Tuesday, February 21, 2006

daddy is happy

i know that it is a reoccuring theme of this blog to ponder my own worth as a father and deal with my unresolved issues with my own late father.

recently, no. 1 came home from school with something he had made for valentine's day. it was a series of pictures he had drawn and apparently explained to the teacher what was happening and the teacher had added the captions to the artwork and bound it in a little book. the first few pages are "no. 2 plays in the balls", and "mommy plays in the balls". "nos. 1 and 2 play in the balls". the balls are a common thread among all the drawings.

ny page is the last page of the booklet. i apparently have an enormous head, with atrophied legs that wouldn't support a gnat, and three fingers on one hand, and two on the other. but my picture is the only one with two captions. i bet you can guess the first. yep, "daddy plays in the balls". but the thing that shot straight to my heart and caused my eyes to fill with seawater was caption no. 2: "daddy is happy".

daddy is happy. not, "daddy is a shouting, mean motherfucker", or "daddy is a lazy prick", or "daddy never pays attention to me". daddy is happy.

cause out of all the things i would like or not like to be as a father, "happy" is definitely something i'd like my kids to think of me as.

then yesterday while i was putting away a mountain of laundry, simple plan's "perfect" came on, and made me think of my own father, who i would not have described as "happy" for the latter chunk of his life. it made me wonder about whether i made him proud. none of the choices i have made in the last decade or so would fall into what he considered "right" towards the end of his life, and i was always the one who was pissing him off and aggravating him regardless of what i did even when i was trying to toe the line. i mean, i was a pretty fucking good kid. never did drugs, never got drunk, hell, i didn't even drink alcohol until i was 28. never did anything major, and always tried to follow along with the things that were expected of me.

so i wondered if i had made my dad proud. and a strange thing happened, o beloved reader, i think i got a "yes" from the netherworld. a warm feeling, like, "hey, we had our differences, we rarely saw eye to eye, and i know that you have a ton of unanswered questions about what was going on with me and in my mind towards the end, but i see you now, and i think you are doing a good job. you've got wonderful, gorgeous kids who you are trying to raise to the best of your ability, and you are a loving husband. you try to be good to your fellow man, and the rest of the shit just doesn't matter."

it choked me up, much like it is now, and i feel better. not like everything's ok, and i will never have any doubts in the future, cause this isn't an after-school special, but i think somewhere out there, my dad is proud of the effort i am making.

in other news on the sardonic front, we have all been mondo sick with some kind of flu thing that has been engineered by satan himself, and our band is back down to two cause c is a fucking doss cunt not worth the time and fucking effort we wasted on him, cause he missed his old life and just pissed back off to georgia just like that and left us in the lurch. good riddance to bad rubbish, the fucker. so we are on the lookout. unpacking is going fairly well, though slow, so our house still looks a little like we are still moving in.

and that, as they say, is that, my droogs and only friends.

darth sardonic

2 Comments:

Blogger Mother Hoodlum said...

darth, did you change emails? Mine keeps coming back as undeliverable. I want to talk to joooooooo.
Happy daddy's are a good thing.

1:06 AM  
Blogger Lauren said...

I hope everyone's feeling better now. It's been a few weeks after all. ... Your father is more than proud of you.

4:50 PM  

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