For a generation who readily discusses our mothers’ shortcomings, dads so often seem to get let off the hook.
I woke up the other morning with two sets of bug bites on my back. One right below my neck, chomp, chomp. The other bright red set lay next to my left bra strap, a particularly annoying place to be bitten. Weird, I thought. I don’t normally get mosquito bites.
But I’d just returned from a few days at my friends’ house in the Berkshire Mountains and I had a pretty good idea of when I might’ve been attacked. At the end of a harrowing summer taking care of family, I’d snuck away for some time where I wouldn’t have to do anything for anyone else. This mini-vacation was the first thing I’d done for myself in ages.
The plan was simple: sit, relax, eat, drink. I spent an inordinate amount of time on their back deck. I live in New York City without any outdoor space of my own, so if I can saunter outside with a cup of coffee and no shoes, I do so as often as possible. When evening comes, swap that coffee for a cocktail and I am in heaven—even with the bugs.
I assume they got me after a terrible FaceTime call with my father that somehow devolved from a check-in to a vitriol-fueled fight I had ardently been trying to avoid. I planted myself on the deck afterward and wept and bitched to my friend for hours. I was sapped of any emotional fortitude after a summer during which I moved my twins home from their first year of college, my stepmother had a stroke, and my father faced another serious health issue of his own. I’d spent days on the road driving back and forth from colleges and hospitals, to my parents homes and back to move my kids into separate colleges once again.
I know I am lucky that both my parents and stepparents are still alive. Plenty of my friends have spent years without their parents already and I feel a twinge of guilt for complaining. Still, caring for aging parents brings into sharp focus a lifetime of unresolved issues. Maybe for the very first time. The uncomfortable dichotomy of being fortunate and being angry is not lost on me. It’s an issue I grapple with every day.
Squarely in the sandwich generation, I’ve been acting as mother, child, breadwinner, marriage counselor, home health aid, financial advisor, tech guru, and mover. Anyone inhabiting this many roles is bound to crack. The thing that finally broke me was being accused of not caring enough because I didn’t offer to have my father move in with me. For a million reasons, this was never an option, nor was it something he actually wanted. But there I sat, a scolded child, a 50-year-old single mother, dumbfounded that I was being accused of not doing enough. The coup de grace was being verbally lashed for taking time for myself to visit friends.
Maybe it’s the perimenopausal drop in estrogen that’s to be blamed for depleting my ability to smooth over uncomfortable interactions (the “I’m done taking anyone’s shit” paradigm), or maybe it’s a reckoning a long time in the making with fathers of Gen X daughters like me. I’ve written at length about the relationship with our mothers, and so have others, but the fathers in our lives are not guilt-free.
We were raised in an awkward in-between time when we were told we could be anything, but still received input from every side that being chosen by a man for a fairytale romance was the ultimate prize. Even though in the ’80s and ’90s, it was general wisdom that half of all marriages would end in divorce (an anecdotally flawed stat). In most of those divorces, the moms ended up with the kids. When our parents’ marriages didn’t end in divorce, most of our mothers were still the ones who bore all of the burden of raising the children and keeping the house. Regardless of whether or not they were working outside of the home.
I was one of the latchkey kids of divorced parents who saw my dad inconsistently on weekends when I was little, and when I was in high school—and he had a pool—for the summers. The argument I had with my dad while on vacation and the heaviness of me “not doing enough” has been looming over me like a threatening cloud. But something has shifted in me, and instead of bearing guilt over what I haven’t done, I’ve turned the question around and asked myself: what has he done?
By all accounts, my mother did everything. She worked and raised us, cooked and cleaned. After they divorced, there wasn’t any child support to speak of until I was in high school. She was the one to give me what money she could for back-to-school shopping, and drove me to my first job before I could drive myself. She was the one I saw weep with fear when my older siblings acted out in their teen years. She made sure there was a roof over our heads, by whatever means necessary. I was also lucky that she eventually married a man who tentatively tried to fill my dad’s shoes as a stepfather. Not an easy or always pleasant task.
What did my father do? The answer is not a lot. Born in 1940, he is a part of the Silent Generation and a Middle Eastern immigrant. I could probably wrap this up on those two facts alone. But I don’t think my dad is an outlier in being a there-but-not-there father to a Gen X child. Of course, there are millions of lucky Gen Xers who had wonderful dads who did everything one hopes a father would: those who taught you to ride a bike and how to file your taxes; told you what kind of men to be wary of; and helped you put together furniture in your first apartment. I’m happy for and envious of those people. I was not one of them.
