navigate home improvement stores, or in each time a mechanic has told me that I need to pay to replace my air filter while showing my car’s oil filter to demonstrate just how dirty the air filter was.

Ralph was a good man, a man who made, in his understated but committed way, a profound difference to the life my brother and I would have faced had he not taken on the responsibility of raising two children who were not biologically his own. Ralph created opportunities for us that would have been impossible without him, but never bragged or boasted about what he did - the double-shifts, the showing up to pick me up after my late-shift at the grocery store at 1:00 or 2:00 am even though he had to be up at 5:30 to get to work, the building by hand together with my uncle the extension to our 2-bedroom house that allowed me to have my own room before I hit puberty because, as he stated, a girl needs a space of her own, not sharing a bunk-bed with her brother.

My Dad was not perfect, he had his flaws and I often considered him old-fashioned and over-protective. He called my dorm room at 7:30am every Sunday to make sure I was there and not “shacked-up with some boy” much to the irritation of my room mate. He allowed my younger brother to have a later curfew when I was home from college for the summer because “he is better able to take care of himself.” He never wanted me to ever work as a nurse or a paralegal because he felt I was better than those more “womanly” jobs and should always aim for jobs done by men because they were more respected and important.

Yes, he was imperfect, but the love he had for me and my brother was unwavering. My most fervent hope is that he died knowing that he was loved just as unwaveringly, and that his memory is alive each time I pick up one of my boys in the week hours of the morning no questions asked, whenever I take out the spirit level to make sure a picture is hung perfectly straight, or in the laughter of my brother and me each time we speak to each other, honouring his wish that we look after each other as one day it would just be the two of us left.

Thank you Dad, for choosing me to be your daughter and for showing me how how much difference one person, with a wide open heart and mind, can make in the lives of those around them. I wish that I had never told you to go away and not come back and that you were still here with us to see how much of an impact you have made, how much I see you in both of my children despite there being no biological connection, and how your belief in me continues to bolster me in those time when I struggle to believe in myself.