In 1978, I was eight years old. I loved Sean Cassidy, Nancy Drew, but above all else, my father. My father made baby pancakes — just the two of us awake while my sister slept and my mom pretended to. He wrote my name in cursive in the batter. Never broke a sweat, flipping like a Zen-master. I watched him, rapt, my skinny legs folded in like a pack of matches hugged to my chest, wanting to exist there, just my father and me, in my Scooby Doo nightshirt, forever. Daddy was SuperMan. He made everything okay.
We had our rituals and rituals have comfort. When one side of the pancake got burnt, well, we didn’t acknowledge it. He tossed the pancake onto the plate mistake side down, pretty side up, and grinned while I smothered it with syrup. My father appreciated pretty — it’s what made him marry my mom after three months when she was nineteen and he was twenty-five. Regardless, I smiled right back, willing participant, palpably alive in his attention. In our house that was mostly tense and persistently sad, my mother’s absence literal or figurative, these Sunday mornings were a glorious time out.
“Yum, daddy!” I beamed, even when the taste was scalded. “These are good!” Before I can remember, it was written in my family’s mythology: if we pretended it wasn’t there — the pain, the mistreatment, the injustice — it just might disappear.
We tiptoed on eggshells around Mommy. We did not want to set her off, and it was fickle to figure what might be a trigger. I obsessed in the dark after she finally exploded, the scene looping as I tried in vain to sleep, to plan for the invariable next time. Who could I be that would not make my mother so angry?
If my sister or I asserted our own spirit in any way, my mother perceived it as personal rejection. I remember my older sister’s livid voice struggling to convince my dad of something my mother had done or said. And his customary response: “You just have to meet your mother halfway.” A buried part of me craved my dad’s acknowledgement of her misconduct, and because that never came, I knew to my bones that either he was wrong or I was wrong. It was necessary for survival at the time to believe that it was me.
Fast forward, oh I don’t know, thirty-five years, and I make pancakes for my freshly three-year-old daughter. I am the adult now. We’ve made our own ritual. Same Bisquick recipe but I choose a Supreme version — as if a bit of baking powder, sugar, and lemon juice, can make my parenting more durable. My recipe is less improvisation, more concerted, as I am all too aware how easily, how irrevocably, good intentions can go up in smoke. I boast a special pan — six little pre-made circles to define the edges of modern-day baby pancakes. I have read the books and done the homework.
As if I can prepare for every possibility.
I long for that easy magic I felt with my father. But burns are inevitable. Pretending that away only makes it more apparent. Despite my deepest desire to protect my children from pain, sorrow, and loss, truly living actually requires them. My baby pancakes are not so melt in your mouth as my memory.
It’s still hard for me to tell the truth about any kind of sadness. To admit my own road with depression and anxiety, how frightened I am that I will pass that horror on to my children. I long again to stop time just as I did when I was eight, but now it’s to preserve my children. I cling to each perfect detail — porcelain skin, pure-pitched voice, earnest devotion. Three-year-olds hug with their whole body, no hurt lodged deep enough from which they think to protect from.
My son, who was three like thirty minutes ago, somehow stares back at me from age nine, rolling his eyes, wanting less often my fabulous company, laudable cartoon voices and propensity to tickle, in favor of the XBOX, ITouch, or basketball. That it means I’ve done it mostly right makes it no less painful. Sometimes it hurts so terribly to love him.
My father has had a decidedly less heroic second act. He has never met my little girl. His new wife does not appreciate his two grown daughters. Active grandparent to his stepson’s little girls, he has not spoken to me since just after my daughter was born. He has missed the boat on so much. I cannot reconcile this man with the one I knew. Is the real him my dad when I was growing up or who he has been in my adulthood? Either people can fundamentally change or I didn’t really know my father. Or maybe, I begin to admit the older I grow, as parent myself, life is more intricate than either of those conclusions allow for. In the current version of family pancake — father one side, mother the other — an unexpected truth emerges.
My mother, undisputed “bad guy” in my childhood, has shown up as a grandmother in ways I could never have imagined. She has been present for the births of both of my children, each time with a special blanket. She is “Nammaw” and my children adore her. She treats them like absolute gold.
Last Spring Break, she and my stepfather took my son to the Alamo. When I picked them up at the train station, my mother donned an enormous sun hat, my son a coon skin cap and Alamo t-shirt, and they walked closely, talking and laughing. She helped plan, with absurd detail, the execution of my daughter’s recent princess and pirate birthday party, complete with a pink tulle costume she sewed. Not because anyone asked but because she wanted to. Like a living apology — what she cannot change from my past she heals by treasuring my children.
My dad, unequivocally present when I needed him most as a child, at the same time refused to get help for or even admit my mother’s debilitating depression. I knew somewhere subterranean for as long as I can remember that I was on borrowed time with my father. Still it is so tempting to linger trapped in hurt and anger in the wake of his choice to jump ship. To a child everything is black and white, but being a grown up is every color of the rainbow. To feel pleasure entails accepting the weight and existence of its opposite. I miss my father. I always will.
But I have arrived on the shores of a crazy new truth and screw it if it’s not smooth sailing. People, I have learned, are not an either/or proposition. We are a jumble of good, bad, ugly, and everything in between — that’s authenticity. Accepting only the acceptable — flipping the pancake — is missing the boat altogether. Allowing ugly can be the most beautiful act and an ironic path to transcendence. Parents screw up, sometimes epically. In every plot to be different, to be better, not one of us can steer clear of gaping parental blunders. It is our reaction, and thankfully not just the first one — our ability to claim mistakes and make good on them — that keeps us alive.
I look at my beautiful daughter as we make pancakes and I see her. I do not wish for her or for me to be anywhere else, to be doing, feeling, seeing anything different. If it weren’t for my father, I would never have believed in the possibility and truth of the purest form of love, and I wouldn’t have eventually admitted to myself what I wanted more than anything, to be a mother.
“This one looks like a dinosaur!” I suggest, and she squeals, a rare moment of agreement. “What does this one look like, mommy?” A boat. On the sea of rolling on, not getting stuck but willing to move forward, even when it means saying goodbye.
—
Previously Published on Medium
—