“Tonight, I danced with my father.”
A woman wrote this on a public wall; it was posted on a site that has become for me a rich source of humor, anger, information and idiocy, and on occasion, heartbreaking honesty. I know the woman, and I fell into the post in the way that Alice tumbled into the looking glass; I emerged from it into a world of wonder and pain.
“My dad and I haven’t always had the best relationship or even always been on speaking terms for that matter… but tonight, I danced with my father.”
I struck apart my two marriages; scattered among the ruins were three children, two of whom are girls. Deserving or not, a father manages to survive his shames and somehow still be worthy of a dance.
“I’m a horrible dancer…and tonight, I danced with my father.”
I doubt that my daughters will have fond memories of having danced with me, but perhaps “dance” is a metaphor for something else, something that is just outside my emotional grasp. If my fundamental failure with them — to stay with their mothers and help to raise them — places me outside of the possibility of being asked to judge some element of their lives, they have not said that to me.
“At one point in the night’s conversation he said he would ‘never treat a woman that way’ and for a moment I wished he would have been more a part of my life in my younger years…”
Encapsulated within that statement for me is the lost time with my daughters: with my eldest, there was silence, then sharing and later, leaving. With my youngest, time and distance. The best demonstration to our daughters of how women should be treated is made in the way their fathers treat their mothers. Daughters watch, listen and learn. As John Mayer sang, “Daughters will love like you do…”
“… but then I wouldn’t be the woman I am today…”
My eldest daughter told me of my confession to her: “I wasn’t a good husband, but I think I was a pretty good father.” She assured me that I had been, mature words that skipped like a happy flat stone across our quiet pool of time. I hope that the ripples from that pool will reach my youngest daughter. But I can’t know if any great good things have grown from my absence from their lives, and what failures as a parent I gave to them as obstacles to overcome, for they are like my friend, who is like all of the daughters of all the fathers in all the world, who will all be known better by all of the men outside of himself.
“… the woman who danced with her father.”
I worked with “the woman who danced with her father.” I liked her and still do, and would be happy to introduce her to my daughters, though I have not spent one second in her presence for more than five years. I admired her and still count her as a friend.
I don’t know what she was saying in her post; perhaps she exhaled and forgave, inhaled and remembered and assembled the fractured pieces of a broken life, and in the mosaic, found shapes and colors that sang in her heart as she danced that night. The night of that dance, my friend’s proclamation signaled the possibility of redemption for me, a father who has failed and succeeded in ways still not known but who hopes for that moment when his daughters will remember and forget, and that each will delight in the dance with her father.