Father’s Day

Of course, Father’s Day was difficult. I went out for lunch with my husband and kids and I saw other families with grandfathers too and couldn’t help but wish we could have my father with us instead of at the care home.

He’s actually only just back to the care home after a brief stay in hospital. He had a fall last week – just on the soft carpet of the care home, but he had a small bump on his head and a sore foot he was dragging, so they took him to the hospital to play it safe.

He was monitored and given a CT scan that showed a very small bleed on his brain as a result of the fall. It doesn’t require intervention, but they think he might have experienced a small seizure, so they’ve increased his epilepsy medication, which I’m not sure I even knew he was on.

I got the WhatsApp messages from my mum about my dad’s fall while I was away for the weekend by the seaside for a friend’s 40th birthday. I was in a bar, surrounded by people, then suddenly swallowed up into my phone as I read the messages, sucked out of the bar and away to the hospital where my father was. My stomach dropped as I read the words. The helplessness of being far away while something big is happening to someone you love. I felt like I’d split in two.

My friend noticed I’d suddenly disappeared mentally as she stood next to me and gently asked if everything was ok. I explained quickly but brushed off her worried face and said there was nothing I could do now, my mum was with him, my sister was visiting the following day, I’d be back on Sunday night.

I’d been planning this weekend away from the kids for weeks, I was surrounded by party-goers, I’m the queen of avoidance. I stayed up until the small hours sweatily dancing and talking to friends I hadn’t seen in years or hadn’t seen enough of since having children. I felt I had to steal this night while I could, pushing hard into the party and away from the reality of dementia and caregiving and motherhood.

After monitoring over the weekend, they were happy with my dad’s condition and he was eating well and hydrated, so he went back to the care home. They’ve added precautions like crash mats and a lower bed to protect him if he falls again. He’s very unsteady on his feet.

It’s scary to think what might happen next time he falls. It’s all so scary. But he’s ok for now. He just can’t come out for a pizza with us on Father’s Day, like the other sweet grandfathers I watched across the restaurant.

 I watched one man lift his grandchild onto his knee, and I felt a pang of longing. My kids don’t get those kind of moments with their grandfather, not any more. That simple, unremarkable kind of love across the generations.

Although I can look back to when my daughter was first born, my first child. I remember my dad coming round to my flat when I was completely frazzled and sleep deprived in those first few weeks and just took her from me and told me to go and lie down and nap. It was such a relief to be able to hand her over – she was a baby that never wanted to be put down – and spend some time alone, horizontal, in the semi-dark of my bedroom as the blinds fought to hold out the morning sunlight.

I remember falling into a sleep of oblivion, I was so so tired, then waking suddenly and pawing frantically at the bedsheets, panicking I’d dropped her and she’d be smothered, before remembering she was safe in his arms in the other room. His assuredness with a newborn surprised me, but he is a father of three children after all. Three children who miss having his calm presence, his acts of service that are most definitely his love language.

My husband’s father died years ago, so it was just us four in the pizza restaurant, two effectively fatherless adults with our two kids, carving up the pizza for the kids and then us. It might sound harsh to say I feel ‘effectively fatherless,’ because I do still have a father – but the version of him I leaned on, learned from, and laughed with is now mostly out of reach.

I remember a couple of years ago when we were having building work done on our house, the head builder was only slightly younger than my father, planning to retire but couldn’t seem to stop doing the work that he loved or that kept him busy. He was kind and Irish and I think my husband and I both tacitly took him on as a surrogate father figure.

He noticed our kettle button was sticking and fixed it without even mentioning it to us. He shaved the bottom off my daughter’s bedroom door so it would finally close properly – something we’d just been living with. We were both so moved when we realised these small acts of kindness he did around the house that were nothing to do with the work we’d hired him for.

We both need a father sometimes, or just someone who instinctively steps in and makes life work a bit better. There are little gaps everywhere now – things around the house that my dad would have known how to handle. It’s not just about DIY, it’s about that comforting sense that someone had the answers.

My father rewired his parents’ house when he was a teenager, could put up pictures and shelves without blinking – he just knew how things worked. I miss him in a very real way when I realise something needs fixing, or I have a question about gardening, or about my tax return. These were things he knew better than anyone. Where has that knowledge gone now?