"What Would We Do Without Fathers?"

 What Would We Do Without Fathers?

by

Maria Whittaker

(Maria Whittaker (19) and her father, James Whittaker, at her college graduation in 1979.)

What would we do without fathers? 

Who would throw us up in the air?

Wink at us?

Drive us places?

Let us ride on their backs?

Cook spaghetti 4 us when we were sick?

Tell us stories while we were sitting in the car waiting for mom to come from the Doctor’s office:

---Riki Tikki Tavi, the mongoose

---how he and his best friend Junior who lived across Chapel Street from him in the Bottoms all his life got paddled at school

Take care of us when our birth father abandoned us?

Love us unconditionally? 

Accept us completely the way we are?

Protect us?

Let us go out on dates at 15 without my mother knowing? 

Let our ‘dates’ into the house?

Not tell our mothers when we got in the car and travelled alone around the country, camping out? 

Save our lives?

Pick us up from the airport on our first trip home from going away to college? 

Jump my car when I left  it parked somewhere with the lights on without even telling me?

Repay me the $400 cash I loaned him without knowing what it was for?

Give me a brother so I would not have to grow up alone?  

Only ask for money once?

Introduce me to his girlfriend when he was still married and living with my mother, so I would understand that sometimes everything is necessary?

Take care of me?

Take care of my ill mother 4 me?

Teach me how 2 be?

Show me how to be?

Bring letters to me from my boyfriend in the army secreted in the trunk of his car so my mother would not find and destroy them? 

Take me and my brother when I was 9 and he was 8 and all our little “kid” friends in his car up and down the steep and roller coaster hills of Blendon Woods, where we laughed and giggled until we couldn’t anymore?

Promise to take us Canada!

“We’re going to Canada kids!” He would go faster and faster and the car would jump off the viaduct and surely we felt as if we must have flown to Canada in that moment of laughter, giggles and pure happiness?

Drive me and pick me up from ice skating lessons, my dream, every day in the summer of 1974. 

Never get mad at me at 16 for “stealing” his car at night with my brother and teenage lifelong neighbors and friends. He just took the alternator out! We only discovered it after we had pushed the car out of the parking lot under his bedroom window, and down the driveway so he would not hear us start it. (His bedroom window was right above where he parked the car  and it was open because it was summer. We, my brother and I and some of our lifelong teenage neighbors/friends had to push the car back up the driveway (up a hill) and back into a parking lot, under his window!

Be imperfect, flawed so I would learn how to understand and love people the way they were so they could grow and heal. 

Let me take love 4 granted.

Fall in love with men, masculinity.

Have a family, cousins, grandmother, aunts, uncles and neighbors.

Have a connection to the past.

Take us to ‘the plant,” the B&T Metals Company, where he worked all his life and show us all the tools, machines, locker room, big equipment, and pin up posters still there from World II. 

Drive me to swimming practice every day and two times a day in the summer.

Pick me up from swimming practice.

Let me go on dates.

Take me on dates with my little boyfriend.

Do all the housework and complain about it for years until you finally told him “Thank you” and that you were sorry for his suffering, and he simply replied. “It weren’t nothing.”

“Manipulated you so you’d know when you were being manipulated in the future.

Teach you what love is.

Be so present for you when he was alive, he was always with you after he died, so you would know death and everything is a mere illusion. 

Be your rock.

Show me how to be my own rock, all without words.

Be present in me after the death of his physical body. 

Love dogs.

Take care of “your dog.”

Beeeee soooooo much fun!

Beee laid back.

Make homemade spaghetti. 

Take you to his local bar, the Tippin’ Inn, when you were a child with him and let you overhear him tell the bartender to tell "his wife," my mother,  who was calling, “I’m not here.” 

Get drunk with you present and say stupid things so you would know noone is perfect and what real is. 

Be sexually inappropriate when he was unconscious and drunk, so you could know trauma only endures when there is not enough love to dissolve it.

Take you and your little brother "fishing" at Madison Lake and Nelson Park and know nothing about it.

Visit and clean your studio apartment when you were a graduate student at a big, fancy, top three law school in the US and think nothing of it.

Drive you to a prospective law school to visit your step grandfather who married your grandmother, your mother’s birth mom, from whom your mom had been tragically kidnapped at 2 days old by a great aunt. 

Beee ridiculous.

Bee absurd.

Beee humble, so when you grew up, you would know and remember what it meant not to have an ego and what “holiness” was.

Be there so when you grew up you would know what gratitude was.

Beee there sew U could take having a father 4 granted.

Beee there so you could smell his aftershave and go to the barbershop with him on Saturday mornings on Mt. Vernon Avenue in the middle of Columbus’s Black neighborhood.

Beee there so you could know what it meant to have a good man in your life.

Beee there so you could know what it was like to have a crush on a man.

Be there so you did not have 2 worry.

Be there so U could know what peace meant.

Be there so you could take sacrifice 4 granted.

Be there sew u could know what it was like to be taken care of and loved, not perfectly, but imperfectly.

Be there so you would never ever know what it was like to be alone even after he died.

That’s what Fathers R 4.