Sometimes the pedestals we put people on don’t seem quite so high the taller we get, with time and maturity, perspectives change. As an adult, I reflect on the idolatry I had for my father when I was a child as compared to the platform of respect and understanding I place him on today.
My earliest recollection of my father is cast through a dazzling, sunlit filter. He is crouching next to me in our garden; I am “petting” a daisy and he is whispering softly, “Gentle, just gentle.” Not to discount my mother, but I was a Daddy’s Girl. His first, my mother’s eighth. My world revolved around him. As soon as he hit the door from a long day at work, I would leap into his arms. He would then carry me upside-down into the living room where we would have “con-ver sa-tion”. It was the biggest word I had ever heard, and he was the smartest man I knew. He became a deity to me, encompassing my ideal of perfection and infallibility; and with every godly act he performed, the pedestal where I had set him lifted a little higher into the sky.
As an adolescent, I took those early impressions and continued building on them – oversimplified, he was never wrong. Dinner conversations were peppered with truths to live by like, “Be true to yourself” and “Your handshake is your word”. His pedestal was now so high, I had to make it self-buttressing so it did not collapse under it’s own weight. I had the same acme of perfection set for myself – because I was his daughter.
As a young adult, I spent years resenting his omnipotence, doing just about everything I could to defy him. I can remember playing Devil’s Advocate in arguments, just to challenge his correctness. Every time his unheeded advice proved right, it only increased my resentment and underlined my failure. Could I not be perfect without him? I kept that flawed perception of him well into my twenties, and it was only recently that I was able to put everything in proper perspective.
The shift began when I went to work for him. Another personal setback left me wanting for work; and, as usual, I ate crow and he threw me a bone. Working for his company afforded me the not only the opportunity to learn the business, but also to meet the people with whom he had professional relationships. These were people I had heard about my entire life, a few of whom I had previously met, who were now getting to know me as someone other than “Bob’s Daughter” ; I was a business associate.
I spent nearly twenty years in financial services as an assistant, a broker, a wholesaler and finally as a financial planner. In that time, I met many people who had known my father in a different context and for much longer than I had. I heard some of the same stories I had heard as a child, but in a different light. This was not dirt digging on my part, nor mud slinging on theirs. This was a common thread we wove into a new fabric. Through their narratives, both professional and personal, the “deity” became tangible to me; the hero started to become human.
The pedestal is now realistically proportioned. I see my father as a fallible human, not an infallibly deity. The platform has also broadened to include all the qualities my previous, singular perspective had obscured. My father is three-dimensional. He has feelings, and can be hurt. He has flaws, and can be wrong. What I know now is that he never thought himself perfect, I did; and he never asked perfection of me. All the times I expected perfection from us both, I was the only one disappointed. By letting my father “out of the box” of my childhood perceptions, I have released us both.