There are countless other dads who were passive observers or worse. To these fathers, their children were an afterthought. Children were an accessory; pretty baubles that proved they were worthy men. My role was to be a reflection of how good my dad was. As an honor roll student and the first in my nuclear family to go to college, I was a thing to be talked about pridefully to friends. But all the work that got me to that place was done on my own. I wasn’t given homework help or shown how to make good choices. I just did those things because that’s who I am.
Despite my efforts to always be the good child, there were so many times where I fell short of my father’s sky-high expectations. Even though no one had to nag me to get to school on time, or to find a job to make spending money, or to do my homework, when I proudly brought home a 95% on a big test, I would get asked what happened to the other 5%. When I got into a great college with an incredibly hard curriculum, my dad was disappointed in my choice because he hadn’t heard of the school before. The disapproval felt so much more heartbreaking because he never offered any guidance or help.
I remember one particularly poignant moment when I was a senior in college. I was working three jobs to feed myself and pay for my apartment. I had taken out all the debt I was allowed—which was a hell of a lot back then—in order to pay for college on my own. I had come to his house one weekend for a visit and I overheard him discussing sending money to someone in his home country who needed it. I broke down in tears. He was confused. I didn’t know how he could so readily help a distant acquaintance and not his own daughter. It hadn’t occurred to him to support me.
He did things for us that he enjoyed doing but not more. He liked buying each of my siblings and I an old used car in high school. I was thrilled with mine, of course. But when my beloved Honda CRX was totaled after catching fire on the New Jersey Turnpike, I bore the blame of misusing his one big gift. I still hear about it 30+ years later. He showed up to my graduations, but only stayed an hour or two before needing to leave for unnamed reasons. These showy gestures meant so much to me at the time because they were so rare. They felt magical. I see them with different eyes now: They made him look good but were not exactly “parenting.”
Just like I have with my mother, I’ve learned so much about what I think a parent should be by having children of my own. I wish I had a father more like my own kids’. My twin’s dad picked them up from school, took them to the playground, and cooked for them. Small, consistent, loving acts. Last year when my ex-husband’s own crosscountry relocation coincided with our kids’ first year of college, he got right back on a plane after the moving truck arrived at his new house and flew back to help our kids move to school. He’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but he is present and helpful and giving. It’s what I think good dads should do.
Our Gen X fathers were tasked with one thing: go to work to make the money, then come home to their castle. If their kids had fathers who did that, they were good. Anything beyond that was extraordinary. Many of us didn’t even get the former, and far too few got the latter. They demanded respect, but did little to earn it. So why is it we—myself included—have placed so much of the blame for our upbringing on our mothers? Surely our fathers could’ve done more, even if they hadn’t received much more themselves.
I constantly marvel at the fact that as a generation so many of us are cycle-breakers, in big and small ways. We often got the short end of the parental stick and instead of passing down an even shorter one to our children, we built them an entire life raft from the scraps. We shouldn’t have known how to since we received so little ourselves. Yet we lashed together hopes and aspirations, bound them with what we thought children deserved, and watched them sail into calmer seas. We might be worse for the wear, but we hope beyond hope that they aren’t.
On one of my trips to my father and stepmother’s house—about five hours away from mine—this summer, I moved things around their house that needed moving. They’re octogenarians with new, serious health issues now, and I wanted to do whatever I could while I was there to help. I made trips to the basement and took away things they didn’t want. I found free, legitimate tax professionals online and looked through end-of-life documents. I wrote phone numbers and addresses down on paper so they could find them without going online. I fixed tech problems in person instead of trying to do it over FaceTime as usual. The last big thing I wanted to do was remove my stepmother’s old mattress and replace it with the new one that was standing on its side in the guest room.
Dripping in August sweat, I hauled the old queen-sized one to the garage for pickup, then grabbed the new one to move to the bedroom. My father—obliviously condescending—marveled at the fact that, as a woman, I was strong enough to do it. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t. It was a lot of work, but I was happy to help.
Back at home one morning this week, two more bites showed up on the right side of my bra strap and I lost it. If you’ve lived in a city, or visited a hotel before, you already know what I feared. I went nuclear in my bedroom. Everything came out and went into the wash, then the blazing hot dryer. I dissected my mattress topper with a box cutter and threw it away. I vacuumed and steamed anything left standing. I ordered a new mattress and heaved my old one off the frame by myself just like I’d done at my dad’s. I inspected it for bloodsucking bugs after Googling what to look for. Luckily, I found nothing.
I did it all by myself, never even thinking to ask or expecting anyone to want to help. I do wish, though, when the delivery men came, I had a dad that I could call up and ask how much would be right to tip them.
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Lili Zarghami lives with her teenagers in Brooklyn. She’s been writing for and providing editorial direction at women’s websites like Redbook, HGTV, Better Homes & Gardens and more since the turn of the century. She can remember the addresses of all the places she was a latchkey kid but has no idea what her email password is.
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